by Frederick Douglass

Frederick Douglass was born Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey in the cabin of his grandmother, Betsey Bailey, on Tuckahoe Creek in Talbot County, Maryland, sometime around February of 1818. Born of a slave mother and white father (who was probably his master), Douglass tells a powerful tale of the beatings and mistreatment that he observed and endured. The story spans Douglass's twenty years in slavery, his success in escaping it, and his initial involvement in the abolitionist movement.

Events in History at the Time the Autobiography Takes Place

Slavery in Maryland. Maryland, where Frederick Douglass was born and where he spent his years in slavery, was one of the so-called border states that marked the boundary between North and South prior to the Civil War. Though a slaveholding state...