Frederick Douglass

This brief introduction to the life of Frederick Douglass opens with his birth in slavery and provides a short account of his escape to New York disguised as a sailor. After recounting Douglass's veritable act of self-naming, Chesnutt moves to Douglass's career as a lecturer on the antislavery circuit and his relationship with William Lloyd Garrison. In 1845, following the publication of his narrative, Douglass sailed to England, where he spent two years giving lectures on slavery and temperance throughout Great Britain. While in England, Mrs. Ellen Richardson secured funds for his legal manumission from Hugh Auld. When Frederick Douglass returned to the United States in April 1847, he was a free man with plans to establish and run his own antislavery newspaper. In December that same year, Douglass began printing and editing the North Star. The biography also describes Douglass's political activism and his work for African American civil liberties. In 1860, Douglass moved to Washington