100 Fun Facts About Frederick Douglass

Frederick Douglass was born with his mother Harriet's surname; what was it?

Bailey: his mother named him Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey. He fled Baltimore in 1838 as 'Stanley', became 'Johnson' in New York, and only then took the name he made famous.

In which state was Douglass born into slavery?

Maryland, on the Eastern Shore of Chesapeake Bay. His mother was hired out twelve miles away and could visit only by walking there at night after a day in the fields; he saw her only a handful of times before she died.

Douglass never knew his birth date; which day did he choose to celebrate it, in memory of his mother?

Valentine's Day. On the last night he saw his mother she took him on her knee and gave him a ginger cake shaped like a heart, and he is said to have picked February 14 for that reason.

Who began teaching the young Douglass his ABCs in Baltimore, until her husband ordered her to stop?

Sophia Auld. Her husband forbade the lessons, warning that reading would 'forever unfit him to be a slave'; the boy took that as proof that literacy was the pathway from slavery to freedom.

At about twelve, Douglass bought which book of speeches and dialogues that shaped his case against slavery?

The Columbian Orator, a popular schoolbook he bought for 50 cents earned shining boots. In one dialogue an enslaved man out-argues his master and is set free, which gave the boy words for what he already felt.

Douglass fought and defeated which 'slave-breaker' at the age of 16?

Edward Covey never laid a hand on him again after the fight. Douglass guessed why he was never sent to the whipping-post for it: a famous breaker of men could not admit that a boy of sixteen had beaten him.

What trade did the teenage Douglass learn on the Baltimore waterfront, soon earning top wages that went to his enslaver?

Ship caulker, sealing hull seams with mallet and irons. Within a year he commanded the highest wages in the yards, and had to hand over every cent each Saturday night, an injustice that hardened his resolve to run.

On September 3, 1838, Douglass escaped Baltimore by what means?

Boarding a northbound train dressed as a sailor, with papers borrowed from a free Black seaman. The conductor gave them the merest glance, and by rail, ferry and steamboat he reached New York in under 24 hours.

Whose savings paid for Douglass's escape from Baltimore in 1838?

Anna Murray, his future wife, was a free Black woman who risked her own safety to pay a fugitive's way. She followed him to New York, and they married eleven days after he arrived.

Douglass's surname was suggested by a friend who had just read which poem by Walter Scott?

The Lady of the Lake, whose exiled Scottish lord is James Douglas. His host Nathan Johnson chose it at the breakfast table, because their town already held so many Johnsons that the newcomer could not stay one.

In which Massachusetts whaling town did the newly escaped Douglass and his wife first settle in 1838?

New Bedford, where for the first time no master stood by to take his pay. White tradesmen on the wharves refused to work beside him, so he sawed wood, shovelled coal and loaded ships instead.

In which denomination did the young Douglass serve as a local preacher in Massachusetts?

African Methodist Episcopal Zion, a small Black congregation he joined after a white Methodist church refused him a seat in the body of the house. An abolitionist who heard him speak there invited him onto his first big platform.

Which abolitionist paper did young Douglass rank 'second only to The Bible' in his heart?

The Liberator, William Lloyd Garrison's Boston weekly. Douglass was too poor to pay when its agent called, but was signed up anyway, and wrote that the paper 'became my meat and my drink'.

On which Massachusetts island did the 23-year-old Douglass give his first major abolitionist speech in 1841?

Nantucket, at a summer convention of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society. He had come only to listen; asked without warning to speak, he trembled so that he could hardly stand, yet left the island as the society's new lecturer.

After an Indiana mob broke Douglass's hand in 1843, who rescued him?

A Quaker family, the Hardys, carried him off in their wagon and nursed him until he was back on his feet. The broken bones were never properly set, and his right hand troubled him for the rest of his life.

Which 1845 bestseller was Douglass's first autobiography?

Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass answered audiences who doubted that so polished a speaker had ever been enslaved. It was so well written that sceptics then doubted a Black man could have written it.

Why did Douglass's early memoirs omit how he escaped?

