Frederick Douglass
The Lion of Anacostia
24 x 18 inches • oil on wood panel • artist Steve Simon
Biography
About the Painting
Selected Quote
Overview
Frederick Douglass was born in Talbot County, Maryland circa February 1818. As a child, he largely taught himself to read. Around age twenty, he escaped slavery and through a deep will and profound oratorical skill became a powerful voice for the abolition of slavery. The famous abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison provided audiences for Douglass to speak to and encouraged Douglass to write about his slavery experience. Douglass’ writing and oratory refuted the slaveholder argument that African Americans lacked intellect.
Douglass was also a strong supporter of women’s suffrage and is considered by many to be the most influential African-American leader of the 19th Century.
Born to Such a Fate
Frederick Douglass Biography
There is one virtue all Great Peacemakers exhibit—critical thinking. The ability to objectively evaluate social norms in a manner independent of the prevailing opinions, using conscience instead of unexamined conformity is a hallmark of each figure in this collection. For Sojourner Truth, as we examined above, the process of realizing slavery was antithetical to social justice took some time, but she eventually got there and soon applied her critical thinking to a variety of issues.
The Great Peacemakers go beyond critical thinking though. Like Truth, they act. As if making up for lost time, she acted with volition. “Agitate, agitate, agitate,” would become the slogan used by one luminary to sum up this sentiment. His name was Frederick Douglass.
Douglass was born into slavery in Talbot County, Maryland circa 1818. As an infant, he was separated from his mother as and raised by his grandmother. At the age of six, he was in turn separated from her and sent to a plantation.
His peripatetic childhood continued when he was sent by his owner, Thomas Auld, to work for Thomas’ brother Hugh in Baltimore. Before long, Douglass was hired out to yet another plantation. Along the way, he had managed to learn how to read and began teaching more than forty slaves the skill under the pretense of Sunday school. Those efforts were put to an abrupt end by a group of slave owners, labeling Douglass as something of a troublemaker.
Thomas Auld, thus, took Douglass back and sent him to work for Edward Covey, a farmer with a reputation as a “slave breaker.” Douglass was whipped, beaten, and psychologically tormented by Covey. After enduring the slave breaker’s gratuitous abuse for six months, the sixteen-year-old Douglass resolved to stand up and defend himself. In what would become a major inflection point in his life, Douglass engaged in a two-hour physical brawl with Covey. The fight ended in a draw, but it was clear Douglass had usurped Covey’s vaunted reputation and in so doing “rekindled the smoldering embers of liberty.”
The fight ended in a draw, but it was clear Douglass had usurped Covey’s vaunted reputation and in so doing “rekindled the smoldering embers of liberty.”
It was that taste of freedom that compelled Douglass to more seriously consider escaping. In his late teens, Douglass planned two unsuccessful escapes. He then fell in love with a free black woman in Baltimore named Anna Murray. She would become his accomplice and later his bride. In a crafty plan, Douglass made his way by rail and boat from Baltimore, through Delaware, to Philadelphia, and finally to a safe house in New York City.
Murray caught up with Douglass in New York and the couple married eleven days after the harrowing escape. They settled in New Bedford, Massachusetts. There, Douglass met the famous abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison who provided speaking venues for Douglass and encouraged him to write about his slavery experience. Douglass’ first of three autobiographies, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, eloquently laid bare the brutality of slavery. His incisive writing coupled with his rousing oratory refuted the slaveholder argument that African Americans lacked the intellect necessary to function as independent citizens.
The autobiography became a best-seller, but the increased profile further exposed his status as a fugitive. Due to this risk, Douglass, like many escaped slaves, chose to flee to Ireland to avoid recapture. In Ireland and Britain, Douglass gave many lectures as enthused supporters raised money to purchase the fugitive’s freedom. Upon his return stateside, Douglass began publishing his first newspaper, North Star, as a platform for abolition and women’s rights.
Frederick Douglass by Steven Weitzman, Emancipation Hall, Capitol Visitor Center, Washington, D.C.
During the Civil War, Douglass campaigned to allow African Americans to fight for the Union and recruited soldiers to do so. After the war, white vigilante groups like the Ku Klux Klan mounted violent efforts to reassert white supremacy in the South. In response, Douglass launched a new newspaper, New National Era, using it to expose the criminal violation of rights and to demand justice.
Throughout the remainder of his life, Douglass continued to “agitate, agitate, agitate.” He actively supported women’s rights and African Americans’ equal rights while also speaking and writing on behalf of a variety of reform causes including land reform, free public education, the abolition of capital punishment, and peace.
Frederick Douglass is considered by many to be the most influential African American of the 19th century. He died on February 20, 1895 of a heart attack and was buried in Rochester, New York.
About the Painting
The portrait of Frederick Douglass is a color interpretation of a black and white photograph by George Kendall Warren. It was selected for Douglass’ stately, leonine disposition that the photographer aptly captured. Framed by gray locks and beard like the mane of a pride male, “The Lion of Anacostia” focuses his gaze upon something in the distance. The painting emerges from a sepia-toned past into a full-colored, but still unfinished present.
The image on the right is a reference to Douglass’ frequent refrain that knowledge is “the pathway from slavery to freedom.” When Douglass was a young child, the wife of one of his slave masters would occasionally read the Bible aloud. The act of reading stoked the child’s inquisitive nature. The woman, Sophia (Greek for wisdom) Auld, obliged Douglass’ curiosity. She introduced him to the alphabet and began to teach him basic reading.
One day Hugh Auld, Sophia’s husband, witnessed one of these reading sessions. Mr. Auld promptly scolded his wife within earshot of Douglass. She was to cease this immediately for “it was unlawful, as well as unsafe, to teach a slave to read.” Young Frederick understood the profound implications.
Recalling the episode many years later, Douglass wrote, “The effect of (Mr. Auld’s) words on me was neither slight nor transitory. His iron sentences, cold and harsh, sunk like heavy weights deep into my heart, and stirred up within me a rebellion not soon to be allayed.”
The image on the left is, of course, a reference to his oratorical skill. When Frederick was twelve, he bought a copy of The Columbian Orator for fifty cents. The book includes famous speeches and dialogues by notable historical figures. He read, studied, and then repeatedly recited the contents in private. It was a practice that would serve him well. One of the entries in the book, “Dialogue Between a Master and Slave,” Frederick found particularly riveting. In the dialogue, the slave and master debate the morality of slavery. After the slave vanquishes the master in the debate, the master emancipates the slave. Douglass would later write, “I could not help feeling that the day might come, when the well-directed answers made by the slave to the master, in this instance, would find their counterpart in myself.”
Indeed Douglass would go on to become an extraordinary orator, abolitionist, writer, social reformer, statesman, and the most photographed American of the 19th century.
Selected Frederick Douglass Quote
“The soul that is within me no man can degrade.“
