The enterprising Douglass found himself many jobs, including working as a day laborer in a brass foundry, as well as unloading ships. In 1841, Douglass attended an anti-slavery meeting in Nantucket and befriended two well-known abolitionists, John A. Collins and William Lloyd Garrison. Meeting these men proved to be yet another turning point in his life. Collins invited him to be a salaried lecturer, and Douglass agreed to the arrangement for three months. He was such a popular speaker that three months of lectures and tours became four years. In 1845, he decided to put the speeches he gave about his life as a slave into writing. These speeches became the basis for his Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave.
The work became an instant bestseller in America as well as in Europe, where it was translated into French and German. Despite its critical and popular acclaim, however, it was met with skepticism by pro-slavery Americans, who simply could not believe that such a brilliant account could be produced by a slave with no formal education. Some thought that the text was a clever counterfeit document produced by abolitionists and passed off as Douglass' writing. In fact, Douglass was so frequently confronted by such skeptics in the North that he had to finally demonstrate his oratory skills in order to prove his intellectual capacity.
Because of the fame created by his Narrative, Douglass risked capture by slave hunters in the North, so he sailed for England. For two years, he lectured on the evils of slavery. He found the British sympathetic to the abolitionists' cause but ignorant of the horrific conditions of slavery in America. Through some British friends, Douglass discovered that Thomas Auld was willing to sell Douglass' freedom for $711.16, and two of his English friends paid the price and bought his freedom. In 1847, Douglass returned to America as a free man.