Helpers' safety: naming the route would have exposed them and closed it to others still enslaved. He told the full story only in his third memoir, in 1881, once slavery was gone and the secret could hurt no one.

Why did Douglass sail for Britain and Ireland months after publishing his Narrative in 1845?

To avoid being recaptured: the book named his enslaver and the places he had lived, so a fugitive had made himself easy to find. He sailed on the Cambria in August 1845 and stayed almost two years.

Which Irish leader, the winner of Catholic emancipation, did Douglass meet in Dublin in 1845 and praise ever after?

Daniel O'Connell, who refused donations from American slaveholders for his own Irish cause. Douglass recalled being introduced to a packed Dublin hall as 'the Black O'Connell of the United States'.

How did Douglass become legally free in 1846?

British supporters raised funds to buy his freedom: the Richardson family of Newcastle sent his enslaver £150. Douglass wrote that some allies thought paying conceded a right to own people; to him it was a ransom paid to a robber.

Which instrument did Douglass play as a lifelong hobby, a love he shared with a grandson who became a concert soloist?

Violin. In a Genoa museum Douglass lingered longest over Paganini's, writing that he would have given more for it than for any picture there; his grandson Joseph Douglass became a touring concert violinist.

What was the name of the abolitionist newspaper Douglass founded in upstate New York in 1847?

The North Star carried the motto 'Right is of no Sex, Truth is of no Color'. British friends paid for the press; Douglass recalled American allies astonished that 'a wood-sawyer' should offer himself as an editor.

Where did Douglass send the fugitives he hid at home, once eleven at a time, when he had raised their fares?

Canada, a steamer ride across Lake Ontario from his door. He wrote that the work was like bailing out the ocean with a teaspoon, yet every person passed along brought him unspeakable joy.

Douglass broke with his mentor William Lloyd Garrison after changing his mind about which document?

The US Constitution, which Garrison burned in public as a pro-slavery document. After a decade of echoing him, Douglass decided it was an anti-slavery instrument worth voting under, and old friends treated him as an apostate.

At which 1848 gathering did Douglass speak up for Elizabeth Cady Stanton's demand that women get the vote?

Seneca Falls Convention, the first women's rights convention. Stanton's call for the vote was the one resolution in real doubt until Douglass spoke for it, and he was among the 32 men who signed its Declaration of Sentiments.

Douglass gave his speech 'What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?' in which city?

Rochester, his home city, where a ladies' anti-slavery society had invited him to Corinthian Hall on July 5, 1852. He told his hosts the holiday was theirs, not his: 'You may rejoice, I must mourn.'

What did Douglass press Abraham Lincoln about at their first White House meeting, in 1863?

Equal pay for Black soldiers, who were earning less than white troops. Douglass recalled Lincoln's answer: the lower pay had eased their enlistment against popular prejudice, and in the end they would receive the same.

Where did Douglass secretly meet John Brown shortly before the Harpers Ferry raid?

An abandoned stone quarry near Chambersburg, Pennsylvania. Douglass told Brown he was walking into 'a perfect steel-trap' and went home, but Shields Green, the fugitive he had brought along, stayed with Brown and was hanged.

Which document did John Brown draft while boarding for weeks at Douglass's home in early 1858?

His Provisional Constitution, a frame of government for the men he meant to lead into the mountains, adopted by his followers at Chatham that May. Douglass recalled that Brown insisted on paying three dollars a week in board.

Scholars rank Douglass ahead of even Abraham Lincoln as the 19th century's most what American?

Photographed more than any other American of his century, by one scholarly count of surviving portraits. He never smiled for the camera, refusing to feed the caricature of the happy slave.

What title did Douglass give his March 1863 broadside calling for Black recruits to the Union army?

Men of Color to Arms! ran in his own paper and was copied across the North. 'Liberty won by white men would lose half its luster,' he argued, and 'Better even die free, than to live slaves.'

Which regiment did two of Douglass's sons join during the Civil War?

54th Massachusetts Infantry, the Black regiment whose assault on Fort Wagner the film Glory retells. Lewis Douglass came through that assault as its sergeant major.

