Life and Times of Frederick Douglass
Glossary
A
- Abraham Lincoln
- The wartime president whom Douglass met personally and whose Emancipation Proclamation and authorization of Black regiments Douglass treats as historic turning points — later the subject of Douglass's carefully balanced 1876 Freedmen's Monument oration, reprinted as this book's appendix.
- Related: The Freedmen's Monument Oration, Secession and War
B
- Baltimore
- The city where Douglass spent much of his enslaved youth in the Auld household, learned to read and the ship-caulking trade, and from which he ultimately made his 1838 escape to the North.
- Related: Hugh Auld, Escape from Slavery
C
- Col. Edward Lloyd
- The wealthy owner of the large plantation, described in Chapter 4, where young Douglass first observed slavery's workings from the perspective of the "great house" — the enslaver's opulent central residence.
- Related: The Great House, Overseer
- Colored Regiments
- The Black Union Army units, including Massachusetts's pioneering regiments, that Douglass actively recruited for once the Lincoln administration authorized Black enlistment — he frames their service as decisive proof of Black manhood and citizenship claims.
- Related: George L. Stearns, Governor John A. Andrew, Secession and War
E
- Edward Covey
- The "negro breaker" to whom the sixteen-year-old Douglass was hired out for a year of deliberately brutal treatment meant to crush his spirit. Douglass's physical fight back against Covey, recounted in Chapter 15, is the turning point he says restored his sense of manhood.
- Related: Slave-Breaking, Thomas Auld
F
- Frederick Douglass
- The author and narrator, born enslaved in Talbot County, Maryland, around 1818. He escaped to freedom in 1838, became the leading Black abolitionist orator and editor of his era, and by the time of this 1881 memoir had served in federal appointments and met four U.S. presidents.
- Related: Douglass's Three Autobiographies, Life as a Freeman
- Freedmen's Monument Oration
- Douglass's 1876 speech at the unveiling of the Freedmen's Monument to Lincoln in Washington, D.C., reprinted as the book's Chapter 41 appendix — it credits Lincoln's leadership while insisting that Black Americans were active agents in their own emancipation, not passive recipients of it.
- Related: Abraham Lincoln
- Fugitive Slave Law
- The 1850 federal law compelling the return of escaped enslaved people even from free states, which Douglass calls "atrocious and shameless" — it terrorized free Black communities in the North, since the sworn word of any two accusers could consign a free man to slavery.
- Related: Increasing Demands of the Slave Power
G
- George L. Stearns
- A Boston abolitionist and friend of John Brown who wrote to Douglass asking him to help recruit Black soldiers for the Union Army once Governor Andrew received authorization to raise colored regiments.
- Related: Governor John A. Andrew, Colored Regiments
- Gerrit Smith
- A wealthy abolitionist philanthropist and political ally of Douglass, mentioned alongside Garrison and Phillips as a leading figure of the antislavery movement, and later a host to Douglass in his account of confronting Northern racial prejudice.
- Related: William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Phillips
- Governor John A. Andrew
- The Massachusetts governor authorized by President Lincoln to raise the first regiments of Black soldiers, which Douglass helped recruit — a milestone Douglass treats as proof that Black men's usefulness to the Union cause was finally being recognized.
- Related: George L. Stearns, Colored Regiments
H
- Harriet Beecher Stowe
- Author of Uncle Tom's Cabin, discussed by Douglass in the same chapter as John Brown for her enormous influence on Northern antislavery sentiment through fiction rather than direct action.
- Related: John Brown
- Henry Highland Garnet
- A prominent Black abolitionist minister, one of the men whose reverent, hushed way of speaking about John Brown made Douglass eager to meet him.
- Related: John Brown, J. W. Loguen
- Hugh Auld
- Thomas Auld's brother in Baltimore, to whose household Douglass was sent as a boy. It was in this house that Hugh's wife Sophia began teaching Douglass his letters, before Hugh forbade it, and Douglass later worked as a hired-out ship caulker before his escape.
- Related: Sophia Auld, Learning to Read
I
- Impressions Abroad
- Douglass's 1845–47 tour of Britain and Ireland, undertaken partly for safety after the Narrative's publication made him a hunted fugitive, during which he experienced treatment free of American racial caste for the first time and secured British funds to purchase his legal freedom.
- Related: The Narrative (1845), Julia Griffiths Crofts
J
- J. W. Loguen
- A Black abolitionist and fellow formerly enslaved man, associated with Douglass and Garnet in Rochester-area antislavery circles and in introducing Douglass to John Brown.
- Related: John Brown, Henry Highland Garnet
- John Brown
- The militant abolitionist Douglass met in Springfield through Henry Highland Garnet and J. W. Loguen's introductions and came to deeply respect, though Douglass declined to join Brown's 1859 raid on Harpers Ferry, believing it doomed to fail.
- Related: Henry Highland Garnet, J. W. Loguen
- Julia Griffiths Crofts
- An English supporter whose energetic management of Douglass's paper's finances, he writes, rescued it from debt at a critical moment — one of several British abolitionist allies who materially sustained Douglass's work.
- Related: The North Star, Impressions Abroad
L
- Learning to Read
- The pivotal episode, chronicled in Chapters 10 and 11, in which Douglass — first taught letters by Sophia Auld, then self-taught through tricks and stolen lessons after Hugh Auld forbade it — comes to understand literacy as the essential, forbidden key to freedom.
