The Life of Frederick Douglass Quiz

Answer: Maryland

Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey was born into slavery in Talbot County, Maryland to Harriet Bailey. Using records of his first owner, Aaron Anthony, historians have estimated he was born in February of 1818. He was separated from his mother in infancy and lived with his grandparents, a slave woman and a free black man.

A few years later, he was separated from his grandparents and taken to the Wye House plantation.

Answer: False

In his childhood, Douglass was sent by his then owner Thomas Auld to serve Hugh Auld in Baltimore, where Auld's wife Sophia began teaching him the alphabet. However, her husband disapproved of the instruction, and so Sophia stopped teaching Douglass and hid all reading materials from him. Consequently, he was forced to teach himself to read in secrecy.

He learned from white children in the neighborhood, through observation, and eventually by reading newspapers and pamphlets. When he was later hired out to another plantation, he taught many of the slaves there to read.

Answer: True

Douglass met Anna Murray, who was five years his senior, in 1837 in Baltimore when he was about 19. She helped him to escape North about a year later by giving him some of her savings to cover travel costs. Once secure, Douglass sent for her. They were married less than two weeks after his escape and remained married for 44 years.

Answer: Traveled by foot for fifty-one miles

Douglass escaped on September 3, 1838, in less than 24 hours. First, he took a northbound train from Baltimore, and then switched trains to travel by rail through Delaware. He carried papers from a free black sailor and disguised himself in a uniform Anna Murray had given him. Next, he traveled by steamboat on the Delaware River to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Finally, he went to a safe house in New York City owned by an abolitionist named David Ruggles.

Answer: Sir Walter Scott

He had previously gone by his mother's name of Bailey and then Stanley and then Johnson. The name Douglass was suggested to him by a man he stayed with, Nathan Johnson. Douglass was the surname of two of the characters in the poem.

Answer: Founder

Formed in 1821 in New York City, the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church was church home to Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth as well. Douglass was licensed as a preacher in 1839, and in that capacity he honed his oratorical skills. He also served as a sexton, steward, and Sunday School superintendent for the church.

Answer: William Lloyd Garrison

Douglass heard the abolitionist speak at a meeting of the Bristol Anti-Slavery Society. He was already a regular subscriber to Garrison's weekly abolitionist newspaper. Garrison, unlike many abolitionists of his time, promoted immediate rather than gradual abolition of slavery. He also supported women's suffrage.

Answer: An American Slave

"Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave" was published on May 1, 1845. William Lloyd Garrison wrote a preface for the memoir, which also contains a letter from the abolitionist Wendell Phillips. To this day, it remains one of the most prominent memoirs of American slavery and is often assigned reading in American schools.

Answer: true

After publishing his autobiography, Douglass feared being recaptured and returned to his former owner, Hugh Auld. So he sailed abroad and lived in England and Ireland for two years. There, he gave lectures and gained supporters who gathered money and negotiated with his legal owner to purchase his manumission.

The negotiations were complicated; Thomas Auld had given Douglass to his brother Hugh Auld, so the negotiators had Thomas sell his portion in Douglass to Hugh, and then Hugh finalized the paperwork to render Douglass legally free in December of 1846.

The cost? 150₤ Sterling.

Answer: Color

While in Ireland and Britain, Douglass collected £500, which he used to begin publication of his first abolitionist newspaper, "The North Star," on December 3, 1847. It later merged with the "Liberty Party Paper" published by Gerrit Smith.

Answer: false

Douglas, and his newspaper, vehemently opposed the idea of recolonization. The predominantly white society, also known as the American Colonization Society (ACS), sought to send blacks back to Africa through a program of voluntary return to a colony that is now Liberia.

However, most ex-slaves and their descendants had by then lived in in the United States for generations and had no desire to "return" to a continent they had never seen.

Answer: False

Douglass was the only African-American to attend the Seneca Falls Conference on women's rights, which was held July 19-20, 1848 in upstate New York. Many of the other attendees opposed extending the right to vote to women, but Douglass's oratory on behalf of the cause helped to persuade the assembly to pass Elizabeth Cady Stanton's resolution on women's suffrage.

However, when it later came to passage of the 15th amendment, Stanton and Douglass disagreed. Douglass supported the amendment, while Stanton opposed it because she believed its passage would delay women's suffrage for decades, but if they continued to push and work together, they could get universal suffrage sooner. Douglas, however, thought such an approach would only delay black male suffrage.

The 15th was ratified on February 3, 1870. The 19th amendment, giving women the right to vote, was not ratified until 1920.

Answer: The Fourth of July

Delivered on July 5, 1852, the address is commonly considered to be one of the greatest anti-slavery speeches in history. In the address, Douglass asked: ""What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer; a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim."

Answer: True

One hundred and sixty distinct portraits of Frederick Douglass exist today. That's 34 more than exist of Abraham Lincoln. Douglass was a fan of photography because he believed it could help to overcome whites' prejudices about blacks by showing them dignified portraits of real-life black people instead of stereotypical, racist, or menacing caricatures.

Answer: Vice President of the United States

Douglass was nominated to serve as Victoria Woodhull's running mate for the Equal Rights Party in 1872. However, Douglass never sought or acknowledged his vice presidential nomination. He had supported the campaign of Ulysses S. Grant in 1868, and Grant won a second term in 1872.

Answer: Marrying a white woman

A little over a year after his first wife Anna died, Frederick Douglass married a white suffragist and former abolitionist, Helen Pitts, who was twenty years his junior. Although Helen's parents were abolitionists, they were not in favor of the marriage. Reverend Francis J. Grimké, a mixed-race Presbyterian minister, performed the ceremony, and the couple remained married for eleven years.

Answer: One was the founder of the Black Panther Party

All of his children were from his first marriage. Annie Douglass died at the age of ten. Rosetta Douglass was a founding member of the National Association for Colored Women. Charles Remond Douglass was the first African-American to enlist in the Union Army in New York during the Civil War. Lewis Henry Douglass fought for the 54th Massachusetts Infantry Regiment in the Civil War and attained the highest rank an African-American man could reach at the time, that of Sergeant Major. Frederick Douglass, Jr. was an official recruiter of black soldiers for the Union Army, though he was not himself a combat soldier.

The Black Panther Party was founded in 1966 by Bobby Seale and Huey Newton.

Answer: Benjamin Harrison

Benjamin Harrison was the 23rd president of the United States and served from 1889 to 1893. Douglass resigned the position in the summer of 1891. Douglass was a frequent adviser to U.S. Republican presidents. He conferred with Abraham Lincoln on the treatment of African-American soldiers. He also discussed black suffrage with Andrew Johnson.

Answer: Indispensable

This line comes from "Self-Made Men," a lecture Douglass delivered for the first time in 1859. He emphasized the importance of hard work and went on to say, "Give the negro fair play and let him alone. If he lives, well. If he dies, equally well. If he cannot stand up, let him fall down."

Answer: His former owner, Thomas Auld

Douglass wrote of the 1877 encounter in the final edition of his autobiography, "The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass" (1881):

"He had struck down my personality, had subjected me to his will, made property of my body and soul, reduced me to a chattel [. . .] I, on my part, had traveled through the length and breadth of this country and of England, holding up this conduct of his, in common with that of other slaveholders, to the reprobation of all men who would listen to my words [. . . ] yet here we were, after four decades, once more face to face--he on his bed, aged and tremulous, drawing near the sunset of life, and I, his former slave, United States Marshal of the district of Columbia, holding his hand and in friendly conversation with him in a sort of final settlement of past differences preparatory to his stepping into his grave, where all distinctions are at an end, and where the great and the small, the slave and his master, are reduced to the same level."