IV. ANTISLAVERY LECTURES IN CONCORD
IV.A. Frederick Douglass:
Frederick Douglass (1818-1895), the most widely recognized American black abolitionist, was born a slave in Maryland, learned to read as a boy despite prohibitions against it, and escaped to freedom in 1838. Living in Massachusetts, he was inspired and encouraged by William Lloyd Garrison to throw his energies into abolition. He delivered eloquent addresses at antislavery gatherings, and, in 1847, established the influential abolitionist paper The North Star at Rochester, New York. His highly successful autobiographical book Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave appeared in 1845.
Although Douglass ultimately broke from Garrison and Wendell Phillips over their rejection of the United States Constitution as a document supporting abolition, he worked closely with them in the 1840s.
After the Civil War, Douglass continued to advocate for black suffrage, and also for women's rights. In 1872, he was nominated for the vice presidency of the United States as the running mate of Victoria Woodhull on the Equal Rights Party ticket.
Frederick Douglass first spoke in Concord on October 12, 1841, at a meeting of the Middlesex County Antislavery Society at the Universalist church on Monument Square. The meeting was reported in the October 15th issue of the Liberator. A letter by Douglass (titled "Conventions in Middlesex County") in the March 15, 1844 issue of that paper referred to a lecture he had recently delivered to "a good audience" in Concord. Douglass was also one of the speakers at the Concord Ladies' Antislavery Society's August 1, 1844 anniversary celebration of emancipation in the British West Indies.
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