New Bedford Douglass
Days later, Anna, an enslaved woman he was engaged to, joined him, and they were married in New York City on September 15. "They soon left for New Bedford, Massachusetts, where the likelihood of his being captured on a fugitive slave was reduced by assuming the name 'Douglass'" (The Norton Anthology of American Literature, Shorter Ninth Edition: Beginnings to 1865, 998).
Team Garrison
Abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison "was in the audience when Douglass delivered his first antislavery speech, and shortely thereafter he hried Douglass as a speaker in his Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society. During 1841-1843, Douglass delivered his antislavery message on behalf Garrison's organization in a number of northern states, and on one occasion in 1843, in Pendleton, Indiana, he was attacked by an anti-abolitionist mob and suffered a borken hand"(The Norton Anthology of American Literature, Shorter Ninth Edition: Beginnings to 1865, 998).
Best-seller
Douglass published his Narrative in May 1845 and it became "a bona fide best-seller" (The Norton Anthology of American Literature, Shorter Ninth Edition: Beginnings to 1865, 998).
Power and Violence
Garrison advocated "moral persuasion over violence," but in time, Garrison and Douglass became estranged, and in 1851, Douglass "defended the strategic use of violence as a response to the violence of slavery" (The Norton Anthology of American Literature, Shorter Ninth Edition: Beginnings to 1865, 999).
“If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. This struggle may be a moral one; or it may be a physical one; or it may be both moral and physical; but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.” (from Douglass's "West India Emancipation" speech, delivered on August 3, 1857, at Canandaigua, New York).
Douglass vs. Covey II
While in his "1845 Narrative, [Douglass] presented himself as relatively isolated from his fellow slaves, describing his fight with Covey as a heroic instance of individual rebellion; in the 1855 My Bondage and My Freedom, he depicted the fight as involving several other African Americans who came to his assistance" (The Norton Anthology of American Literature, Shorter Ninth Edition: Beginnings to 1865, 999).
Militancy
By the late 1850s, Douglass "became more militant in his writing. Though he refused to participate in John Brown's 1859 raid on the federal arsenal at Harper's Ferry, which he regarded as a suicidal action, he was obliged to flee to Canada and thence to England because of his known association with Brown" (The Norton Anthology of American Literature, Shorter Ninth Edition: Beginnings to 1865, 999).
Recruiter
During the Civil War, Douglass "became a successful recruiter of Black soldiers, whose ranks included his own sons . . . Douglass subsequently protested directly to President Lincoln over Blacks' unequal pay and treatment in the Union army" (The Norton Anthology of American Literature, Shorter Ninth Edition: Beginnings to 1865, 1000).
Women's Rights
Although "[a]t times his writing seems to celebrate black manhood, ... Douglass had a longstanding interest in women's rights. Though he broke temporarily with women's rights supporters in 1868-69, when he championed the Fifteenth Amendment (which failed to offer suffrage to women), he had attended the first Women's Right's Convnetion in Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848, and he continued to attend women's rights conventions and to editorialize and lecture in favor of women's rights. His final speech, delivered just hours before he died of a heart attack on February 20, 1895, was at a women's rights rally" (The Norton Anthology of American Literature, Shorter Ninth Edition: Beginnings to 1865, 999).
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