From Fells To Free

Celebrating Frederick Douglass’ 200th Birthday.

- Ron Cassie

FREDERICK AUGUSTUS WASHINGTON BAILEY did not know the year or date he was born. He said in the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass that he did not remember ever meeting a slave “who could tell of his birthday.”

Born on a Talbot County plantation, he was 7 or 8 years old when he was sent to live in Fells Point and work for Hugh Auld, brother to his master’s son-in-law. He later chose Valentine’s Day to celebrate his birthday, recalling his mother had referred to him as her “Little Valentine.” The year of his birth had been recorded as 1818, marking February 14 this month as his 200th birthday.

The future writer and abolitionist also selected (for his safety) his own surname as a young man, following his escape from slavery in Baltimore. At the suggestion of a black couple who had helped him and his wife make their way to Massachusetts, he choose Douglass after an exiled knight in Sir Walter Scott’s poem Lady of the Lake. Despite his newly won freedom, new surname, and new birthday, Douglass nevertheless refused to forget the vicious apartheid system he had been born into. He had not parted with his first name, he said, “to preserve a sense of my identity.”