Which general, whose 1861 order freeing Missouri rebels' slaves Lincoln had revoked, did Douglass first back for president in 1864?

John C. Frémont, the radicals' nominee, because Lincoln would not yet endorse votes for freedmen. Frémont quit the race that September, and Douglass wrote that he then did his uttermost for Lincoln rather than 'swap horses'.

Douglass told an 1876 crowd that Black Americans were only Lincoln's step-children, and called him what?

'The white man's President', he said as the Emancipation Memorial was unveiled before President Grant. Yet he ended by judging that, measured by his country's sentiment, Lincoln was 'swift, zealous, radical, and determined'.

In 1872 Douglass became the first African American nominated for vice president, on which ticket?

Victoria Woodhull's Equal Rights Party put him on its ticket without asking him. He never acknowledged the nomination, and that year he served instead as a presidential elector, carrying New York's electoral vote to the capital.

Douglass named the three 'boxes' in which a man's rights rest as the ballot box, the jury box and what?

The cartridge box. After the war he argued that American liberties depended on the ballot-box, the jury-box and the cartridge-box, and that no class of people could live and flourish in the country without all three.

Which financial institution did Douglass become president of in 1874, only for it to fail within months?

Freedman's Savings Bank, founded to keep the earnings of the newly freed. Douglass lent it $10,000 of his own before he grasped that the money was already gone; he had, he wrote, been 'married to a corpse'.

Which president, fresh from the disputed election of 1876, made Douglass US Marshal for the District of Columbia?

Rutherford B. Hayes. Douglass was the first Black man in the post, and when the president had someone else present guests at White House receptions, a customary part of the job, he refused friends' calls to resign over it.

Whose sickbed did Douglass visit in 1877 to make his peace?

His former enslaver Thomas Auld, by then bedridden with palsy. Auld greeted him as 'Marshal Douglass'; he answered 'not Marshal, but Frederick to you as formerly', and Auld said that in his place he would have run too.

What did Douglass name his final home, the Washington estate that is now a National Historic Site?

Cedar Hill, the Anacostia estate he bought in 1877. After his death his widow Helen fought to keep it as a memorial to him, and it has been shown to visitors for more than a century.

Douglass's second wife, Helen Pitts, caused controversy because she was what?

White and nearly 20 years younger. Helen Pitts came from an abolitionist family and had been a clerk in his office; they married in 1884, his children were especially displeased, and the pair stayed together until his death.

To which republic, born of a slave revolt, did President Harrison send Douglass as US minister in 1889?

Haiti. He resigned in 1891 as Washington pressed for a naval station on Haitian soil, and Haiti's president then chose him to represent the country at the 1893 Chicago World's Fair, which he called a crowning honour.

At the 1888 Republican convention, Douglass became the first African American in a major party to receive what?

A vote for president: one delegate named him in the roll call, and Benjamin Harrison went on to win the nomination. Douglass had gone to Chicago backing Senator John Sherman.

Complete Douglass's famous 1857 line: 'If there is no struggle, there is no' what?

Progress. He said it at Canandaigua, New York, in August 1857, marking West India emancipation, and went on to warn that 'Power concedes nothing without a demand.'

Douglass died in February 1895 shortly after returning home from a meeting of which organisation?

National Council of Women. He spent his last day among the suffragists he had backed for nearly fifty years, went home in the late afternoon, and collapsed while getting ready to speak at a local church.

Which fellow reformer shares Mount Hope Cemetery with Douglass?

Susan B. Anthony. Douglass had been a Sunday guest at her family's farm, and in 1866 the two helped found a group demanding votes for all, only to split three years later over whether Black men should get the vote first.

Which future president spoke when Douglass's statue was unveiled in his adopted home city in 1899?

Theodore Roosevelt, then governor of New York, gave the address in June 1899. Douglass had died four years earlier, and the sculptor used his son Charles as the model for the bronze.

What news brought Douglass home from Britain in 1860?

His daughter's death: Annie, ten, was the youngest of his five children and, he wrote, 'the light and life of my house'. Regardless of the peril, he took the first steamer home and kept out of sight for nearly a month.

