In 1841 Douglass entered upon that epoch of his life which brought the
hitherto obscure refugee prominently before the public, and in which
his services as anti-slavery orator and reformer constitute his chief
claim to enduring recollection. Millions of negroes whose lives had
been far less bright than Douglass's had lived and died in slavery.
Thousands of fugitives under assumed names were winning a precarious
livelihood in the free States and trembling in constant fear of the
slave-catcher. Some of these were doing noble work in assisting others
to escape from bondage. Mr. Siebert, in his _Underground Railroad_,
mentions one fugitive slave, John Mason by name, who assisted thirteen
hundred others to escape from Kentucky. Another picturesque fugitive
was Harriet Tubman, who devoted her life to this work with a courage,
skill, and success that won her a wide reputation among the friends
of freedom. A number of free colored men in the North, a few of them
wealthy and cultivated, lent their time and their means to this cause.
But it was reserved for Douglass, by virtue of his marvellous gift of
oratory, to become pre-eminently the personal representative of his
people for a generation.
In 1841 the Massachusetts Anti-slavery Society, which had been for
some little time weakened by faction, arranged its differences, and
entered upon a campaign of unusual activity, which found expression in
numerous meetings throughout the free States, mainly in New
England. On August 15 of that year a meeting was held at Nantucket,
Massachusetts. The meeting was conducted by John A. Collins, at that
time general agent of the society, and was addressed by William Lloyd
Garrison and other leading abolitionists. Douglass had taken a holiday
and come from New Bedford to attend this convention, without the
remotest thought of taking part except as a spectator. The proceedings
were interesting, and aroused the audience to a high state of feeling.
There was present in the meeting a certain abolitionist, by name
William C. Coffin, who had heard Douglass speak in the little negro
Sunday-school at New Bedford, and who knew of his recent escape from
slavery. To him came the happy inspiration to ask Douglass to speak
a few words to the convention by way of personal testimony. Collins
introduced the speaker as "a graduate from slavery, with his diploma
written upon his back."
Douglass himself speaks very modestly about this, his first public
appearance. He seems, from his own account, to have suffered somewhat
from stage fright, which was apparently his chief memory concerning
it. The impressions of others, however, allowing a little for the
enthusiasm of the moment, are a safer guide as to the effect of
Douglass's first speech. Parker Pillsbury reported that, "though it
was late in the evening when the young man closed his remarks, none
seemed to know or care for the hour.... The crowded congregation had
been wrought up almost to enchantment during the whole long evening,
particularly by some of the utterances of the last speaker [Douglass],
as he turned over the terrible apocalypse of his experience in
slavery." Mr. Garrison bore testimony to "the extraordinary emotion it
exerted on his own mind and to the powerful impression it exerted upon
a crowded auditory." "Patrick Henry," he declared, "had never made a
more eloquent speech than the one they had just listened to from the
lips of the hunted fugitive." Upon Douglass and his speech as a text
Mr. Garrison delivered one of the sublimest and most masterly efforts
of his life; and then and there began the friendship between the
fugitive slave and the great agitator which opened the door
for Douglass to a life of noble usefulness, and secured to the
anti-slavery cause one of its most brilliant and effective orators.
At Garrison's instance Collins offered Douglass employment as lecturer
for the Anti-slavery Society, though the idea of thus engaging him
doubtless occurred to more than one of the abolition leaders who heard
his Nantucket speech. Douglass was distrustful of his own powers. Only
three years out of slavery, with little learning and no experience
as a public speaker, painfully aware of the prejudice which must be
encountered by men of his color, fearful too of the publicity that
might reveal his whereabouts to his legal owner, who might reclaim his
property wherever found, he yielded only reluctantly to Mr. Collins's
proposition, and agreed at first upon only a three months' term of
service.
