Frederick Douglass

Frederick Douglass died at Cedar Hill, his house above the Anacostia in Washington, D.C., on February 20, 1895. He was about seventy-seven. He had been born into slavery on Maryland's Eastern Shore, taken February 14 as a birthday, and guessed the year as 1818. In 1838 he walked out of bondage with another man's papers and a sailor's knowledge of the roads. What he did with freedom was to make the country hear it. The Narrative, the Rochester newspapers, and the lecture halls of the North and Britain left slavery no polite distance. He told Lincoln to arm Black soldiers and to mean emancipation. After the war he was marshal of the District, recorder of deeds, minister to Haiti — offices that never satisfied him while the ballot and the schoolhouse were still bargained away. He was a husband and a father who kept a study looking over a city that had once been a slave market. Cedar Hill still stands. The voice does too.