An American Valentine

If you did not know your own birthday, when would you celebrate it?

No one knows the date Frederick Douglass was born. In Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, his first autobiography, Douglass writes: “I have no accurate knowledge of my age, never having seen any authentic record containing it...A want of information concerning my own [birthday] was a source of unhappiness to me even during childhood.”

Free children knew their birthdays, and this gave them a sense of individuality that, according to Douglass, was sorely lacking in enslaved children. What’s worse is that Douglass did not even know who his father was (though he suspected it was one of his white slave masters) and spent most of his childhood separated from his mother. She lived on a different plantation twelve miles away, and she could only make the journey by night to visit her son a handful of times.

Nevertheless, his relationship with his mother had a lasting impact on him. In My Bondage and My Freedom, his second autobiography, Douglass tells the story of how he learned he was “somebody’s child” when his mother stood up for him against a cruel slave woman responsible for caring for the children in the plantation house. After the incident, Douglass recounts that his mother gave him a cake: “The ‘sweet cake’ my mother gave me was in the shape of a heart, with a rich, dark ring glazed upon the edge of it. I was victorious, and well off for the moment; prouder, on my mother’s knee, than a king upon his throne.” However, this victorious feeling would be fleeting, and he would never see her again.

And so, to honor his bond with his mother, Douglass chose to celebrate his birthday on February 14—Valentine’s Day.

The Personal Consequences of American Slavery

This episode in Douglass’s life is only one example of the deeply personal consequences American slavery had upon the enslaved. In our free online course on “Civil Rights in American History,” Dr. Kevin Portteus describes the nature of slavery, citing the words of Douglass, and others, to piece together how the institution was inhumane, unjust, and a significant departure from the principles of the American Founding. The conditions Douglass experienced as a slave were meant to make him unfit for the life of a free human being. As Dr. Portteus says, slavery is “in many ways a war against nature. Frederick Douglass describes the various ways in which the institution of slavery corrupts everything it touches.”

A mother could not be with her son, and a son did not know his father. And this was by design. Douglass never had a chance at a normal family life.

Despite growing up enslaved, Douglass would go on to be a prominent defender of Founding principles. He believed that a fuller adherence to those principles was the key to incorporating black people into society. As Dr. Portteus explains, “he believed that the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence provided the proper framework for the establishment of liberty and justice for the slaves of this country.”

Douglass knew the depths of injustice better than most. While his personal story is worthy of study in its own right, his political arguments become even more significant in light of the circumstances into which he was born.