During the first three or four months Frederick’s speeches had been almost exclusively made up of narrations of his own personal experiences as a slave.
“Give us the facts,” said Secretary Collins. “We’ll take care of the philosophy.”
“Tell your story, Frederick,” Garrison would whisper as his protégé stepped upon the platform. And Frederick, smiling his devotion to the older man, always followed the injunction.
But Frederick was growing in stature. Scholars’ libraries were thrown open to him. Theodore Parker had sixteen thousand volumes; his library covered the entire third floor of his house.
“Come up any time, Frederick. Books, my boy, were written to be read.”
And Frederick reveled in Thomas Jefferson, Carlyle, Edmund Burke, Tom Paine, John Quincy Adams, Jonathan Swift, William Godwin. He became drunk on books; staggering home late at night, his eyes red, he would fall heavily across his bed. He pored over the newspapers from all parts of the country which Garrison gathered in the Liberator office; he sat at the feet of the greatest orators of the day—Wendell Phillips, Charles Redmond, Theodore Parker among them. He munched sandwiches and listened, while John Whittier read his verses; and always the young fugitive from slavery followed in the wake of William Lloyd Garrison, devouring his words, tapping his sources of wisdom, attuning his ears to every pitch of the loved voice.
Frederick’s speeches began to expand in content, logic and delivery.
“People won’t believe you ever were a slave, Frederick, if you keep on this way,” cautioned Collins. But Garrison shook his head.
“Let him alone!” he said.
The year 1843 was one of remarkable antislavery activity. The New England Anti-Slavery Society mapped out a series of one hundred conventions. The territory covered in the schedule included all of New England, New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio and Indiana. Under Garrison’s leadership it was a real campaign, taking more than six months to complete. Frederick Douglass was chosen as one of the agents to tour the country.