That act of resistance, and the victory achieved, “revived within me a sense of my manhood and inspired me with a determination to be free.” It took four years before Douglas would legally be free, but beating Covey had made him, in essence, a free man. I was broken in body, soul and spirit.” But as Covey was attempting to abuse him yet again, Douglass recounted, he snapped, engaging in a knock-down, drag-out fight that lasted nearly two hours-and resulted in Covey never laying a finger on him again. When he was a 16-year-old toiling on a Maryland tobacco field, Douglass wrote, a particularly vicious overseer named Edward Covey had “succeeded in breaking me.

In his autobiographies, he is preoccupied with this theme, writing about his youth of “hardship, whipping and nakedness.” Douglass Stood Up to His Oppressor It Became a Turning Pointĭouglass’ recruitment strategy was an outgrowth of his own experiences as a formerly enslaved person who had endured daily assaults on his manhood. In his “Men of Color to Arms! Now or Never!” broadside, Douglass called on formerly enslaved men to “rise up in the dignity of our manhood, and show by our own right arms that we are worthy to be freemen.”ĭouglass, who had risen to international fame after the 1845 publication of his first autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, saw the Civil War as the “golden moment” for African American men to join all races of men to “assert their claim to freedom and manly character.” By defending their country, Douglass believed, his brethren could “claim America as his country-and have that claim respected.” As uniformed soldiers, Black men could shed the image of the powerless enslaved person and assert the rights of male citizenship that came with patriotic service. During the Civil War, Frederick Douglass used his stature as the most prominent African American social reformer, orator, writer and abolitionist to recruit men of his race to volunteer for the Union army.

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