A Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass: An American Slave

A Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass is the memoir of one of the first nationally-known and respected African-American activists, writers, and thinkers, Frederick Douglass. Douglass was born into slavery and bought his freedom as an adult. He had learned to read and write, and appeared to be so cultured and educated that many people were skeptical that he had ever been a slave. He wrote his memoir in part to disabuse these doubters. Large portions of the memoir were intended to aid the abolitionist movement. Douglass gave first-hand evidence of the evils of slavery, and devastated the then-popular notion that slaves were better off in the hands of their owners than they would be as free men and women. This book played an important role in the gradual rise of the anti-slavery movement, culminating in the Civil War and Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation. Douglass met with Lincoln in the White House during the War, and his voice was an important one for decades in the mid-Nineteenth Century.