My Bondage and My Freedom
nature, and which revealed to him the fact that liberty and right, for
all men, were anterior to slavery and wrong. When his knowledge of the
world was bounded by the visible horizon on Col. Lloyd’s plantation,
and while every thing around him bore a fixed, iron stamp, as if it had
always been so, this was, for one so young, a notable discovery.
To his uncommon memory, then, we must add a keen and accurate insight
into men and things; an original breadth of common sense which enabled
him to see, and weigh, and compare whatever passed before him, and
which kindled a desire to search out and define their relations to
other things not so patent, but which never succumbed to the marvelous
nor the supernatural; a sacred thirst for liberty and for learning,
first as a means of attaining liberty, then as an end in itself most
desirable; a will; an unfaltering energy and determination to obtain
what his soul pronounced desirable; a majestic self-hood; determined
courage; a deep and agonizing sympathy with his embruted, crushed and
bleeding fellow slaves, and an extraordinary depth of passion, together
with that rare alliance between passion and intellect, which enables
the former, when deeply roused, to excite, develop and sustain the
latter.
With these original gifts in view, let us look at his schooling; the
fearful discipline through which it pleased God to prepare him for the
high calling on which he has since entered—the advocacy of emancipation
by the people who are not slaves. And for this special mission, his
plantation education was better than any he could have acquired in any
lettered school. What he needed, was facts and experiences, welded to
acutely wrought up sympathies, and these he could not elsewhere have
obtained, in a manner so peculiarly adapted to his nature. His physical
being was well trained, also, running wild until advanced into boyhood;
hard work and light diet, thereafter, and a skill in handicraft in
youth.
For his special mission, then, this was, considered in connection with
his natural gifts, a good schooling; and, for his special mission, he
doubtless “left school” just at the proper moment. Had he remained
longer in slavery—had he fretted under bonds until the ripening of
manhood and its passions, until the drear agony of slave-wife and
slave-children had been piled upon his already bitter experiences—then,
not only would his own history have had another termination, but the
drama of American slavery would have been essentially varied; for I
cannot resist the belief, that the boy who learned to read and write as
he did, who taught his fellow slaves these precious acquirements as he
did, who plotted for their mutual escape as he did, would, when a man
at bay, strike a blow which would make slavery reel and stagger.
Furthermore, blows and insults he bore, at the moment, without
resentment; deep but suppressed emotion rendered him insensible to
their sting; but it was afterward, when the memory of them went
seething through his brain, breeding a fiery indignation at his injured
self-hood, that the resolve came to resist, and the time fixed when to
resist, and the plot laid, how to resist; and he always kept his
self-pledged word. In what he undertook, in this line, he looked fate
in the face, and had a cool, keen look at the relation of means to
ends. Henry Bibb, to avoid chastisement, strewed his master’s bed with
charmed leaves and _was whipped_. Frederick Douglass quietly pocketed a
like _fetiche_, compared his muscles with those of Covey—and _whipped
him_.
In the history of his life in bondage, we find, well developed, that
inherent and continuous energy of character which will ever render him
distinguished. What his hand found to do, he did with his might; even
while conscious that he was wronged out of his daily earnings, he
worked, and worked hard. At his daily labor he went with a will; with
keen, well set eye, brawny chest, lithe figure, and fair sweep of arm,
he would have been king among calkers, had that been his mission.
It must not be overlooked, in this glance at his education, that Mr.
Douglass lacked one aid to which so many men of mark have been deeply
indebted—he had neither a mother’s care, nor a mother’s culture, save
that which slavery grudgingly meted out to him. Bitter nurse! may not
even her features relax with human feeling, when she gazes at such
offspring! How susceptible he was to the kindly influences of
mother-culture, may be gathered from his own words, on page 57: “It has
been a life-long standing grief to me, that I know so little of my
mother, and that I was so early separated from her. The counsels of her
love must have been beneficial to me. The side view of her face is
imaged on my memory, and I take few steps in life, without feeling her
presence; but the image is mute, and I have no striking words of hers
treasured up.”
From the depths of chattel slavery in Maryland, our author escaped into
the caste-slavery of the north, in New Bedford, Massachusetts. Here he
found oppression assuming another, and hardly less bitter, form; of
that very handicraft which the greed of slavery had taught him, his
half-freedom denied him the exercise for an honest living; he found
himself one of a class—free colored men—whose position he has described
in the following words:
“Aliens are we in our native land. The fundamental principles of the
republic, to which the humblest white man, whether born here or
elsewhere, may appeal with confidence, in the hope of awakening a
favorable response, are held to be inapplicable to us. The glorious
doctrines of your revolutionary fathers, and the more glorious
teachings of the Son of God, are construed and applied against us. We
are literally scourged beyond the beneficent range of both authorities,
human and divine. * * * * American humanity hates us, scorns us,
disowns and denies, in a thousand ways, our very personality. The
outspread wing of American christianity, apparently broad enough to
give shelter to a perishing world, refuses to cover us. To us, its
bones are brass, and its features iron. In running thither for shelter
and succor, we have only fled from the hungry blood-hound to the
devouring wolf—from a corrupt and selfish world, to a hollow and
hypocritical church.”—_Speech before American and Foreign Anti-Slavery
Society, May_, 1854.