Douglass and a waiting crowd listened 'as for a bolt from the sky' for word of what?

The Emancipation Proclamation, on January 1, 1863. Hours dragged by until a man pushed through the crowd crying that it was coming, 'on the wires', and Douglass recalled joy that ran from shouts of praise to sobs and tears.

What happened to Douglass's family home on June 2, 1872, shortly before he moved to Washington?

Fire destroyed it, along with the bound volumes of his newspaper from 1848 to 1860. Only weeks earlier Harvard had invited him to store them in its fire-proof library, and he had put off sending them.

What disguise did Douglass wear to flee Baltimore in 1838, carrying a free man's borrowed papers?

A sailor's uniform matched the seaman's protection papers a free Black mariner had lent him. The whole dash to New York took less than 24 hours.

What did young Douglass give hungry white boys on Baltimore's streets in return for reading lessons?

Bread was always plentiful in the Baltimore house where he was held, so he slipped it into his pocket on errands and swapped it for lessons from boys who had schooling but empty stomachs.

Weeks before he died, what one word did Douglass repeat three times as his advice to a young man?

Agitate was the old campaigner's creed in a single word: he believed injustice gave way only to forceful, persistent, unyielding pressure, never to patience.

Which ancient monument did Douglass climb to the top on an 1886–87 tour, hauled up by four guides?

The Great Pyramid nearly beat him: two guides pulled, two pushed, and he vowed that nothing in the world would tempt him to try it again.

Which keepsake of Abraham Lincoln's did his widow Mary send Douglass after the 1865 assassination?

His walking stick, said to be Lincoln's favorite, came in thanks for Douglass's help in recruiting Black troops, and he wrote the widow a letter of thanks that August.

Under the statehood name the US capital chose in 2016, 'D.C.' would stand for 'Douglass' what?

Commonwealth lets the capital keep its famous initials while honoring the abolitionist who lived and died there, and the House passed statehood bills using the name in 2020 and 2021.

Douglass wrote in 1868 that he had 'wrought in the day' while which woman worked 'in the night'?

Harriet Tubman had asked him to endorse her biography; he replied that he had enjoyed the applause of crowds while her only witnesses were the midnight sky and a few footsore fugitives.

Which reformer stopped Douglass mid-speech in Ohio by calling out, 'Frederick, is God dead?'

Sojourner Truth, a committed pacifist, was appalled to hear him say slavery could only end in bloodshed. He answered that because God was not dead, it must.

Which observance grew from a week Carter G. Woodson timed to Douglass's and Lincoln's birthdays?

Black History Month began in 1926 as Negro History Week, set where Black communities already celebrated both birthdays. Two years after Douglass died, Washington's classrooms were already keeping a 'Douglass Day'.

What was the young Douglass promised if he scrubbed himself clean before being sent to Baltimore?

A pair of trousers was a dazzling prize for a boy who had only ever worn a knee-length linen shirt, so he spent most of three days in the creek scrubbing.

What did Douglass call 'the pathway from slavery to freedom', having learned to read in secret?

Knowledge became his creed the day his master banned his lessons, warning that reading would make a slave unmanageable; the boy took the warning as a map to liberty.

Who raised the infant Douglass in a cabin near Tuckahoe Creek after he was parted from his mother?

His grandmother Betsy, also enslaved, minded the plantation's youngest children. His mother saw him only a few times before she died, when he was about seven.

How did Douglass's mother, hired out twelve miles away, manage her few visits to her young son?

On foot after dark was her only way: a field hand faced a whipping if she missed sunrise, so she covered the whole distance, lay beside him until he slept, and was gone by morning.

Which US coin pictured Douglass in a 2017 issue, with his hilltop home in the background?

The quarter came from the America the Beautiful series, which gave every state and territory one national site; the capital's pick was the house where Douglass spent his last years.

Which actor voiced Douglass in Ken Burns's landmark 1990 documentary series The Civil War?

Morgan Freeman read Douglass's words in the nine-part series, which drew more than 39 million viewers and became the most-watched program ever shown on PBS.

