On January 14, 1862, Frederick Douglass, a prolific writer, abolitionist, and free African American, delivered an address in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, expressing his unwavering support for the Union against the Confederacy in the ongoing Civil War. Douglass, who had been enslaved for the first sixteen years of his life before fleeing his Baltimore home and securing his freedom in 1838, used the speech for two principal purposes: to defend the Union war effort on moral, legal, and practical grounds and to call for President Abraham Lincoln to end the South’s “peculiar institution” of slavery.