The most photographed American man of the nineteenth century was not Lincoln or Whitman but Frederick Douglass, a man born into slavery around February 1818 in Talbot County, Maryland, who never knew his birthday and chose February 14 because his mother called him her little Valentine. This episode examines how Douglass engineered his own freedom, from the alphabet lessons Sophia Auld began in Baltimore before being forced to stop, to the brutal fight with the slave breaker Edward Covey that he later called the moment his mind rejected enslavement.

We follow his escape to New York in September 1838, his marriage to Anna Murray who helped fund it, his rise as an anti-slavery speaker who was dragged off a segregated train in 1841 and had his hand broken by a mob in 1843, and the 1845 autobiography that proved his story while exposing him to c ...