This volume of The Frederick Douglass Papers represents the first of a four-volume series of the selected correspondence of the great American abolitionist and reformer. Douglasss correspondence was richly varied, from relatively obscure slaveholders and fugitive slaves to poets and politicians, including Horace Greeley, William H. Seward, Susan B. Anthony, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.
The letters acquaint us with Douglasss many rolespolitician, abolitionist, diplomat, runaway slave, womens rights advocate, and family manand include many previously unpublished letters between Douglass and members of his family. Douglass stood at the epicenter of the political, social, intellectual, and cultural issues of antebellum America. This collection of Douglasss early correspondence illuminates not only his growth as an activist and writer, but the larger world of the times and the abolition movement as well.
