CHAPTER XV

FURTHER EVIDENCES OF POPULAR ESTEEM, WITH GLIMPSES INTO THE PAST

The foregoing chapters contain the important incidents and events in the life of Frederick Douglass. He lived in a great transitional period, and, in his struggle to gain his own freedom, he personified the historic events which took place during that time. His life was so wholly under the public eye, and what he did and stood for during more than fifty years, were so much an integral portion of these years, that it is impossible to obtain an estimate of the man apart from the history of slavery. Frederick Douglass and Anti-slavery, are almost interchangeable terms. In himself he was both the argument and demonstration of the things that gave interest and meaning to his life and times. Yet he had another side not exhibited in the history of which he was a part and which he helped to make. Much of a personal nature that would add interest to his life and partly explain the sources of his strength as a leader of men, can be added to the portrait.

The limitations of this volume will permit only a brief outline of some of the things that Frederick Douglass said and did during the last thirty years of his life, which chronologically belonged to previous chapters, but which for the sake of their peculiar significance are reserved for this.

As may be inferred from what has appeared in the course of this narrative, Frederick Douglass was a more than ordinarily interesting personality. He was a figure to attract attention anywhere, and especially so during the last twenty-five years of his life. He was over six feet in height, broad-shouldered, well-proportioned, and his movements had all the directness and grace of a man who had been bred a prince rather than a slave. His features were broad, strong, and impressive. His complexion was that of a mulatto. His head was strikingly large, and crowned with an abundant crop of white hair of almost silken fineness. His eyes were brown and mildly animated. His voice was strong, but of mellow tone. When he was aroused, however, it would fairly thunder with the passionate earnestness of the man. In conversation he was delightful. His manner was graceful and wholly free from personal mannerisms. His mental and moral faculties were well balanced. He was a man without technical education, yet he had more than ordinary learning. All that he knew was acquired outside of schoolrooms and without school teachers. His great library bore witness to his love of books. In the history of governments and of races, and in mental philosophy and poetry, he found special delight. No trained elocutionist could recite verse with better effect. He was especially fond of Byron, Burns, Coleridge, and Pierpont.

He was always quick to recognize ability in one of his race, and so had a peculiar fondness and interest in Paul Laurence Dunbar, who, at his death, was just beginning to be known as a poet, and who received his first real encouragement from Frederick Douglass.

He had an unfailing memory, and consequently a good command of everything he ever saw, heard, or read. He was liked and honored by men and women, not only because he was interesting, but also because he was singularly free from crotchets, idiosyncrasies, and ill-temper. He was of a lovable disposition, and especially so in the latter days of his life. The all too common character blemishes of selfishness, envy, and jealousy were never charged against him. His whole nature was keyed to high, generous impulses. He loved the right, and hated wrong in any form.

No man of his prominence was freer from vices: he was of temperate habits, clean speech, and personal rectitude. His sense of honor was not

## partial, but a controlling force in all of his relationships to men and

things.

He was also fortunately free from family troubles, except the loss by death of a beloved little daughter, whose few gentle and beautiful years had been his delight, a sorrow which deeply shadowed the earlier period of his public career. His wife, who had helped him to gain his freedom, devoted her life to his comfort and to the happiness of his home. His three stalwart sons, Lewis, Charles, and Frederick, Jr., honored him by lives of usefulness, and there was always the closest intimacy between him and them. His oldest girl, named Rosa, was very dear to him. She grew up by his side as a faithful helper in his work as well as a devoted daughter. She is widely known and loved for her culture and unselfish disposition. In short, Frederick Douglass’s family was worthy of him. If by his deeds he brought to them honor and opportunity, he lived long enough to see his example and precepts honored again in them.

His home in Cedar Hill, overlooking the Capitol, was a delightful spot. Everything about it bespoke the character of the man. The broad grounds, shaded with trees, the well-cultivated garden, all told of his love of nature. Within the ample house there was a quiet, restful refinement, revealing the taste and habits of the scholar. Books, busts, and pictures all bore witness to that instinctive thirst for culture which no one who knew him well could fail to recognize. He had an extraordinary passion for the violin, and, although he did not place a very high estimate upon his own ability, yet he, as well as his nearest friends, received much enjoyment from his knowledge of the use of this instrument.

In later years he found a special delight in the fact that his grandson, Joseph Douglass, exhibited a decided taste and a real genius for the violin. A more affecting picture of the power of music could scarcely be imagined than that of the old man sitting and listening with rapt and tearful attention when this boy played for him some of his favorite tunes.

