In addition to his oratory, Douglass wrote several autobiographies, eloquently describing his life as a slave, and his struggles to be free. He became a major speaker for the cause of abolition. He stood as a living counter-example to slaveholders' arguments that slaves did not have the intellectual capacity to function as independent American citizens. After escaping from slavery, he became a leader of the abolitionist movement, gaining renown for his dazzling oratory and incisive antislavery writing. 'synopsis' may belong to another edition of this title.įrederick Douglass (1818–1895) was an American social reformer, orator, writer and statesman. His autobiographical works are The Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Bondage and My Freedom and Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, published in 18 respectively. He was such an impressive orator that numerous persons doubted if he had ever been a slave. In 1841 he addressed a convention of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society in Nantucket and so greatly impressed the group that they immediately employed him as an agent. Soon thereafter he changed his name to Frederick Douglass. In 1838 he escaped from slavery and went to New York City, where he married Anna Murray, a free colored woman whom he had met in Baltimore. As a young boy he was sent to Baltimore, to be a house servant, where he learned to read and write, with the assistance of his master's wife. Frederick Douglass was born in slavery as Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey near Easton in Talbot County, Maryland. Douglass wrote The Heroic Slave in response to a request from the Rochester Ladies' Anti Slavery Society for a short story to go in their collection, Autographs for Freedom. The novella is based on a true incident where a slave, Madison Washington, leads a rebellion on board a slave ship. The Heroic Slave is the only work of fiction written by Frederick Douglass.

Frederick douglass the heroic slave