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Frederick Douglass was born a slave in Maryland, and even
though it was illegal for slaves to become literate, at an
early age he managed to learn to read and write. In 1836,
after years of moving around among different brutal situations,
Douglass escaped. Once north, he joined Anna Murray, a free
black woman, and the couple married and adopted new names
to minimize the chances of being caught. Douglass soon became
an important orator in the abolitionist movement, and with
the publication of his first autobiography, Narrative
of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845), he became the
international spokesperson for emancipation. Moving to Rochester,
New York, in 1847, Douglass began publishing the antislavery
paper The North Star, later called Frederick
Douglass's Weekly and Monthly. At the outbreak of the
Civil War, he actively recruited black soldiers to join the
Union Army, and when the Union won, he argued for the immediate
passage of the Fifteenth Amendment, which gave African American
men the right to vote. Douglass's other autobiographies are
My Bondage and My Freedom (1855) and The Life
and Times of Frederick Douglass (1881, 1892).
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