Walk Slowly and Bow Often: Frederick Douglass & biking the Mr. Vernon Trail

Frederick Douglass was a slave. Then he became an American social reformer, orator, writer and statesman, an advisor to Presidents. After escaping from slavery, he became a leader of the abolitionist movement, gaining note for his dazzling oratory and incisive antislavery writing.

I drove to his house on a high spot overlooking the Capitol and took a tour with the National Park Service.

Waiting for the Ranger.

As a child he was exposed to the degradations of slavery, witnessing firsthand brutal whippings and spending much time cold and hungry. When he was eight he was sent to Baltimore to live with a ship carpenter named Hugh Auld. There he learned to read and first heard the words abolition and abolitionists. "Going to live at Baltimore," Douglass would later say, "laid the foundation, and opened the gateway, to all my subsequent prosperity."

The enthusiastic Ranger tells the story of this extraordinary man.

In 1845, despite apprehensions that the information might endanger his freedom following his escape from slavery, Douglass published his autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written By Himself.

On July 5, 1852, Douglass gave a speech at an event commemorating the signing of the Declaration of Independence, held at Rochester's Corinthian Hall. It was biting oratory, in which the speaker told his audience, "This Fourth of July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn." And he asked them, "Do you mean, citizens, to mock me, by asking me to speak to-day?"

In 1877, Douglass bought the family's final home in Washington D.C., the one I toured, on a hill above the Anacostia River. He and Anna named it Cedar Hill. They expanded the house from 14 to 21 rooms, and included a china closet. One year later, Douglass purchased adjoining lots and expanded the property to 15 acres. The home has been designated the Frederick Douglass National Historic Site. Anna Murray-Douglass died in 1882, leaving him with a sense of great loss and depression for a time.

View of the Washington monument from his home.

View of the Douglass home from the bottom of the property.

I headed down to the Potomac to find the bike trail near Roosevelt Island. Theodore Roosevelt Island is a 88.5-acre island and a national memorial located in the Potomac River in Washington, D.C., but I learned no bicycling was allowed there.