After the death of his wife of forty-four years, Anna, a freeborn but illiterate black woman, he shocked the conventions of his age by marrying Helen Pitts, a well-educated white activist schooled in abolitionism and women’s rights.

Douglass the radical outsider, an admirer of the insurrectionist John Brown, after the Civil War became a Republican Party insider, serving in political and diplomatic posts. Subjected to cruelty by Southern Christians, he would satirise those who invoked the Bible to justify slavery and found personal and political meaning not by rejecting religious faith but by immersing himself in the Scriptures. Lacking a close-knit family as a boy – separated from his mother and unsure of his white father’s identity, he called himself a ‘wounded soul’ – he became the patriarch of a vast, dependent and often troubling family of sons, daughters and grandchildren. The physical courage he demonstrated as a young man – in a celebrated fight with a professional slave-breaker, confrontations with white workers in the Baltimore shipyard and escape from bondage – gave way to intellectual power radical thought, gifted oratory and campaigning journalism became his characteristic weapons. Slaves were denied education, yet Douglass would win a reputation as a literary genius.

It was just one metamorphosis in a life of dramatic transformations. After escaping to freedom in 1838 he took the name by which he would achieve national and international fame, an act of self-creation inspired by Walter Scott’s poem Lady of the Lake. In his mid-twenties, newly established as an abolitionist celebrity, he wrote Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, a dramatic account in simple but vivid prose of his twenty years as a Maryland slave further autobiographies, published in 18, stylishly recorded his activities as a campaigner for emancipation and racial equality both during the civil war that secured black freedom and in its aftermath, when the halting steps towards black civil rights faltered.ĭouglass was born Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey. Certainly, no other black American life has been more remarkable or significant, and few other lives, black or white, have lent themselves, as did Douglass’s, to the publication of three separate and bestselling autobiographies, each of them an essential source for a biographer. F rederick Douglass – runaway slave, radical activist, brilliant orator and writer, tireless advocate for his race, political office-holder – lays claim to being the most influential African-American of all time.

Blight douglass