And when - in the year he escaped, 1838, Baltimore had about 130,000 people.

Baltimore was a great ocean port and a great shipbuilding city.

In Baltimore, he lived among a lot of freed black men - right? - and women.īLIGHT: That's right. And then he grows up for 20 years as a slave - about 11 of them on the Eastern Shore, and about nine of those years in Baltimore, which, in fact, the city has everything to do with the fact that he would ever be able to escape.ĭAVIES: Right. So as a child, he's essentially a - not altogether abandoned, but he's left without parents. And he had to practically invent images of her. He never knew his father, and he never saw his mother after the age of 6. So one of the facts of his youth that everyone should know is that he was, in essence, an orphan. Douglass was always told that his father was his master or one of his masters. And he never will know exactly who his father was, although one candidate is Aaron Anthony himself. He was probably born in his grandmother Betsy Bailey's cabin, although we don't know for sure. His mother was a still young woman named Harriet Bailey. He was born on the Holme Hill Farm, which was owned by his then-master, Aaron Anthony. It's a - kind of a remote backwater, at that point, of the American slave society. Frederick Douglass was born along a horseshoe bend in the Tuckahoe River on the Eastern Shore of Maryland in 1818. Where was he born? What was his life like as a slave?ĭAVID BLIGHT: Well, first, thank you, Dave. Tell us about Frederick Douglass' early life. I spoke to him last year when his book, 'Frederick Douglass: Prophet Of Freedom,' was first published.ĭAVIES: Well, David Blight, welcome back to FRESH AIR. David Blight is a professor of history at Yale and the author or editor of a dozen books, including annotated editions of Douglass's first two autobiographies. Frederick Douglass is probably best known for his compelling autobiographies in which he described his experiences as a slave and his escape to freedom.īlight's book also illuminates less-well-known parts of Douglass's long and remarkable life - his break with leading abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, his complicated personal life, his support for and bitter feud with leaders of the women's suffrage movement and his years as a Republican Party functionary when he took patronage jobs in the government.ĭouglass was a passionate writer and powerful orator, and Blight says the most photographed person in the 19th century. The Pulitzer Prize for History was awarded this week to historian David Blight for his book about 19th century abolitionist Frederick Douglass. I'm Dave Davies in for Terry Gross, who's off this week.

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