Born into slavery on Maryland's Eastern Shore around 1818, Douglass taught himself to read against the law, escaped north at twenty, and spent the next half-century as the most visible Black intellectual and political leader in the United States — orator on three continents, newspaper editor (The North Star, later Frederick Douglass' Paper), recruiter of Black soldiers for the Union Army, minister to Haiti, and the indispensable Black voice in the long American argument over slavery, Reconstruction, and the meaning of the founding documents. He wrote three autobiographies — each longer and more complicated than the last as his public persona grew — and delivered the address that, more than any other 19th-century American text, sets out what the republic's creedal language sounds like to the people it excluded ("What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?", 1852).
His intellectual project had several unresolved tensions worth reading him for. He was both a fierce critic of the Constitution (in the 1840s, following Garrison, he called it a proslavery compact) and, by the 1850s, its most powerful Black defender, arguing that properly read it was an antislavery document whose principles the nation had failed to live up to. He was committed to nonviolent persuasion and — after John Brown — to the legitimacy of violent resistance where nothing else would move slaveholder power. He married a white woman after his first wife's death and lost friends over it. He believed in a politically robust federal guarantee of Black citizenship rights — one of the tragedies of his late life was watching Reconstruction's promises be broken while he argued against that breaking in speeches few wanted to hear.
Douglass is the beginning of a Black American intellectual tradition that runs through Du Bois, Thurman, Baldwin, King, Morrison, West, and Coates — each of whom has had to work out a relationship to the national creed and its long betrayal in terms Douglass first articulated.