Four years or more, from 1837 to 1841, he struggled on, in New Bedford,
sawing wood, rolling casks, or doing what labor he might, to support
himself and young family; four years he brooded over the scars which
slavery and semi-slavery had inflicted upon his body and soul; and
then, with his wounds yet unhealed, he fell among the Garrisonians—a
glorious waif to those most ardent reformers. It happened one day, at
Nantucket, that he, diffidently and reluctantly, was led to address an
anti-slavery meeting. He was about the age when the younger Pitt
entered the House of Commons; like Pitt, too, he stood up a born
orator.
William Lloyd Garrison, who was happily present, writes thus of Mr.
Douglass’ maiden effort; “I shall never forget his first speech at the
convention—the extraordinary emotion it excited in my own mind—the
powerful impression it created upon a crowded auditory, completely
taken by surprise. * * * I think I never hated slavery so intensely as
at that moment; certainly, my perception of the enormous outrage which
is inflicted by it on the godlike nature of its victims, was rendered
far more clear than ever. There stood one in physical proportions and
stature commanding and exact—in intellect richly endowed—in natural
eloquence a prodigy.” 1
It is of interest to compare Mr. Douglass’s account of this meeting
with Mr. Garrison’s. Of the two, I think the latter the most correct.
It must have been a grand burst of eloquence! The pent up agony,
indignation and pathos of an abused and harrowed boyhood and youth,
bursting out in all their freshness and overwhelming earnestness!
This unique introduction to its great leader, led immediately to the
employment of Mr. Douglass as an agent by the American Anti-Slavery
Society. So far as his self-relying and independent character would
permit, he became, after the strictest sect, a Garrisonian. It is not
too much to say, that he formed a complement which they needed, and
they were a complement equally necessary to his “make-up.” With his
deep and keen sensitiveness to wrong, and his wonderful memory, he came
from the land of bondage full of its woes and its evils, and painting
them in characters of living light; and, on his part, he found, told
out in sound Saxon phrase, all those principles of justice and right
and liberty, which had dimly brooded over the dreams of his youth,
seeking definite forms and verbal expression. It must have been an
electric flashing of thought, and a knitting of soul, granted to but
few in this life, and will be a life-long memory to those who
participated in it. In the society, moreover, of Wendell Phillips,
Edmund Quincy, William Lloyd Garrison, and other men of earnest faith
and refined culture, Mr. Douglass enjoyed the high advantage of their
assistance and counsel in the labor of self-culture, to which he now
addressed himself with wonted energy. Yet, these gentlemen, although
proud of Frederick Douglass, failed to fathom, and bring out to the
light of day, the highest qualities of his mind; the force of their own
education stood in their own way: they did not delve into the mind of a
colored man for capacities which the pride of race led them to believe
to be restricted to their own Saxon blood. Bitter and vindictive
sarcasm, irresistible mimicry, and a pathetic narrative of his own
experiences of slavery, were the intellectual manifestations which they
encouraged him to exhibit on the platform or in the lecture desk.
A visit to England, in 1845, threw Mr. Douglass among men and women of
earnest souls and high culture, and who, moreover, had never drank of
the bitter waters of American caste. For the first time in his life, he
breathed an atmosphere congenial to the longings of his spirit, and
felt his manhood free and unrestricted. The cordial and manly greetings
of the British and Irish audiences in public, and the refinement and
elegance of the social circles in which he mingled, not only as an
equal, but as a recognized man of genius, were, doubtless, genial and
pleasant resting places in his hitherto thorny and troubled journey
through life. There are joys on the earth, and, to the wayfaring
fugitive from American slavery or American caste, this is one of them.
But his sojourn in England was more than a joy to Mr. Douglass. Like
the platform at Nantucket, it awakened him to the consciousness of new
powers that lay in him. From the pupilage of Garrisonism he rose to the
dignity of a teacher and a thinker; his opinions on the broader aspects
of the great American question were earnestly and incessantly sought,
from various points of view, and he must, perforce, bestir himself to
give suitable answer. With that prompt and truthful perception which
has led their sisters in all ages of the world to gather at the feet
and support the hands of reformers, the gentlewomen of England 2 were
foremost to encourage and strengthen him to carve out for himself a
path fitted to his powers and energies, in the life-battle against
slavery and caste to which he was pledged. And one stirring thought,
inseparable from the British idea of the evangel of freedom, must have
smote his ear from every side—
Hereditary bondmen! know ye not
Who would be free, themselves mast strike the blow?
The result of this visit was, that on his return to the United States,
he established a newspaper. This proceeding was sorely against the