Most of the abolitionists were, or meant to be, consistent in their
practice of what they preached; and so, when Douglass was enrolled as
one of the little band of apostles, they treated him literally as a
man and a brother. Their homes, their hearts, and their often none too
well-filled purses were open to him. In this new atmosphere his mind
expanded, his spirit took on high courage, and he read and studied
diligently, that he might make himself worthy of his opportunity to do
something for his people.
During the remainder of 1841 Douglass travelled and lectured in
Eastern Massachusetts with George Foster, in the interest of the
two leading abolition journals, the _Anti-slavery Standard_ and the
_Liberator_, and also lectured in Rhode Island against the proposed
Dorr constitution, which sought to limit the right of suffrage to
white male citizens only, thus disfranchising colored men who had
theretofore voted. With Foster and Pillsbury and Parker[1] and
Monroe[2] and Abby Kelly [Kelley][3] he labored to defeat the Dorr
constitution and at the same time promote the abolition gospel. The
proposed constitution was defeated, and colored men who could meet the
Rhode Island property qualification were left in possession of the
right to vote.
[Footnote 1: Editor's Note to Dover Edition: Reverend Theodore Parker
(1810-1860) was a Unitarian minister who graduated from the Harvard
Divinity School and was active in the Boston area.]
[Footnote 2: Editor's Note to Dover Edition: James Monroe (1821-1898),
a New Englander with a Quaker mother; in 1839 he became an
Abolitionist lecturer instead of enrolling in college.]
[Footnote 3: Editor's Note to Dover Edition: Abigail Kelley Foster
(1811-1887), who married another Abolitionist, Stephen Foster, in
1845, was a Quaker orator and organizer on behalf of the abolition of
slavery and for women's right to vote.]
Douglass had plunged into this new work, after the first embarrassment
wore off, with all the enthusiasm of youth and hope. But, except among
the little band of Garrisonians and their sympathizers, his position
did not relieve him from the disabilities attaching to his color.
The feeling toward the negro in New England in 1841 was but little
different from that in the State of Georgia to-day. Men of color were
regarded and treated as belonging to a distinctly inferior order of
creation. At hotels and places of public resort they were refused
entertainment. On railroads and steamboats they were herded off by
themselves in mean and uncomfortable cars. If welcomed in churches
at all, they were carefully restricted to the negro pew. As in the
Southern States to-day, no distinction was made among them in these
respects by virtue of dress or manners or culture or means; but all
were alike discriminated against because of their dark skins. Some
of Douglass's abolition friends, among whom he especially mentions
Wendell Phillips and two others of lesser note, won their way to his
heart by at all times refusing to accept privileges that were denied
to their swarthy companion. Douglass resented proscription wherever
met with, and resisted it with force when the odds were not too
overwhelming. More than once he was beaten and maltreated by railroad
conductors and brakemen. For a time the Eastern Railroad ran its cars
through Lynn, Massachusetts, without stopping, because Douglass, who
resided at that time in Lynn, insisted on riding in the white people's
car, and made trouble when interfered with. Often it was impossible
for the abolitionists to secure a meeting-place; and in several
instances Douglass paraded the streets with a bell, like a town crier,
to announce that he would lecture in the open air.
Some of Douglass's friends, it must be admitted, were at times rather
extreme in their language, and perhaps stirred up feelings that a
more temperate vocabulary would not have aroused. None of them ever
hesitated to call a spade a spade, and some of them denounced slavery
and all its sympathizers with the vigor and picturesqueness of a
Muggletonian or Fifth Monarchy man of Cromwell's time execrating his
religious adversaries. And, while it was true enough that the Church
and the State were, generally speaking, the obsequious tools of
slavery, it was not easy for an abolitionist to say so in vehement
language without incurring the charge of treason or blasphemy,--an old
trick of bigotry and tyranny to curb freedom of thought and freedom of
speech. The little personal idiosyncrasies which some of the reformers
affected, such as long hair in the men and short hair in the
women,--there is surely some psychological reason why reformers run
to such things,--served as convenient excuses for gibes and unseemly
interruptions at their public meetings. On one memorable occasion,
at Syracuse, New York, in November, 1842, Douglass and his fellows
narrowly escaped tar and feathers. But, although Douglass was
vehemently denunciatory of slavery in all its aspects, his twenty
years of training in that hard school had developed in him a vein of
prudence that saved him from these verbal excesses,--perhaps there was
also some element of taste involved,--and thus made his arguments more
effective than if he had alienated his audiences by indiscriminate
attacks on all the institutions of society. No one could justly
accuse Frederick Douglass of cowardice or self-seeking; yet he was
opportunist enough to sacrifice the immaterial for the essential, and
to use the best means at hand to promote the ultimate object sought,
although the means thus offered might not be the ideal instrument. It
was doubtless this trait that led Douglass, after he separated from
his abolitionist friends, to modify his views upon the subject
of disunion and the constitutionality of slavery, and to support
political parties whose platforms by no means expressed the full
measure of his convictions.
