There was once a slave...
SHIRLEY GRAHAM
The heroic story of
FREDERICK DOUGLASS
JULIAN MESSNER, Inc., NEW YORK
There Was Once a Slave, The Heroic Story of Frederick Douglass by Shirley Graham, received the sixty-five hundred dollar JULIAN MESSNER AWARD FOR THE BEST BOOK COMBATING INTOLERANCE IN AMERICA. The judges were: Carl Van Doren, Lewis Gannett, and Clifton Fadiman. Miss Graham’s work was selected from over six hundred manuscripts submitted in the contest. The original award was augmented by a grant from the Lionel Judah Tachna Memorial Foundation, established by Max Tachna in memory of his son who lost his life in the Battle of the Coral Sea.
PUBLISHED BY JULIAN MESSNER, INC.
8 WEST 40TH STREET, NEW YORK 18
COPYRIGHT, 1947
BY SHIRLEY GRAHAM
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
BY MONTAUK BOOK MANUFACTURING CO., INC.
To Peoples on the March
You cannot hem the hope of being free
With parallels of latitude, with mountain range or sea;
Put heavy padlocks on Truth’s lips, be callous as you will,
From soul to soul, o’er all the world,
leaps the electric thrill.
—James Russell Lowell
Contents
Prologue
I keep my eye on the bright north star and think of liberty.
—From an old slave song
They told him that he was a slave, that he must bend his back, walk low, with eyes cast down, think not at all and sleep without a dream. But every beat of hoe against a twisted root, each narrow furrow reaching toward the hill, flight of a bird across the open field, creak of the ox-cart in the road—all spoke to him of freedom.
For Frederick Douglass had his eyes upon a star.
This dark American never knew the exact date of his birth. Some time in 1817 or 1818 or 1819 he was born in Talbot County on the Eastern Shore of the state of Maryland. Who were his people? “Genealogical trees,” he wrote in his autobiography, “did not flourish among slaves. A person of some consequence in civilized society, sometimes designated as father, was literally unknown to slave law and to slave practices.”
His first years were spent in a kind of breeding pen, where, with dogs and pigs and other young of the plantation, black children were raised for the fields and turpentine forests. The only bright memories of his childhood clung round his grandmother’s log hut. He remembered touching his mother once. After he was four or five years old he never saw or heard of her again.
This is the story of how from out that breeding pen there came a Man. It begins in August of the year of our Lord, 1834. Andrew Jackson was in the White House. Horace Greeley was getting a newspaper going in New York. William Lloyd Garrison had been dragged through the streets of Boston, a rope around his neck. Slavery had just been abolished wherever the Union Jack flew. Daniel O’Connell was lifting his voice, calling the people of Ireland together. Goethe’s song of the brotherhood of man was echoing in the hills. Tolstoy was six years old, and Abraham Lincoln was growing up in Illinois.