I need give but one more example of a colored man of my acquaintance
who has exhibited great intellectual ability as well as moral worth.
And he is one extensively known and admired throughout our country,
Great Britain, and Ireland. Of course I mean Frederick Douglass. His
well-written, intensely interesting autobiography, entitled “My Bondage
and My Freedom,” has probably been read so generally that I need not
attempt any sketch of his life. Suffice it to say he was born a slave
in Maryland. He experienced all the indignities, and suffered most of
the hardships and cruelties, that passionate slaveholders could inflict
upon their bondmen. When about twenty-one years of age he resolved
that he would endure them no longer, and in 1838 he found his way from
Baltimore to New Bedford, the best place, on the whole, to which he
could have gone. There, with his young wife, he commenced the life of
a freeman. The severest toil now seemed light. He worked with a will,
because the avails of his labor were to be his own. Being, as most
colored persons are, religiously inclined, he soon became a member of a
Methodist church, and erelong was appointed a class-leader and a local
preacher.
While in slavery Mr. Douglass had contrived, in various ingenious ways,
to learn to read and write. So soon, therefore, as he came to live in
Massachusetts, he diligently improved his enlarged opportunities to
acquire knowledge. Erelong he became a subscriber for _The Liberator_,
and week after week made himself master of its contents, in which
he never found a silly or a worthless line. Of course its doctrines
and its purpose were altogether such as his own bitter experience
justified. And the exalted spirit of religious faith and hope, at all
times inspiring the writings and speeches of Mr. Garrison, awakened
in the bosom of Mr. Douglass the assurance that he was “the man,--the
Moses raised up by God to deliver his Israel in America from a worse
than Egyptian bondage.”
In the summer of 1841 there was a large antislavery convention
held in Nantucket. Mr. Douglass attended it. In the midst of the
meeting, to his great confusion, he was called upon and urged to
address the convention. A number were present from New Bedford who
had heard his exhortations in the Methodist church, and they would
not allow his plea of inability to speak. After much hesitation he
rose, and, notwithstanding his embarrassment, he gave evidence of
such intellectual power--wisdom as well as wit--that all present were
astonished. Mr. Garrison followed him in one of his sublimest speeches.
“Here was a living witness of the justice of the severest condemnation
he had ever uttered of slavery. Here was one ‘every inch a man,’ ay,
a man of no common power, who yet had been held at the South as a
piece of property, a chattel, and had been treated as if he were a
domesticated brute,” &c.
At the close of the meeting, Mr. John A. Collins, then the general
agent of the Massachusetts Antislavery Society, urgently invited Mr.
Douglass to become a lecturing agent. He begged to be excused. He was
sure that he was not competent to such an undertaking. But Mr. Garrison
and others, who had heard him that day, joined Mr. Collins in pressing
him to accept the appointment. He yielded to the pressure. And, in
less than three years from the day of his escape from slavery, he was
introduced to the people of New England as a suitable person to lecture
them upon the subject that was of more moment than any other to which
the attention of our Republic had ever been called.
Mr. Douglass henceforth improved rapidly. He applied himself diligently
to reading and study. The number and range of his topics in lecturing
increased and widened continually. He soon became one of the favorite
antislavery speakers. The notoriety which he thus acquired could not be
confined to New England or the Northern States. A murmur of inquiry
came up from Maryland who this man could be. A pamphlet which he felt
called upon to publish in 1845, in answer to the current assertions
that he was an impostor, that he had never been a slave, made it no
longer possible to conceal his personality. The danger of his being
captured and taken back to Maryland was so great that it was thought
advisable he should go to England. Accordingly, he went thither that
year in company with James N. Buffum, one of the truest of antislavery
men, and with the Hutchinson family, the sweetest of singers.
Although not permitted to go as a cabin passenger, many of the
cabin passengers sought to make his acquaintance and visited him
in the steerage, and invited him to visit them on the saloon-deck.
At length they requested him to give them an antislavery lecture.
This he consented and was about to do, when some passengers who
were slaveholders chose to consider it an insult to them, and were
proceeding to punish him for his insolence; they threatened even to
throw him overboard, and would have done so had not the captain of the
steamer interposed his absolute authority: called his men, and ordered
them to put those disturbers of the peace _in irons_ if they did not
instantly desist. Of course they at once obeyed, and shrank back in the
consciousness that they were under the dominion of a power that had
broken the staff of such oppressors as themselves.
This incident of the voyage was reported in the newspapers immediately
on the arrival of the vessel at Liverpool, and introduced Mr. Douglass
at once to the British public. He was treated with great attention
by the Abolitionists of the United Kingdom; was invited to lecture
everywhere, and rendered most valuable services to the cause of his
oppressed countrymen. So deeply did he interest the philanthropists of
that country that they paid seven hundred and fifty dollars to procure
from his master a formal, legal certificate of manumission, so that,
on his return to these United States, he would be no longer liable to
be sent back into slavery. They also presented him with the sum of
twenty-five hundred dollars for his own benefit, to be appropriated,
if he should see fit, to the establishment of a weekly paper edited by
himself, which was then his favorite project.
Soon after his return in 1847 he did establish such a paper at
Rochester and conducted it with ability for several years. He has since
become one of the popular lecturers of our country, and every season
has as many invitations as he cares to accept. He is extensively known
and much respected. Many there are who wish to see him a member of
Congress; and we confidently predict that, if he shall ever be sent
to Washington as a Representative or a Senator, he will soon become a
prominent man in either House.