Champion of the suppressed people of the world, Frederick Douglass was an escaped slave who rose to become the United States Minister to Haiti and a counselor to four presidents. A man with no formal education who spoke at universities all over the world, Douglass, who as a youngster slept in an animal pen, eventually became wealthy enough to afford the home of his dreams.

Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey was born in Tuckahoe, Maryland, which he once described as "a small district of country, thinly populated, and remarkable for nothing I know of more than the worn-out sandy, desert-like appearance of its soil." He calculated his birth date to have been in February 1817; later in life, he celebrated it on 14 February. His mother, Harriet Bailey, was a literate slave; his father is presumed to have been a white man. During the first few years of his life he...