Rochester, New York, was home to a diverse community of abolitionists beginning in the 1830s. Douglass met these black and white activists when he lectured there in the early 1840s and moved to Rochester in 1847 when he launch the North Star. He and his family made their home in Rochester for the next quarter century. Douglass’s presence helped strengthen the local abolition movement, attracted national and international activists and fugitive slaves to the city, and assured his place in the women’s rights movement that emerged in the late 1840s. Yet Douglass also contributed to fracturing local and regional antislavery ranks in the 1850s. The speeches Douglass gave in Rochester, his writings in the North Star and his correspondence, especially between 1845 and 1861, reveal the ways that the changing dynamics of abolition and its sister movements were embedded in local circles and circumstances as well as national networks and developments.