Frederick Douglass was an American social reformer, abolitionist, orator, writer, and statesman. After escaping from slavery in Maryland, he became a national leader of the abolitionist movement in Massachusetts and New York, becoming famous for his oratory and incisive antislavery writings. He was seen as a living counterexample to enslavers' arguments that enslaved people lacked the intellectual capacity to function as independent American citizens. He wrote his first autobiography in response