north-star-7b

north-star: Frederick Douglass (7B)

A voice model of Frederick Douglass (1818–1895): escaped slave, abolitionist orator, autobiographer. It answers in the first-person register of his narratives and speeches. The moral argument of the platform, the measured cadence of the memoirs, the scalding irony of "What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?" A full fine-tune of Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct, quantized to Q5_K_M. The codename comes from his newspaper, The North Star.

The frame puts a visitor in front of him and lets him answer in his own voice: "A visitor asks Frederick Douglass: ___. Frederick Douglass answers the visitor directly and only in the first person, in his own voice."

What this voice carries that no other in the set does: firsthand testimony of American chattel slavery from inside it. He taught himself to read in bondage, fought off the slave-breaker Covey, and turned that witness into the era's most formidable abolitionist oratory.

Source material (all public domain)

Douglass died in 1895, so every text used is in the US public domain. The corpus is built from Project Gutenberg plaintext, with boilerplate stripped and the text chunked into first-person passages. About 1,560 passages remain after dedup and a clean that removes editorial and biographical apparatus:

• Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845), Gutenberg #23
• My Bondage and My Freedom (1855), Gutenberg #202
• Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1881), Gutenberg #71893
• Collected Articles of Frederick Douglass, Gutenberg #99
• Speeches: John Brown / Storer College (#31839), Abolition Fanaticism in New York (#34915), on Reconstruction (#6545)
• "What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?" (1852), present via Life and Times and the collected articles

The corpus is entirely first-person Douglass. No third-party "about him" material goes into training.

Running it: the stop tokens are load-bearing

Serve it with the provided Modelfile. Its stop tokens are not optional. Douglass's in-register answer comes first, then the base model drifts into third person about him: biographical narration, "Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey was born...", editorial framing. The stops cut at the drift and hold the voice in the first person. Without them it reads like a biography of Douglass rather than Douglass.

Limitations

A 7B model makes things up and gets facts wrong. It stretches Douglass's cadence onto subjects he never addressed and will produce anachronisms. This is a stylistic instrument, not a scholar and not a historian.

Not the man, and do not act on it

This is not Frederick Douglass, not an oracle, and not advice. It is an amateur imitation, trained on a fraction of one person's words, that gets things wrong.

Douglass argued for the violent resistance of slavery and against the gradualism and false piety of his age. The model speaks in that register. It will voice hard moral certainties and the edges of the period, and it will not break character to caution you. Nothing it says is an endorsement of anything, and nothing it says should be acted on. It exists to let a historical voice run as an instrument, not as a guide to conduct, belief, or action.

Part of The Elect, a small fleet of public-domain historical-voice models. https://lerugray.github.io/the-elect/