Chattel slavery and the anti-slavery movement were major factors in the onset of the Civil War, and during the 1840s and 1850s Frederick Douglass, more than any other individual, generated great anti-slavery support in America and abroad. His eloquent speeches and writings were uniquely influential because they were based on personal "tales of horror," as he called them, experienced as an enslaved child from his birth near Hillsboro in 1818 until his escape from Baltimore in 1838. Many of his best known descriptions of enslaved life were based on events in and around Hillsboro, including his separation from his mother in 1824 and the division of his family among slaveholders in 1828 on the west side of Tuckahoe Creek south of Hillsboro, and other events just south of Hillsboro on the east side of the Tuckahoe, including the murder of his wife's cousin. A drunken slaveholder brutally beat Douglass' brother Perry in 1828, an incident that may have occurred in Hillsboro. Douglass graphically related such incidents in his 1845 and 1855 autobiographies as well as in his prolific essays and speeches, carrying the local experiences of an enslaved child to a worldwide audience and increasing sectional passions that resulted in the Civil War.