But perhaps these glimpses of the personality of Frederick Douglass are sufficient to suggest that, behind the great orator, the active politician, the anxious leader in a critical period, there was a real man, whose domestic tastes and disciplined heart give an added value to his public life. It is not at all surprising that one thus gifted should have had many intimates among the best people of his generation. The leading statesmen, educators, and literary men were counted as his close and personal friends. Behind the respect that was felt for his natural talents and his unusual achievements was a sincere admiration and even fondness for the large and warmhearted nature which could laugh and cry and be touched by the social delights of home and fireside. He was a man of opinions, of ideals, of imagination, and had the gift of adequate expression for every thought and emotion.

After the death of his first wife, Mr. Douglass married again, in 1884, and for this step he was severely criticised. The fact that his second wife, Miss Helen Pitts, was a white woman caused something like a revulsion of feeling throughout the entire country. His own race especially condemned him, and the notion seemed to be quite general that he had made the most serious mistake of his life. Just how deep-seated was the sentiment of white and black people alike against amalgamation has never been so clearly demonstrated as in this case. Douglass was sorely hurt by the many unkind things said about his marriage by members of his own race.

The woman whom he married he had known and admired for many years. She had helped him in various ways in his literary work. She belonged to one of the best families in western New York, and in following the natural impulse of his attachment, he failed to take into consideration the offense his act might give to public feeling. The resentment felt by the people because of his disregard of its unwritten law never entirely died out in his lifetime, but he himself got over the personal discomfiture of it. In addressing a large audience of white and colored people in Springfield, Mo., in the fall of 1893, he referred to this incident in the following words: “I am strongly of the opinion that you will want me to say something concerning my second marriage. I will tell you: My first wife, you see, was the color of my mother, and my second wife the color of my father; you see I wanted to be perfectly fair to both races.” This clever bit of raillery on a very delicate subject put him on good terms with his audience and if any were inclined to think the less of him because of his marriage the fact did not then appear.

In the period from 1865 to the Columbian Exposition at Chicago, in 1893, Mr. Douglass was interested in many things. He made various addresses outside of the range of politics, and was busy to the limit of his waning strength. What he wrote found ready acceptance in important publications, and his absence from any great national gathering was a matter of regret.

Among the many tokens of respect that continued to come to him from all parts of the country, he cherished none so much as the tribute paid to him by the city of Rochester, his home during the twenty-five formative years of his career. In the name of the city, some of its leading citizens caused to be placed in Sibley’s Hall, at Rochester University, a noble bust of Frederick Douglass. It was a gracious recognition of the esteem in which he was held by the people who had had the best opportunity of knowing him. The Rochester _Democrat and Chronicle_ expressed the sentiment of the city in the following eulogy written at the time:

“Frederick Douglass can hardly be said to have risen to greatness on account of the opportunities which the republic offers to self-made men, and concerning which we are apt to talk with an abundance of self-gratulation. It sought to fetter his mind equally with his body. For him it builded no schoolhouse, and for him it erected no church. So far as he was concerned, freedom was mockery, and law was the instrument of tyranny. In spite of law and gospel, despite of statutes which enthralled him and opportunities which jeered at him, he made himself, by trampling on the laws and breaking through the thick darkness that encompassed him. There is no sadder commentary upon human slavery than the life of Frederick Douglass. He put it under his feet and stood erect in the majesty of his intellect; but how many intellects, brilliant and powerful as his, it stamped upon and crushed, no mortal can tell until the secret of its terrible despotism is fully revealed. Thanks to the conquering might of American freedom, such sad beginnings of such illustrious lives as that of Frederick Douglass are no longer possible; and that they are no longer possible, is largely due to him, who when his lips were unlocked, became a deliverer of his people. Not alone did his voice proclaim emancipation. Eloquent as was that voice, his life in its pathos and in its grandeur, was more deeply eloquent still; and where shall be found, in the annals of humanity, a sweeter rendering of poetic justice than that he, who has passed through such vicissitudes of degradation and exaltation, has been permitted to behold the redemption of his race?

“Rochester is proud to remember that Frederick Douglass was, for many years, one of her citizens. He who pointed out the house where Douglass lived, hardly exaggerated when he called it the residence of the greatest of our citizens, for Douglass must rank as among the greatest men, not only of this city, but of the nation as well—great in gifts, greater in utilizing them, great in the persuasion of his speech, greater in the purpose that informed it.

“Rochester could do nothing more graceful than to perpetuate in marble the features of this citizen in her hall of learning; and it is pleasant for her to know that he so well appreciates the esteem in which he is held here. It was a thoughtful thing for Rochester to do, and the response is as heartfelt as the tribute is appropriate.”

