Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey
“Without struggle there is no progress”
Born Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey, a slave in Talbot County, Maryland somewhere around the time of 1817(?) and died in 1895 as a freed man named Frederick Douglass. In my essay I am going to just overview the book, The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass An American Slave, which was written by him-self. In his book, Douglass tells about his early childhood in which he hadn’t known for sure the identity of his father and of how he and his mother had not had the loving mother and child relationship that we know. Douglass explains the different plantations that he had seen and talked about the ways of the different masters and mistresses that he had encountered. Also he talks about his disagreement of the Underground Railroad and his learning’s later in life, which made him rebel the way that he did against slavery and escape. Frederick Douglass has always been a very interesting man to me and now I am going to describe the life of a slave as told by him the best way I possible can.
Born in a town called Tuckahoe, with no knowledge of his age, Frederick Douglass h

As time went by and Douglass had learned to read and write he began to gain knowledge of day and time. Frederick Douglass had made many attempts to escape up until the third of September in 1838 when he was finally successful and ran off to New York. Douglass had wrote to his friends but he would never tell all of what he knew or how he had gotten out of slavery or shall I say his plan because he didn’t want to risk getting caught, and that is why he didn’t 100% agree with the underground railroad. Once the escape was successful Douglass said, “I felt like one who had escaped a den of hungry lions.”8 Douglass continued to use his motto of “Trust no man!” (p. 144) and felt the white man to be the enemy and a man of color to be a cause for distrust. When arriving to New York, Douglass naturally had no place to stay and was hungry and without friends, whom he had left all back in slavery, but he couldn’t approach anyone because of his motto. He would later meet Mr. David Ruggles who sheltered him and helped plan the next move for Douglass because it was “unsafe” as Ruggles had said. Douglass thought of going to Canada but Mr. Ruggles directed him toward New Bedford. Douglass immediately wrote to Anna Murray, whom was a free woman and the wife to be of Frederick Johnson (what he was known as at that time), to come meet him in New York, which she did. Ruggles then arranged a wedding ceremony, which was preformed by the Rev. J. W. C. Pennington and witnessed by himself and a Mrs. Michaels on September 15, 1838. Immediately following the ceremony, the newly weds left for New Bedford where Frederick would get the last name of Douglass because to many people had the last name of Johnson. His name, Douglass, had come from a reading called “Lady of the Lake.”

ass had like other slaves went by the seasons and tried to estimate his age and the years. At the time of this writing Frederick believes to be about 27 or 28 years of age. Douglass remembers his mothers name being, Harriet Bailey the daughter of Isaac and Betsey Bailey who both were black. All he knew of his father was that he was white and that it was rumored his father was his master. He had been taken from his mother as an infant but he does remember his mother leaving from her plantation, at least 12 miles away, very late at night to secretly be with him. His mother had died when he was a very young age and all that he could remember was that very short time, which wasn’t many, that he had spent with her. He recalls not being able to be present for the burial or the death of his m