“I don’t generally take much interest in scenes of this nature,” says a grave representative;—“but I came here to-day for the sake of the principle!”
“Gentlemen,” says the auctioneer, “we’ve got a specimen here that some of your Northern abolitionists would give any price for; but they shan’t have him!—no! we’ve looked out for that. The man that buys him must give bonds never to sell him to go North again!”
“Go it!” shout the crowd, “good!—good!—hurra!” “An impressive idea!” says a senator; “a noble maintaining of principle!” and the man is bid off, and the hammer falls with a last crash on his hearth, and hopes, and manhood, and he lies a bleeding wreck on the altar of Liberty!
Such was the altar in 1776;—such is the altar in 1850.
OUTLINE OF A MAN.
In some of those castle building day-dreams, in which, like all youth of an imaginative turn, I was wont, in my early days, to indulge; a favourite image of my creation was an Africo-American for the time,—a coloured man, who had known by experience the bitterness of slavery, and now by some process free, so endowed with natural powers, and a certain degree of attainments, all the more rare and effective for being acquired under great disadvantages,—as to be a sort of Moses to his oppressed and degraded tribe. He was to be gifted with a noble person, of course, and refinement of manners, and some elegance of thought and expression; by what unprecedented miracle such a paragon was to be graduated through the educational appliances of American slavery, imagination did not trouble herself to inquire. She was painting fancy-pieces, not portraits.
Having thus irresponsibly struck out upon the canvas her central figure, she would not be slow to complete the picture with many a rose-coloured vision of brilliant successes and magic triumphs won by her hero, in his great enterprise of the redemption of his people. A burning sense of their wrongs fired his eloquence with an undying, passionate earnestness, and as he alternately reproached the injustice, and appealed to the generosity of his oppressors, all opposition gave way before him; the masses, as one man, demanded the emancipation of his long-degraded, deeply-injured race; and millions of regenerated men rose up, upon their broken chains, and called him blessed.
Years rolled away, and these poetic fancies faded “into the light of common day.” The cold, stern, pitiless reality remained. The dark incubus of slavery yet rested down upon more than three millions of the victims of democratic despotism. But the triumphant champion of the devoted race had melted away, with the morning mists of my boyish conjuring.
One morning in the summer of 1844, walking up Main-street in the city of Hartford, I was attracted by the movements of a group of some twenty-five or thirty men and women, in a small recess, or court, by the side of the old Centre Church. They appeared to be organized into an assembly, and a tall mulatto was addressing them. I drew near to listen. The speaker was recounting the oft-enacted history of a flight from slavery. With his eye upon the cold, but true north star, and his ear ever and anon bent to the ground, listening for the “blood-hound’s savage bay,” sure-footed and panting, the fugitive was before me! My attention had been arrested; I was profoundly interested. The audience was the American Anti-slavery Society, then just excluded from some of the public halls of the city, and fain to content themselves, after an apostolic sort, with the next best accommodations. The orator was Frederick Douglass, the most remarkable man of this country, and of this age; and—may I not dare to add—the almost complete fulfilment of my early dream!
Since that day, through assiduous application, and a varied experience, he has continued to develop in the same wonderful ratio of improvement, which even then distinguished him as a prodigy in self-education. Unusually favored in personal appearance and address, full of generous impulse and delicate sensibility, exuberant in playful wit, or biting sarcasm, or stern denunciation, ever commanding in his moral attitude, earnest and impressive in manner, with a voice eminently sonorous and flexible, and gesture full of dramatic vivacity, I have many times seen large audiences swayed at his will; at one moment convulsed with laughter, and the next bathed in tears; now lured with admiration of the orator, and now with indignation at the oppressor, against whom he hurled his invective. But in my boyhood’s quasi-prophetic fancy of such a man and his inimitable success, I had not counted upon one antagonist, whose reality and potency, the observation of every day now forces painfully upon me. I mean the strange and unnatural prejudice against mere colour, which is so all-prevalent in the American breast, as almost to nullify the influence of such a man, so pleading; while his dignity, his urbanity, his imperturbable serenity and good nature, his genuine purity and worth all fail, at times, to secure him from the grossest indignities, at the hands of the coarse and brutal. Nobody who knows him will be inclined to question our estimate of his character, but it still comports with the intelligence and refinement and piety of a large proportion of American society to label him “nigger,” and the name itself invites to safe contumely, and irresponsible violence.