Which Hamilton actor played a comic, unheroic Douglass in the 2020 miniseries The Good Lord Bird?

Daveed Diggs, a Tony winner as Lafayette and Jefferson, plays him opposite Ethan Hawke's John Brown, in a portrait far less reverent than most.

Douglass's 1845 lecture tour of Ireland began just as which catastrophe was taking hold there?

The Great Famine was beginning as he landed, and the poverty he met in Dublin reminded him so much of slavery that he declared the cause of humanity one the world over.

Douglass broke with Elizabeth Cady Stanton by backing which amendment even though it left women out?

The Fifteenth Amendment barred denying the vote on grounds of race but not sex. Douglass feared that tying the two causes together would sink both.

Douglass denounced the American Colonization Society for shipping free Black people to which colony?

Liberia was the society's creation, but Douglass heaped shame on anyone proposing it, declaring that Black Americans had a right to live in the United States and meant to stay.

A Chicago park named for which senator was renamed in 2020 to honor Douglass?

Stephen A. Douglas lost his park to a student campaign that needed only one extra letter: it became Douglass Park, honoring Frederick and his first wife together.

Which surname did Douglass take at his 1838 wedding, then drop because too many neighbors shared it?

Johnson was so common in the couple's new Massachusetts home that their host, himself one, was asked to choose something rarer; the groom had already tried and dropped 'Stanley'.

Which president sent Douglass to the Caribbean in 1871 to help weigh annexing Santo Domingo?

Ulysses S. Grant hoped the island could become a refuge and a state for Black Americans, and Douglass backed the plan against his old ally Charles Sumner, who led the Senate opposition.

Which Washington office did President Garfield give Douglass in 1881, a job he preferred to marshal?

Recorder of Deeds suited him, he wrote, because the job imposed no social duties and so neither fettered his pen nor silenced his voice; he was the first Black man to hold it.

Douglass's last great speech, 'Lessons of the Hour' in 1894, attacked which Southern practice?

Lynching, he argued, was being excused by talk of a 'Negro problem', a phrase that in his words shielded the guilty and blamed the innocent.

Which journalist enlisted Douglass for a pamphlet protesting the 1893 Chicago World's Fair?

Ida B. Wells reported that copies reached more than 20,000 fairgoers; the pamphlet, with a section by Douglass, asked why Black achievement had been left out of the exhibits.

Douglass was booed for opposing the 1879 'Exoduster' migration of Black Southerners to which state?

Kansas drew tens of thousands fleeing the Klan and discriminatory laws, but Douglass urged them to stay and fight it out in the South, a stand fellow leaders criticized too.

Douglass's 1869 lecture 'Our Composite Nationality' defended which group's right to become citizens?

The Chinese, he argued, should be free to come, testify in court, vote and hold office, a stand many of his fellow Republicans rejected; he called migration a human right.

Which 1855 book, Douglass's second autobiography, did Ottilie Assing translate into German?

My Bondage and My Freedom greatly expands his first book, telling far more about his years in liberty; the German edition came out in Hamburg in 1860.

Douglass was called 'the Sage of' which Washington neighborhood, the site of his hilltop home?

Anacostia was known as Uniontown when Douglass bought the estate of its own developer in 1877, on a rise with a sweeping view back to the Capitol.

In which Massachusetts town did Douglass write his first book and get thrown off a segregated coach?

Lynn was his home from 1841; that September he and a friend were thrown off for refusing the segregated coach, and a park facing the old depot was dedicated to him in 2021.

How did Douglass and his friends plan to travel in their first escape bid, betrayed before it began?

In a large canoe they meant to paddle seventy or eighty miles up Chesapeake Bay over Easter, then go on by land with passes Douglass had forged; all of them were jailed instead.

What did the teenage Douglass run in secret for more than thirty of his fellow slaves?

A Sabbath school was the cover, and reading was the lesson: he later called teaching those men their letters the sweetest engagement with which he was ever blessed.

Which New York abolitionist hid the newly escaped Douglass and hosted his wedding days later?