- Related: Sophia Auld, Hugh Auld
- Lucretia Auld
- Col. Lloyd's daughter and Thomas Auld's wife, described by young Douglass as kindly disposed toward him — she arranged for his move from the plantation to the Auld household in Baltimore.
- Related: Thomas Auld, Col. Edward Lloyd
- Lucretia Mott
- A Quaker abolitionist and early women's rights leader whom Douglass credits, alongside Lydia Maria Child, with reaching audiences that male Garrisonian orators could not — part of Douglass's account of the overlapping abolitionist and women's suffrage movements.
- Related: Lydia Maria Child, Women's Suffrage
- Lydia Maria Child
- An abolitionist writer whose "Appeal for that Class of Americans Called Africans," published early in the antislavery conflict, Douglass names as one of the most effective agencies in awakening Northern attention to slavery's cruelty.
- Related: Lucretia Mott
N
- Nantucket Convention (1841)
- The anti-slavery convention where William C. Coffin, having overheard Douglass speak informally to a Black congregation, invited him to address the assembly — the impromptu speech that launched Douglass's public career as an abolitionist orator.
- Related: William Lloyd Garrison, Introduced to the Abolitionists
O
- Overseer
- The hired enforcer of plantation discipline, positioned between the enslaver and the enslaved workforce — Douglass's Chapter 8 survey of overseers' characteristic cruelty establishes the everyday machinery of control beneath the "great house."
- Related: Col. Edward Lloyd, The Great House
R
- Recorder of Deeds
- The Washington, D.C. federal office to which Douglass was appointed in 1881 — one of several postwar political appointments (also including U.S. Marshal for the District of Columbia) that Douglass presents as evidence of Black political advancement during and after Reconstruction.
- Related: Weighed in the Balance, Retrospection
- Rochester, New York
- The city where Douglass settled, published The North Star, and built the base for his decades of abolitionist and, later, women's suffrage activism — he calls the area around it home more than anywhere else in the Union.
- Related: The North Star
S
- Slave Pass System
- The written permission slips enslaved people were required to carry to travel beyond their plantation; Douglass describes forging such passes for himself and companions during the failed 1836 runaway plot recounted in Chapter 19.
- Related: The Runaway Plot, Escape from Slavery
- Slave-Breaking
- The systematic practice, embodied by Edward Covey, of working and beating an enslaved person into psychological submission — Douglass's year under Covey and his eventual physical resistance form the memoir's most famous single episode.
- Related: Edward Covey
- Sophia Auld
- Hugh Auld's wife, who initially treated the young Douglass with unaccustomed kindness and began teaching him the alphabet, until her husband stopped the lessons — an episode Douglass credits with revealing to him that literacy was slavery's forbidden "pathway from slavery to freedom."
- Related: Hugh Auld, Learning to Read
T
- The Great House
- The grand central residence of the Lloyd plantation, described in Chapter 4 as the most magnificent building young Douglass had ever seen — the physical symbol of the plantation hierarchy he was born into.
- Related: Col. Edward Lloyd, Overseer
- The Liberator / Anti-Slavery Standard
- The abolitionist newspapers — Garrison's Liberator and the American Anti-Slavery Society's Anti-Slavery Standard — that Douglass traveled the eastern United States promoting as a young lecturer and subscription agent before founding his own paper.
- Related: William Lloyd Garrison, The North Star
- The Narrative (1845)
- Douglass's first autobiography, whose publication proved his account of slavery true but also endangered him by revealing his identity and former enslaver's name — a risk his allies feared even as they welcomed the book's persuasive power.
- Related: Impressions Abroad, Douglass's Three Autobiographies
- The North Star
- The antislavery newspaper Douglass founded and edited in Rochester, New York, financially sustained for years with the help of English supporters like Julia Griffiths Crofts — its bound volumes, covering 1848 to 1860, were destroyed when Douglass's Rochester house burned in 1872.
- Related: Rochester, Julia Griffiths Crofts
- Thomas Auld
- Douglass's owner by inheritance, husband of Lucretia Auld and brother of Hugh Auld, who sent Douglass to Covey to be "broken" and later, after Douglass's escape and fame, met him again in old age — an encounter Douglass narrates late in the book.
- Related: Edward Covey, Lucretia Auld, Hugh Auld
U
- Underground Railroad
- The informal network that helped enslaved people escape to free states and Canada — referenced by Douglass in his later reflections on the era's antislavery activism, distinct from his own escape, which he made largely without such organized assistance.
- Related: Escape from Slavery
W
- Wendell Phillips
- A leading white Garrisonian abolitionist orator, named repeatedly alongside Garrison and Smith as among the movement's most reachable-yet-limited voices, whom Douglass compares against reformers like Lucretia Mott who reached different audiences.
- Related: William Lloyd Garrison, Lucretia Mott
- William Lloyd Garrison
- The prominent white abolitionist and editor of The Liberator whose Nantucket convention in 1841 gave Douglass his first public platform as an antislavery speaker, launching his career as a lecturer and, eventually, a rival abolitionist strategist.
- Related: The Liberator, Nantucket Convention, Wendell Phillips
- Women's Suffrage Advocacy
- Douglass's lifelong parallel commitment to women's voting rights, which he discusses in the book's later chapters alongside his account of the abolitionist movement's female leaders — he was present at the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention and remained an advocate to the end of his life.
- Related: Lucretia Mott, Lydia Maria Child