Frederick Douglass

He was separated as an infant from his slave mother--he never knew his white father--and lived with his grandmother on a Maryland plantation until, at age eight, his owner sent him to Baltimore to live as a house servant with the family of Hugh Auld.

Mrs. Auld defied state law by teaching him to read.

Auld, however, declared that learning would make him unfit for slavery, and Mrs. Auld was ordered to stop the instruction. But Frederick had found a thirst for knowledge, and he learned that knowledge is power, so he continued studying, secretly, with boys in the streets.

At 16, upon the death of his master, he was returned to the plantation as a field hand.

Later, in 1833, hired out in Baltimore as a ship caulker, Frederick tried to escape with three others, but the plot was discovered before they could get away.

Five years later, however, he fled to New York City and then to New Bedford, Massachusetts, where he worked as a labourer for three years, eluding slave hunters by changing his surname to Douglass.

At a Nantucket, Massachusetts, antislavery convention in 1841, Douglass was invited to describe his feelings and experiences under slavery. His remarks were so poignant and naturally eloquent that he was catapulted into a new career as agent for the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society.

To counter skeptics who doubted that such an articulate spokesman could ever have been a slave, Douglass felt impelled to write his autobiography in 1845, revised and completed in 1882 as Life and Times of Frederick Douglass. It became a classic in American literature as well as a primary source about slavery from the bondsman's viewpoint.

Still considered a runaway slave, Douglass, to avoid recapture by his former owner, whose name and location he had given in the narrative, left on a two-year speaking tour of Great Britain and Ireland. He returned with funds to purchase his freedom and also to start his own antislavery newspaper, the North Star (later Frederick Douglass's Paper), which he published from 1847 to 1860 in Rochester, New York.

After 1851 Douglass allied himself with the faction of the abolitionist movement led by James G. Birney. He did not countenance violence, however, and specifically counseled against the raid on Harpers Ferry, Virginia.

During the Civil War Douglass became a consultant to President Abraham Lincoln advocating that former slaves be armed for the North and that the war be made a direct confrontation against slavery. Throughout Reconstruction, he fought for full civil rights for freedmen and vigorously supported the women's rights movement.

After Reconstruction, Douglass served as assistant secretary of the Santo Domingo Commission, and in the District of Columbia he was marshal and recorder of deeds; finally, he was appointed U.S. minister and consul general to Haiti.

A remarkable journey from slavery to free man to advisor to a president.