Prologue
I keep my eye on the bright north star and think of liberty.
—From an old slave song
They told him that he was a slave, that he must bend his back, walk low, with eyes cast down, think not at all and sleep without a dream. But every beat of hoe against a twisted root, each narrow furrow reaching toward the hill, flight of a bird across the open field, creak of the ox-cart in the road—all spoke to him of freedom.
For Frederick Douglass had his eyes upon a star.
This dark American never knew the exact date of his birth. Some time in 1817 or 1818 or 1819 he was born in Talbot County on the Eastern Shore of the state of Maryland. Who were his people? “Genealogical trees,” he wrote in his autobiography, “did not flourish among slaves. A person of some consequence in civilized society, sometimes designated as father, was literally unknown to slave law and to slave practices.”
His first years were spent in a kind of breeding pen, where, with dogs and pigs and other young of the plantation, black children were raised for the fields and turpentine forests. The only bright memories of his childhood clung round his grandmother’s log hut. He remembered touching his mother once. After he was four or five years old he never saw or heard of her again.
This is the story of how from out that breeding pen there came a Man. It begins in August of the year of our Lord, 1834. Andrew Jackson was in the White House. Horace Greeley was getting a newspaper going in New York. William Lloyd Garrison had been dragged through the streets of Boston, a rope around his neck. Slavery had just been abolished wherever the Union Jack flew. Daniel O’Connell was lifting his voice, calling the people of Ireland together. Goethe’s song of the brotherhood of man was echoing in the hills. Tolstoy was six years old, and Abraham Lincoln was growing up in Illinois.