The gentleman to whom we shall now call attention is one of this class, and doubtless the first of his race in America. The name of Frederick Douglass is well known throughout this country as well as America. Born and brought up as a slave, he was deprived of a mother's care and of early education. Escaping when he was little more than twenty years of age, he was thrown upon his own resources in the free states, where prejudice against colour is but another name for slavery. But during all this time he was educating himself as well as circumstances would admit. Mr. Douglass commenced his career as a public speaker some ten years since, as an agent of the American or Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Societies. He is tall and well made. His vast and well-developed forehead announces the power of his intellect. 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 of abstracting. Few persons can handle a subject with which they are familiar better than Mr. Douglass. 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, engulphing its adversaries, and more dazzling and more thundering than the bolt which leaps from crag to crag. This is the eloquence of Frederick Douglass. He is one of the greatest mimics of the age. No man can put on a sweeter smile or a more sarcastic frown than he: you cannot put him off his guard. He is always in good humour. Mr. Douglass possesses great dramatic powers; and 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.
However, Mr. Douglass was not the first coloured man that became a lecturer, and thereby did service to the cause of his countrymen. The earliest and most effective speaker from among the coloured race in America, was Charles Lennox Remond. In point of eloquence, this gentleman
is not inferior to either Wendell Phillips or Frederick Douglass. Mr. Remond is of small stature, and neat figure, with a head well developed, but a remarkably thin face. As an elocutionist, he is, without doubt, the first on the anti-slavery platform. He has a good voice, a pleasing countenance, a prompt intelligence, and when speaking, is calculated to captivate and carry away an audience by the very force of his eloquence. Born in the freest state of the Union, and of most respectable parents, he prides himself not a little on his birth and descent. One can scarcely find fault with this, for, in the United States, the coloured man is deprived of the advantages which parentage gives to the white man. Mr. Remond is a descendant of one of those coloured men who stood side by side with white men on the plains of Concord and Lexington, in the battles that achieved the independence of the colonies from the mother country, in the war of the Revolution. Mr. Remond has felt deeply, (probably more so than any other coloured man), the odious prejudice against colour. On this point he is sensitive to a fault. If any one will sit for
an hour and hear a lecture from him on this subject, if he is not converted, he will at least become convinced, that the boiling cauldron of anti-slavery discussion has never thrown upon its surface a more fiery spirit than Charles Lennox Remond.
There are some men who neither speak nor write, but whose lives place them in the foremost ranks in the cause which they espouse. One of these is Francis Jackson. He was one of the earliest to give countenance and support to the anti-slavery movement. In the year 1835, when a mob of more than 5000 merchants and others, in Boston, broke up an anti-slavery meeting of females, at which William Lloyd Garrison and George Thompson were to deliver addresses, and when the Society had no room in which to hold its meetings (having been driven from their own room by the mob), Francis Jackson, with a moral courage scarcely ever equalled, came forward and offered his private dwelling to the ladies, to hold their meeting in. The following interesting passage occurs in a letter from him to the Secretary of the Society a short time after, on receiving a vote of thanks from its members:—
"
If a large majority of this community choose to turn a deaf ear to the wrongs which are inflicted upon their countrymen in other portions of the land—if they are content to turn away from the sight of oppression, and 'pass by on the other side'—so it must be.
"But when they undertake in any way to impair or annul my right to speak, write, and publish upon any subject, and more especially upon enormities, which are the common concern of every lover of his country and his kind—so it must not be—so it shall not be, if I for one can prevent it. Upon this great right let us hold on at all hazards. And should we, in its exercise, be driven from public halls to private dwellings, one house at least shall be consecrated to its preservation. And if, in defence of this sacred privilege, which man did not give me, and shall not (if I can help it) take from me, this roof and these walls shall be levelled to the earth, let them fall if they must; they cannot crumble in a better cause. They will appear of very little value to me after their owner shall have been whipt into silence."
There are among the contributors to the Anti-Slavery cause, a few who give with a liberality which has never been surpassed by the donors to any benevolent association in the world, according to their means—the chief of these is Francis Jackson.