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Hello Frederick Douglass was born into slavery in Maryland in 1818.

And once it escaped became one of that century's most prominent abolitionists.

He was such a good orator, his opponents doubted his story.

But he had told it in grim detail in 1845 in his book, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass and American Slave.

He went on to address huge audiences in Great Britain and Ireland.

And there some of his supporters paid off his owner.

So Douglass could be free in law and not fear recapture when he returned to America.

After the Civil War and the abolition of slavery, he campaigned for equal rights for African Americans arguing against those such as Lincoln,

who would want it freed slave to leave America and found the colony elsewhere.

We were born here, he said, and here we will remain.

With me to discuss Frederick Douglass, our Celeste Marie-Bernier, Professor of Black Studies at the University of Edinburgh,

Karen Salt, Assistant Professor in Transnational American Studies at the University of Nottingham,

and Nicholas Gaert, reader in North American history at the University of Cambridge.

Celeste Marie-Bernier, what were Frederick Douglass's strongest memories of his early childhood?

As a man born into slavery in Maryland in 1818, he was born as Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey.

And for Douglass, the defining moment of his life was understanding that he didn't know the exact date of his birth,

and he barely knew his mother.

...