Douglass also actively supported women's suffrage, and held several public offices. First published in 1881 and revised in 1892, three years before his death, the book covers events both during and after the Civil War. Following the Civil War, Douglass was an active campaigner for the rights of freed slaves and wrote his last autobiography, Life and Times of Frederick Douglass. ĭouglass wrote three autobiographies, describing his experiences as a slave in his Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845), which became a bestseller and was influential in promoting the cause of abolition, as was his second book, My Bondage and My Freedom (1855). It was in response to this disbelief that Douglass wrote his first autobiography.
Northerners at the time found it hard to believe that such a great orator had once been a slave. Accordingly, he was described by abolitionists in his time as a living counterexample to slaveholders' arguments that slaves lacked the intellectual capacity to function as independent American citizens. After escaping from slavery in Maryland, he became a national leader of the abolitionist movement in Massachusetts and New York, becoming famous for his oratory and incisive antislavery writings.
February 1817 or 1818 – February 20, 1895) was an African-American social reformer, abolitionist, orator, writer, and statesman. Frederick Douglass (born Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey, c.