David Ruggles, a printer and bookseller, claimed to have guided more than 600 fugitives to liberty; the young man he sheltered in 1838 became the most famous of them.

What is Douglass's only published fiction, a novella about a revolt aboard the brig Creole?

The Heroic Slave retells the real 1841 mutiny led by Madison Washington, an enslaved cook who had the vessel sailed to Nassau in the Bahamas, where the rebels went free.

In his 1859 lecture 'Self-Made Men', which single word did Douglass say explains success?

Work was his whole answer: he scorned what he called the 'good luck theory' and held that opportunity is important but exertion is indispensable.

What did Douglass call the Second Inaugural Address when Lincoln asked his opinion that evening?

A sacred effort was his verdict, given minutes after policemen had tried to turn him away at the White House door; Lincoln said there was no man whose opinion he valued more.

Douglass's eldest son Lewis survived the bloody 1863 assault on which South Carolina stronghold?

Fort Wagner left nearly half of his regiment killed, wounded or captured, yet the battle turned public attention to the sacrifices Black troops were making; Lewis held the highest rank then open to them.

What did Douglass call the windowless one-room hut behind his house where he withdrew to write?

The Growlery held a second desk, a couch and plenty of books, and he would vanish into it after breakfast and a morning stroll to read and think undisturbed.

Which young Ohio poet did Douglass find a clerk's job at the 1893 Chicago World's Fair?

Paul Laurence Dunbar, who had been running an elevator in Dayton, also got to read his poems at the fair; Douglass called him the most promising young man of his race in America.

Which Harlem painter told Douglass's life story in 32 tempera panels in 1938–39?

Jacob Lawrence was barely into his twenties when he painted the series in three acts (the slave, the fugitive, the free man), writing his own caption for every panel.

Which historian won a 2019 Pulitzer Prize for the biography Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom?

David W. Blight's book also swept the Bancroft, Lincoln and Francis Parkman prizes and became the basis of HBO's 2022 documentary Frederick Douglass: In Five Speeches.

Which New York philanthropist merged his Liberty Party paper with Douglass's newspaper in 1851?

Gerrit Smith was so close an ally that when he gave up his seat in Congress in 1854, Douglass was seriously proposed to succeed him.

Which city, a stop on his 1840s lecture tours, unveiled Europe's first statue of Douglass in 2023?

Belfast set the bronze in its city centre; back in the 1840s, Douglass had been delighted that a group of ministers there refused to admit slaveholders to their church.

Which fugitive known as 'Emperor' left Douglass's side to join John Brown's raid and was hanged?

Shields Green had lived in Douglass's house for almost two years; when Douglass judged the raid suicidal and turned for home, Green surprised him by staying with Brown.

Which Pittsburgh journalist, later an Army major, was named co-editor of Douglass's first paper?

Martin Delany soon left the paper, and the two came to stand for opposite answers: Delany urged Black emigration, while Douglass insisted on staying to win equality at home.

Which Washington weekly did Douglass take over and rename in 1870, the last newspaper he ran?

New National Era passed to his son Lewis as editor and failed in September 1874, a casualty of the same economic crisis that was closing businesses across the country.

Which Englishwoman joined Douglass in America in 1849 to edit, publish and promote his writing?

Julia Griffiths also compiled Autographs for Freedom, the anti-slavery anthology that carried his only novella, and kept writing columns for his papers after going home in 1855.

Douglass's 'Send Back the Money' campaign urged which denomination to return slaveholders' donations?

The Free Church of Scotland had taken some £3,000 from American donors, and Douglass pressed the demand at meetings such as the three he addressed in Dundee; it kept the money.

On which vast Lloyd plantation was the young Douglass enslaved before being sent to Baltimore?

Wye House dated to the 1650s, and Douglass described its brutal conditions at length in his first autobiography; Lloyd descendants kept the estate into the twenty-first century.

At which Harpers Ferry campus did Douglass, a trustee, give his 1881 address honoring John Brown?

Storer College heard him praise Brown while the man who had prosecuted Brown, Andrew Hunter, sat on the same platform; Hunter congratulated him afterward.