Again the country was in gloom. People in their sorrow came together; legislators and earnest men and women shook their heads and marveled at the struggles which seemed necessary for welding a nation of free men. The people as a whole were finding that freedom is a hard-bought thing.
Douglass rose before a huge audience in New York City. He was older. He had suffered because of failure to see, he had stumbled a little on the way—but he had never left the road. The lines in his face were lines of strength, the fire in his eyes was the light of knowledge, the sweet song of emancipation no longer filled his ears to the exclusion of everything else. He saw the scarred and blackened stumps that blocked his path, he saw the rocks and muddy pitfalls on the way, he knew that there were hidden snipers further up the road, but he went on—walking with dignity. The crowd listening to him was very still.
“How stands the case with the recently emancipated millions of colored people in our country?” he began. “By law, by the Constitution of the United States, slavery has no existence in our country. The legal form has been abolished. By law and the Constitution the Negro is a man and a citizen, and has all the rights and liberties guaranteed to any other variety of the human family residing in the United States.”
Men who had recently come to these shores from other lands heard him. New York—melting pot of the world! They had come from Italy and Germany, from Poland and Ireland and Russia to the country of freedom.
“It is a great thing to have the supreme law of the land on the side of right and liberty,” he said. “Only,” he went on, “they gave the freedmen the machinery of liberty, but denied them the steam with which to put it in motion. They gave them the uniforms of soldiers but no arms; they called them citizens and left them subjects; they called them free and almost left them slaves. They did not deprive the old master-class of the power of life and death. Today the masters cannot sell them, but they retain the power to starve them to death!
“Greatness,” the black orator reminded the citizens of New York, “does not come to any people on flowery beds of ease. We must fight to win the prize. No people to whom liberty is given can hold it as firmly or wear it as grandly as those who wrench their liberty from the iron hand of the tyrant.”
He could take the cheers of the crowd with a quiet smile. He knew that some of them would remember and in their own way would act.
Anna joined her husband on the New York trip. And for a short while they relived the time more than forty years before, when, after the anxious days and nights, they were first free together. This trip, their youngest son Charles was marrying Laura Haley, whose home was in New York.
They had banks of flowers, organ music, smart ushers and lovely bridesmaids. The marriage of Charles, son of Frederick Douglass, was a very different affair from that wedding so long ago when Frederick, fugitive from slavery, took Anna Murray, freewoman, to be his wife. As the bride all in white came floating down the aisle, Douglass turned and smiled into Anna’s clear, good eyes.