Frederick Douglass was born into slavery on Maryland’s Eastern Shore in 1818.  His arduous childhood makes Abraham Lincoln’s sound like a cozy episode of Little House on the Prairie.  He had only the vaguest memories of his mother from his earliest years.  She was a comforting presence beside him as he slept, but every morning, before he woke, she was gone.  For most of Douglass’s childhood, she lived and worked on a neighboring plantation about twelve miles away, and she died when he was seven.  He never knew his father, nor even his identity, although he was rumored to be the White slave master.  He lived in the rough cabin of his grandmother until he was six, when he was sent to another Maryland plantation, and then to serve a family in Baltimore.  He recalled that there, at last, he experienced some kindness from a White adult.  Sophia, his master’s wife, treated him  “as she supposed one human being ought to treat another.”  

Sophia began teaching Frederick the alphabet when he was about twelve years old.  He was an eager and avid learner.  After only a few months, though, Sophia’s husband put a stop to the lessons.  Douglass heard his white master angrily tell his wife that if slaves learned to read, they would want to be free.  It was from that moment, he later wrote, that he realized that literacy paved the way toward freedom.  He continued learning on his own, sometimes with the help of White children and their discarded schoolbooks.   Even the smallest scrap of reading material was a treasure to the young man.  

Douglass attempted to share the privilege of literacy with his peers.  Sunday evenings were typically a time of much-needed respite and fellowship for plantation slaves.  For about a year, while still a teenager, he led a “Sabbath School,” teaching reading to about forty or so fellow enslaved men and women.  They took great care to keep from their White overseers the true purpose of these weekly gatherings.  

Douglass’s  living conditions changed frequently as he was hired out to a series of owners, one who was relatively kind, but some quite cruel.  While working at a shipyard in Fell’s Point in Baltimore, he relished a degree of less stringent supervision.  There he met and fell in love with Anna Murray, a free Black woman five years his senior.  Anna must have been a remarkable, quietly bold young woman.  She encouraged Frederick’s growing determination to achieve freedom.  With her contacts, knowledge of the city, and her savings, the dream, it seemed, might well become reality.  Together, they worked out the details of a daring escape plan.  In September 1838, dressed as a sailor and carrying identity papers obtained from a free Black man, Douglass boarded a northbound train in Baltimore.  Via train and steamboat, he made his way first to Havre de Grace, Maryland, then to Wilmington, Delaware, on to Philadelphia, and finally,  about twenty-four hours later, to an abolitionist’s safe house in New York City.  He was twenty years old.  

Douglass later wrote that mere words were insufficient to express the joy he felt in obtaining freedom:

A new world had opened upon me. If life is more than breath, and the ‘quick round of blood,’ I lived more in one day than in a year of my slave life. . .In a letter written to a friend soon after reaching New York, I said: ‘I felt as one might feel upon escape from a den of hungry lions.’ 

Anna followed him shortly afterward, and they were married by a Black Presbyterian minister.  The couple settled first in New Bedford, Massachusetts, a hub of abolitionist activity. Frederick found work (paid work, for the first time, ever), on the shipyards.  He and Anna became active in a local church, and Frederick threw himself into anti-slavery efforts.  In only a few years, he would become a sought-after preacher, orator and best-selling author of three autobiographies.  Eventually he would be known the world over as a brilliant, prophetic voice and a force to be reckoned with in the abolitionist movement.  

Thank goodness for Anna Murray.  Perhaps, even without her assistance, her financial and emotional support, another avenue toward freedom may have opened for Douglass.  But then again, perhaps not.  

There are days when, with absolutely no justifiable reason, I find myself vaguely, and typically briefly, on the edge of despair.  I’m a victim of nothing but my own endlessly circling, malignant thoughts.  I try to break the cycle with reminders of the countless blessings for which I’m grateful.  Among these, I count the examples of Frederick Douglass and his resourceful, encouraging partner Anna Murray.  I think of the seemingly insurmountable odds they overcame.  I think of how much they achieved in their efforts to improve the lives of their fellow brothers and sisters.  I remind myself not to take for granted two gifts I was born into, and for which Douglass chose to fight so fiercely to win:  the right to literacy and freedom.  

Most of us learned in elementary school that the future sixteenth president of the United States was born in a one-room log cabin on the Kentucky frontier.  Stories of young Abe reading at night by firelight may lead us to romanticize his early years of hardscrabble poverty.  Beginning in childhood, Lincoln’s life was characterized by persistence and determination in the face of adversity.  When his mother died, she left her illiterate farmer/carpenter husband with two young children, Sarah,  eleven, and Abraham, nine.  He remarried quickly, to a widow he’d known since his youth.  The family’s living situation improved somewhat with her arrival.  She insisted on the addition of a plank floor to the small cabin, and she brought with her some furniture, more comfortable bedding, and crucially, several books.  Lincoln benefitted from almost no formal schooling, but his love of reading, encouraged by his step-mother, set him on an extremely effective path of self-education.  He would later study law on his own, pass the Illinois state bar in 1836, and work for years as a lawyer in Springfield.   He was well-acquainted with manual labor; his strength and talent for splitting rails is truth, not myth.  As a young man he worked a variety of jobs: flatboat operator, surveyor, storekeeper, militia leader, and postmaster.   He lost his first election, to the Illinois General Assembly, but  later served three terms in that body, as well as one term in the U.S. House of Representatives.  He was defeated in both attempts to become a U.S. Senator.  The series of seven famous debates with Democratic candidate Stephen Douglas during the 1858 campaign, however, brought him to national prominence as a powerful, principled orator and anti-slavery advocate.  

Largely because the country was bitterly divided over the question of slavery,  it was a very complex presidential election in 1860 that led to Lincoln’s unlikely win.  In addition to Lincoln, who represented the newly formed Republican Party, there were three other candidates.  Southern Democrats refused to back Lincoln’s former rival, Stephen Douglas, and so named their own candidate, John Breckinridge.  The fourth candidate, John Bell, represented the new Constitutional Union party.  Lincoln’s win was a narrow one.  He received not quite forty percent of the popular vote, and 180 Electoral College votes, all, not surprisingly, from Northern states.  The process of secession began almost immediately after the election.  

The new president consistently sought to unite rather than further divide. In his first inaugural address, on March 4, 1861, Lincoln reminded listeners of their shared heritage as patriots once allied in the war of independence.  He appealed to “the better angels of our nature,” and urged:  We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection.

Lincoln must have watched with deep sadness as those bonds of affection were repeatedly broken. That he led the U.S. during one of the  most difficult periods in our history was our gain, but his loss.

After the hard-won Union victory at Gettysburg, which resulted in over 7,000 total deaths, Lincoln again spoke about the need to honor the ideals set forth at our country’s founding.  His brief address at the dedication of the Union Cemetery at Gettysburg, on November 19, 1863, famously begins: 

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

He continues: It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced.

It’s the duty of the living to ensure:

that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

In his second inaugural address, on March 4, 1865, just six weeks before his assassination, Lincoln anticipated the end to the war and urged his fellow citizens toward reconciliation:  

With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation’s wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan–to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves, and with all nations.

In this time of current political polarization, may the words of our founding Declaration, with its emphasis on our shared humanity and God-given dignity, inspire us to truly seek what is right, and to act accordingly.  This may require us to look within ourselves to question our own motives, to consider the perspectives of others, and even to admit our own errors.  May we take to heart Lincoln’s plea, and work toward that ideal of “malice toward none,” and “charity for all.”  May we, while we yet live, strive to do our part, so “that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”