In 1843 the New England Anti-slavery Society resolved, at its annual
meeting in the spring, to stir the Northern heart and rouse the
national conscience by a series of one hundred conventions in New
Hampshire, Vermont, New York, Ohio, Indiana, and Pennsylvania.
Douglass was assigned as one of the agents for the conduct of this
undertaking. Among those associated in this work, which extended over
five months, were John A. Collins, the president of the society, who
mapped out the campaign; James Monroe; George Bradburn; William A.
White; Charles L. Remond, a colored orator, born in Massachusetts, who
rendered effective service in the abolition cause; and Sidney Howard
Gay, at that time managing editor of the _National Anti-slavery
Standard_ and later of the New York _Tribune_ and the New York
_Evening Post._
The campaign upon which this little band of missionaries set out was
no inconsiderable one. They were not going forth to face enthusiastic
crowds of supporters, who would meet them with brass bands and shouts
of welcome. They were more likely to be greeted with hisses and
cat-calls, sticks and stones, stale eggs and decayed cabbages, hoots
and yells of derision, and decorations of tar and feathers.
In some towns of Vermont slanderous reports were made in advance of
their arrival, their characters were assailed, and their aims and
objects misrepresented. In Syracuse, afterward distinguished for its
strong anti-slavery sentiment, the abolitionists were compelled to
hold their meetings in the public park, from inability to procure a
house in which to speak; and only after their convention was well
under way were they offered the shelter of a dilapidated and abandoned
church. In Rochester they met with a more hospitable reception. The
indifference of Buffalo so disgusted Douglass's companions that they
shook the dust of the city from their feet, and left Douglass, who was
accustomed to coldness and therefore undaunted by it, to tread the
wine-press alone. He spoke in an old post-office for nearly a week,
to such good purpose that a church was thrown open to him; and on
a certain Sunday, in the public park, he held and thrilled by his
eloquence an audience of five thousand people.
On leaving Buffalo, Douglass joined the other speakers, and went
with them to Clinton County, Ohio, where, under a large tent, a mass
meeting was held of abolitionists who had come from widely scattered
points. During an excursion made about this time to Pennsylvania to
attend a convention at Norristown, an attempt was made to lynch him at
Manayunk; but his usual good fortune served him, and he lived to be
threatened by higher powers than a pro-slavery mob.
When the party of reformers reached Indiana, where the pro-slavery
spirit was always strong, the State having been settled largely by
Southerners, their campaign of education became a running fight, in
which Douglass, whose dark skin attracted most attention, often got
more than his share. His strength and address brought him safely
out of many an encounter; but in a struggle with a mob at Richmond,
Indiana, he was badly beaten and left unconscious on the ground. A
good Quaker took him home in his wagon, his wife bound up Douglass's
wounds and nursed him tenderly,--the Quakers were ever the consistent
friends of freedom,--but for the lack of proper setting he carried to
the grave a stiff hand as the result of this affray. He had often been
introduced to audiences as "a graduate from slavery with his diploma
written upon his back": from Indiana he received the distinction of a
post-graduate degree.