My Bondage and My Freedom is an autobiographical slave narrative written by Frederick Douglass and published in 1855. It discusses in detail his struggle under slavery and subsequent transition from bondage to liberty. Frederick Douglass (born Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey, c. February 1818 - February 20, 1895) was an American social reformer, orator, writer and statesman. After escaping from slavery, he became a leader of the abolitionist movement, gaining note for his dazzling oratory and incisive antislavery writing. He stood as a living counter-example to slaveholders' arguments that slaves did not have the intellectual capacity to function as independent American citizens.Many Northerners also found it hard to believe that such a great orator had been a slave.