Content warning: This section of the guide discusses racism, enslavement, and rape.

Born Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey (he later took the name “Douglass” after the surnames of two characters in Walter Scott’s narrative poem “The Lady of the Lake”), Frederick Douglass is one of the most notable African Americans, one of the nation’s most powerful orators, and its best-known abolitionist activist. Douglass was born in Tuckahoe, Maryland. He believed that he had been born in 1817 but, according to his biographer, David Blight, his enslaver at birth, Aaron Anthony, recorded Douglass’s birth in February 1818 in his inventory of enslaved people. He was also recorded as the son of Harriet, though he had been raised by his grandparents, Betsey and Isaac Bailey, in their cabin. In various places, he claims no knowledge of his paternity. He was aware, however, of claims that his enslaver was his father.

Douglass spent the first eight years of his life living on Colonel Edward Lloyd’s sprawling plantation in the Maryland countryside, where Lloyd’s chief butler, Captain Aaron Anthony, enslaved him. In 1826, when he was eight, he went to live with Hugh and Sophia Auld in Baltimore, where he remained for seven years.