The Life of Frederick Douglass

Frederick Douglass, who was born a slave in Maryland about February 1817, became the most famous of all black abolitionists as well as one of the greatest American orators of his day. As a young man he was sent to Baltimore, where he learned ship caulking. Already schooled in the alphabet by his master's wife, he taught himself to write by tracing the letters on the prows of ships. In 1838, with seaman's papers supplied by a free black, he escaped to New Bedford, Mass. Five months later he came into contact with William Lloyd Garrison's antislavery weekly, the Liberator, and in 1841 he was enlisted as an agent by the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery...