Douglass soon breaks into print with an autobiography and as publisher of his own newspaper. He marries, starts a family, and eventually settles in Rochester, New York, where he becomes an influential speaker for the abolitionist movement led by William Lloyd Garrison. At the age of 20, Douglass escapes to the north. His exposure to life in a big city broadens his horizons and increases his ambition to control his own life.
Soon afterward, he learns to read and write. Its atrocities will haunt and outrage him for the rest of his life.īy a stroke of good luck, the young boy is sent to live with his master’s relatives in Baltimore. At Wye, Frederick witnesses the worst abuses of the slave system. His mother dies soon after this point, leaving the young boy isolated and orphaned despite his siblings. There, he meets his half brothers and sisters, who are strangers to him.
When the boy is six, he is sent to the larger Wye Plantation, which his owner also manages. It is rumored that Frederick’s father is the master of the plantation or one of his White relatives. The baby is left in the care of his grandmother instead. He scarcely knows his mother since she works at a plantation 12 miles away. These include the quest for identity, the power of words, biblical influences, conflicting ideologies, and Douglass’s problematic relationships with women.įrederick Douglass enters life as a slave in the winter of 1818. Drawing on Douglass’s newspaper articles, autobiographies, and personal correspondence, the author follows the abolitionist’s life chronologically from his birth in February 1818 to his death in 1895.Īs Blight sifts through the facts of Douglass’s life, he shapes his narrative around several key themes that the orator wrestles with as he defines and redefines himself. Blight also edited an edition of Douglass’s first autobiography. He has written other books dealing with this material, including Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (2001) and American Oracle: The Civil War in the Civil Rights Era (2011). Blight is a professor of history at Yale University who spent much of his life researching Douglass, slavery in America, and the Civil War.
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