Among his notable addresses during the period under review was one delivered on Decoration Day in 1871 at Arlington. His theme was “The Unknown Loyal Dead.” President Grant, the members of the Cabinet, and a large number of the most prominent people of Washington were present, and the occasion was unusually impressive. He rose grandly to the need of the hour. The oration was in his best vein and is in part as follows:—

“Friends and Fellow Citizens:—Tarry here for a moment. My words shall be few and simple. The solemn rites of this hour and place call for no lengthened speech. There is, in the very air of this resting-ground of the unknown dead, a silent, subtle and all-pervading eloquence, far more touching, impressive, and thrilling, than living lips have ever uttered. Into the measureless depths of every loyal soul it is now whispering lessons of all that is precious, priceless, holiest and most enduring in human existence.

“Dark and sad will be the hour to this nation when it forgets to pay grateful homage to its greatest benefactors. The offering we bring to-day is due alike to the patriot soldiers, dead, and their noble comrades who still live; for, whether living or dead, whether in time or in eternity, the loyal soldiers who imperiled all for country and freedom are one and inseparable.

“These unknown heroes whose whitened bones have been piously gathered here, and whose green graves we now strew with sweet and beautiful flowers, choice emblems alike of pure hearts and brave spirits, reached in their glorious career that last highest point of nobleness beyond which human power cannot go. They died for their country.

“No loftier tribute can be paid to the most illustrious of all the benefactors of mankind than we pay to these unrecognized soldiers when we write above their graves this shining epitaph.

“When the dark and vengeful spirit of slavery, always ambitious, preferring ‘to rule in Hell than to serve in Heaven’ fired the southern heart and stirred all the malign elements of discord; when our great republic, the hope of freedom and self-government throughout the world, had reached the point of supreme peril; when the union of the states was torn and rent asunder at the centre, and the armies of a gigantic rebellion came forth with broad blades and bloody hands to destroy the very foundation of American society, the unknown braves who flung themselves into the yawning chasm, where cannon roared and bullets whistled, fought and fell. They died for their country.

“We are sometimes asked, in the name of patriotism, to forget the merits of this fearful struggle, and to remember with equal admiration those who struck at the nation’s life and those who struck to save it; those who fought for slavery and those who fought for liberty and justice.

“I am no minister of malice. I would not strike the fallen. I would not repel the repentant; but may my right hand forget her cunning and my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth, if I forget the difference between the parties to that terrible, protracted and bloody conflict.

“If we ought to forget a war which has filled our land with widows and orphans; which has made stumps of men of the very flower of our youth; which has sent them on the journey of life armless, legless, maimed and mutilated; which has piled up a debt heavier than a mountain of gold, swept uncounted thousands of men into bloody graves and planted agony at a million hearthstones—I say, if this war is to be forgotten, I ask in the name of things sacred, what shall men remember?”

Five years later Mr. Douglass was again honored with an invitation to deliver the address in memory of Abraham Lincoln, at Lincoln Park, in Washington. The occasion and the man were happily blended. No orator ever had a more inspiring theme. The rulers of the nation in the persons of President Grant and his Cabinet advisers, members of the United States Senate, Justices of the Supreme Court, and a great many high officials were present to evidence the importance of the day; and in such a company of distinguished people Douglass delivered what many call his supreme effort as an orator. The speech later was printed as a pamphlet, and extensively read throughout the country.

His closing words addressed to his own people, prescient, as they seemed to be of days and dangers as yet but vaguely understood, made an ineffaceable impression upon men of his color who heard him:

“We have done a great work for our race to-day. In doing honor to the memory of our friend and liberator, we have been doing highest honor to ourselves and those who are to come after us. We have been attaching to ourselves a name and fame imperishable and immortal. We have also been defending ourselves from a blighting scandal, when now it shall be said that the colored man is soulless, that he has no appreciation of benefits or benefactors; when the foul reproach of ingratitude is hurled at us, and it is attempted to scourge us beyond the range of human brotherhood, we may calmly point to this monument we have this day erected to the memory of Abraham Lincoln.”

