![]() It was a very large, very active, energetic free black community. It only had about 3,000 slaves, but it had about 17,000 free blacks. 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. Blight carefully avoids grinding axes as he makes his argument, which taken as a whole helps to explain why America today continues to wrestle with the seemingly endless and divisive issue of race…Here is a powerful book, artfully written by a scholar of learned poise who believes that by knowing the past we might better know ourselves.Įrfordert eine Authentifizierung Nicht lizenziertħ.This is FRESH AIR. After Reconstruction, Northerners and Southerners alike took hold of a ‘Lost Cause’ ideology that showed pity toward the South in its defeat, accepted Jim Crow policies that deprived blacks of their civil rights, and pushed for policies and practices that would ensure white supremacy across the land. ![]() Reunification became a joyful event, but it came at a steep price. ![]() Less consciously, they and their fellow Americans found this new narrative-this rewriting of history based on a kind of historical amnesia-comforting and restorative. Deeply researched and carefully crafted study argues that after the war white veterans, Union and Confederate, facilitated the reconciliation of the two sections by consciously avoiding the fact that slavery had brought on the sectional conflict, choosing instead to celebrate the courage that they and their comrades had brandished in battle.
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