Frederick Douglass National Historic Site

Frederick Douglass, born a slave in Maryland about February 1817, became the most famous of all black abolitionists and one of the greatest American orators of his day. He learned ship caulking in Baltimore. Already schooled in the alphabet by his master's wife, he taught himself to write by tracing the letters on the prows of ships. In 1838, with seaman's papers supplied by a free black, he escaped to New Bedford, Mass. Five months later he came into contact with William Lloyd Garrison's antislavery weekly, the 'Liberator', and in 1841 he was enlisted as an agent by the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society.