Some Recollections of Our Antislavery Conflict

by Samuel J. May

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.

THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD.

Everybody has heard of the Underground Railroad. Many have read of its operations who have been puzzled to know where it was laid, who were the conductors of it, who kept the stations, and how large were the profits. As the company is dissolved, the rails taken up, the business at an end, I propose now to tell my readers about it.

There have always been scattered throughout the slaveholding States individuals who have abhorred slavery, and have pitied the victims of our American despotism. These persons have known, or have taken pains to find out, others at convenient distances northward from their abodes who sympathized with them in commiserating the slaves. These sympathizers have known or heard of others of like mind still farther North, who again have had acquaintances in the free States that they knew would help the fugitive on his way to liberty. Thus, lines of friends at longer or shorter distances were formed from many parts of the South to the very borders of Canada,—not very straight lines generally, but such as the fleeing bondmen might pass over safely, if they could escape their pursuers until they had come beyond the second or third stage from their starting-point. Furnished at first with written “passes,” as from their masters, and afterwards with letters of introduction from one friend to another, we had reason to believe that a large proportion of those who, in this way, attempted to escape from slavery were successful. Twenty thousand at least found homes in Canada, and hundreds ventured to remain this side of the Lakes.