When asked for career advice once, Douglass replied with three words: "Agitate, agitate, agitate."  Born into slavery in Maryland, he lost both his parents before age six, but was fascinated by the written word and taught himself to read. "Knowledge is the pathway from slavery to freedom," he often said. His encounter with the book, The Columbian Orator (published in 1797), put him on a path to rhetorical agitation for the abolition of slavery.  He was sold to a "slave-breaker" master in 1833 and endured so many floggings that his back told the story throughout the remainder of his life.  Sustained by his faith and by his ingenuity, he escaped slavery in 1838, settled in New Bedford, Massachusetts, and began speaking, preaching, and writing on the injustice of slavery.  Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and abolitionist newspaper publisher William Lloyd Garrison were among his friends.  His Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845) brought him international renown, and his eloquence drew crowds both in America and abroad. (One such audience was the students, faculty, and surrounding community of Hillsdale College in the winter of 1863, to which he gave a speech titled, “Popular Error and Unpopular Truth”. There now stands a statue of him at the College in his honor.)

During the Civil War, Lincoln sought his counsel, and in 1863, when black soldiers were finally admitted to Union ranks, Douglass campaigned for their recruitment in his famous broadside "Men of Color to Arms!"  His own son fought in the Massachusetts 54th Division.  Douglass's long and bitter struggle against racism did not lead him to love of country, but he was in love with truth and justice.  And he often moved mountains with his honest analysis and righteous anger.  In the words of a woman who admired him, he was "majestic in his wrath."