FREDERICK DOUGLASS.
The career of this distinguished individual whose name heads this sketch, is more widely known than that of any other living colored man. Born and brought up under the institution of slavery, which denied its victims the right of developing those natural powers that adorn the children of men, and distinguish them from the beasts of the forest,—an institution that gave a premium to ignorance, and made intelligence a crime, when the possessor was a negro,—Frederick Douglass is, indeed, the most wonderful man that America has ever produced, white or black.
His days of servitude were like those of his race who were born at the South, differing but little from the old routine of plantation life. Douglass, however, possessed superior natural gifts, which began to show themselves even when a boy, but his history has become too well known for us to dwell on it here. The narrative of his life, published in 1845, gave a new impetus to the black man’s literature. All other stories of fugitive slaves faded away before the beautifully-written, highly-descriptive, and thrilling memoir of Frederick Douglass. Other narratives had only brought before the public a few heart-rending scenes connected with the person described. But Mr. Douglass, in his book, brought not only his old master’s farm and its occupants before the reader, but the entire country around him, including Baltimore and its shipyard. The manner in which he obtained his education, and especially his learning to write, has been read and re-read by thousands in both hemispheres. His escape from slavery is too well understood to need a recapitulation here.
He took up his residence in New Bedford, where he still continued the assiduous student, mastering the different branches of education which the accursed institution had deprived him of in early life.
His advent as a lecturer was a remarkable one. White men and black men had talked against slavery, but none had ever spoken like Frederick Douglass. Throughout the North the newspapers were filled with the sayings of the “eloquent fugitive.” He often travelled with others, but they were all lost sight of in the eagerness to hear Douglass. His travelling companions would sometimes get angry, and would speak first at the meetings; then they would take the last turn; but it was all the same—the fugitive’s impression was the one left upon the mind. He made more persons angry, and pleased more, than any other man. He was praised, and he was censured. He made them laugh, he made them weep, and he made them swear.
His “Slaveholders’ Sermon” was always a trump card. He awakened an interest in the hearts of thousands who before were dead to the slave and his condition. Many kept away from his lectures, fearing lest they should be converted against their will. Young men and women, in those days of pro-slavery hatred, would return to their fathers’ roofs filled with admiration for the “runaway slave,” and would be rebuked by hearing the old ones grumble out, “You’d better stay at home and study your lessons, and not be running after the nigger meetings.”
In 1841, he was induced to accept an agency as a lecturer for the Anti-slavery Society, and at once became one of the most valuable of its advocates. He visited England in 1845. There he was kindly received and heartily welcomed; and after going through the length and breadth of the land, and addressing public meetings out of number on behalf of his countrymen in chains, with a power of eloquence which captivated his auditors, and brought the cause which he pleaded home to their hearts, he returned home, and commenced the publication of the “North Star,” a weekly newspaper devoted to the advocacy of the cause of freedom.
Mr. Douglass is tall and well made. His vast and fully-developed forehead shows at once that he is a superior man intellectually. He is polished in his language, and gentlemanly in his manners. His voice is full and sonorous. His attitude is dignified, and his gesticulation is full of noble simplicity. He is a man of lofty reason; natural, and without pretension; always master of himself; brilliant in the art of exposing and abstracting. Few persons can handle a subject, with which they are familiar, better than he. There is a kind of eloquence issuing from the depth of the soul as from a spring, rolling along its copious floods, sweeping all before it, overwhelming by its very force, carrying, upsetting, ingulfing its adversaries, and more dazzling and more thundering than the bolt which leaps from crag to crag. This is the eloquence of Frederick Douglass. One of the best mimics of the age, and possessing great dramatic powers; had he taken up the sock and buskin, instead of becoming a lecturer, he would have made as fine a Coriolanus as ever trod the stage.
As a speaker, Frederick Douglass has had more imitators than almost any other American, save, perhaps, Wendell Phillips. Unlike most great speakers, he is a superior writer also. Some of his articles, in point of ability, will rank with anything ever written for the American press. He has taken lessons from the best of teachers, amid the homeliest realities of life; hence the perpetual freshness of his delineations, which are never over-colored, never strained, never aiming at difficult or impossible effects, but which always read like living transcripts of experience.
Mr. Douglass has obtained a position in the front rank as a lyceum lecturer. His later addresses from manuscripts, however, do not, in our opinion, come up to his extemporaneous efforts.
But Frederick Douglass’s abilities as an editor and publisher have done more for the freedom and elevation of his race than all his platform appeals. Previous to the year 1848, the colored people of the United States had no literature. True, the “National Reformer,” the “Mirror of Liberty,” the “Colored American,” “The Mystery,” the “Disfranchised American,” the “Ram’s Horn,” and several others of smaller magnitude, had been in existence, had their run, and ceased to live. All of the above journals had done something towards raising the black man’s standard, but they were merely the ploughs breaking up the ground and getting the soil ready for the seed-time. Newspapers, magazines, and books published in those days by colored men, were received with great allowance by the whites, who had always regarded the negro as an uneducated, inferior race, and who were considered out of their proper sphere when meddling with literature.
The commencement of the publication of the “North Star” was the beginning of a new era in the black man’s literature. Mr. Douglass’s well-earned fame gave his paper at once a place with the first journals in the country; and he drew around him a corps of contributors and correspondents from Europe, as well as all parts of America and the West Indies, that made its columns rich with the current news of the world.
While the “North Star” became a welcome visitor to the homes of whites who had never before read a newspaper edited by a colored man, its proprietor became still more popular as a speaker in every State in the Union where abolitionism was tolerated.
“My Bondage and My Freedom,” a work published by Mr. Douglass a few years ago, besides giving a fresh impulse to anti-slavery literature, showed upon its pages the untiring industry of the ripe scholar.
Some time during the year 1850, we believe, his journal assumed the name of “Frederick Douglass’s Paper.” Its purpose and aim was the same, and it remained the representative of the negro till it closed its career, which was not until the abolition of slavery.
Of all his labors, however, we regard Mr. Douglass’s efforts as publisher and editor as most useful to his race. For sixteen years, against much opposition, single-handed and alone, he demonstrated the fact that the American colored man was equal to the white in conducting a useful and popular journal.