3. He Escaped From Slavery & Had to Move to Britain to Avoid Slavecatchers

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Douglass was born into slavery in Talbot County, Maryland, to his mother, Harriet Bailey. He was born Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey and later changed his last name to Douglass. Douglass’ exact birth date is unknown as he wrote in his first autobiography, “I have no accurate knowledge of my age, never having seen any authentic record containing it.” He later decided to celebrate the day on February 14.

The son of an enslaved woman and an unknown white father, he spent his early years on a plantation, Gilder Lehman Institute’s

 Sandra Trenholm wrote in a biographical sketch for Google.

When he was eight, Douglass was sent to Baltimore to work for the family of Hugh and Sophia Auld, where he was first educated. “Sophia Auld had not owned slaves before and treated Douglass with great kindness, taught him the alphabet, and awakened his love of learning,” Trenholm wrote. Douglass said hearing her read the Bible aloud “awakened my curiosity in respect to this mystery of reading, and roused in me the desire to learn.”

But Hugh Auld stopped his wife from teaching Douglass, telling her “if you teach him how to read, he’ll want to know how to write, and this accomplished, he’ll be running away with himself,” Douglass wrote in his autobiography. Douglass said, “from that moment, I understood the direct pathway from slavery to freedom.”