Frederick Douglass and Slavery Abolitionist Frederick Douglass was the most distinguished and influential black leaders of the nineteenth century. Douglass focused his writings on the harshness and brutality of slavery. He describes in many of his books accounts of his own experiences as a slave. A reader is able to perceive a clear image of slavery through Douglass' words. His writings explain the effects of slavery and the struggle to overthrow it, as well as the condition of free blacks both before and after the Emancipation, the politics of the Civil War, and the failed promise of Reconstruction the followed. As a child, Douglass was