In his address before the Tennessee Colored Agricultural and Mechanical Association at Nashville, September 18, 1873, he furnished the country new evidence of his ability to give instruction, to inspire hope and ambition, and to encourage thrift. Though not an agriculturist by occupation, his speech can still be used as a manual for the young farmer. It, like his other addresses, is full of practical and useful maxims. His quotation from Theodore Parker, “All the space between man’s mind and God’s mind is crowded with truths which wait to be discovered and organized into law for the practice of men,” indicates the tone of high hopefulness that ran through all his appeals to the people. “If we look abroad over our country and observe the condition of the colored people,” he said, “we shall find their greatest want to be regular and lucrative employment for their energies. They have secured their freedom, it is true, but not the friendship and favor of the people around them.... On account of bad treatment, great numbers are driven from the country to the larger cities where they quickly learn to imitate the vices and follies of the least exemplary whites. Under these circumstances, I hail agriculture as a refuge for the oppressed.”

Insisting that the condition of the Negro in this country is exceptional, he reminded his hearers that “the farm is our last resort, and if we fail here, I do not see how we can succeed elsewhere. We are not like the Irish, an organized political power; we are not shrewd like the Hebrews, capable of making fortunes by buying and selling old clothes.”

The address is rich with maxims that are good to remember and to use as rules of conduct; such as:

“Emancipation has liberated the land as well as the people.”

“It is not fertility, but liberty that cultivates a country.”

“The state of Tennessee is now to be cultivated by liberty, by knowledge which comes of liberty, by the respectability of labor.”

“Neither the slave nor his master can abandon all at once the deeply entrenched errors and habits of centuries.”

“There is no work that men are required to do, which they cannot better and more economically do with education than without it.”

“Muscle is mighty but mind is mightier, and there is no field for the exercise of mind other than is found in the cultivation of the soul.”

“As a race we have suffered from two very opposite causes, disparagement on the one hand and undue praise on the other.”

“An important question to be answered by evidences of our progress is: Whether the black man will prove a better master to himself than the white master was to him.”

“Accumulate property. This may sound to you like a new gospel. No people can ever make any social and mental improvement whose exertions are limited. Poverty is our greatest calamity.... On the other hand, property, money, if you please, will produce for us the only condition upon which any people can rise to the dignity of genuine manhood.”

“Without property there can be no leisure. Without leisure there can be no invention, without invention there can be no progress.”

“We can work, and by this means we can retrieve all our losses.”

“Knowledge, wisdom, culture, refinement, manners, are all founded on work and the wealth which work brings.”

“In nine cases out of ten a man’s condition is worse by changing his location. You would better endeavor to remove the evil from your door than to move and leave it there.”

“If you have a few acres, stick to them.”

“Life is too short, time is too valuable, to waste in the experiment of seeking new homes. People are about as good in your neighborhood as anywhere else in the world, and may need you to make them better.”

The foregoing extracts sufficiently indicate the character and importance of this Nashville address. It was quite unlike speeches that had been made by most of the colored leaders to their people. While emphasizing the importance of hard work, of duties, and patience, he indulged in no false hopes and made no extravagant claims. The every-day facts, needs, and responsibilities of the people on the soil were, he held, the paramount things for men who were beginning their social development. In short, it was a strong and stirring call to the Negroes to look about them, and not afar, for the instruments and forces that must be utilized for their salvation.

Belonging to this latter period of his life, another address, in character quite different from the one just referred to, illustrates how the colored people have been carried from one extreme of hopefulness to the other of despair and uncertainty by the changes in public sentiment concerning them.

In 1883 the Supreme Court of the United States rendered a decision declaring unconstitutional what was known as the “Civil Rights Bill.” This was one of the Reconstruction measures, championed by Senator Sumner, and, when brought forward it was regarded by the colored people and their friends as a sort of charter of liberty. It undertook to prevent discriminations against Negroes in hotels, restaurants, and other places of public accommodation. At the time of its enactment it was considered a necessary appendage to the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, and the colored people everywhere felt a strong sense of protection in its provisions.

When the Supreme Court’s opinion declaring the law, outside of the District of Columbia and other national territory, to be null and void, was made known, it produced a sensation of alarm and almost despair among Negroes everywhere. They saw in this decision a complete reversal of the public sentiment that a few years before was so strongly favorable to them. They began to lose faith in the potency of the letter of the law, either to define or protect their rights. It was a sort of rude reminder that, if they would be secure in their rights, they must rely upon something else than mere statutes. Here was an apt illustration of the maxim that what the law gives, the law can take away. In relying upon only this for his salvation, the Negro had been suspended between hope and despair, until it seemed to him that there was no such thing as stability of sentiment toward him. The first impulse was to protest, in the name of all the colored people, not only against the letter of the decision, but also against haunting implications that they had no rights which the law of the land was bound to respect.

The spirit of resentment found adequate expression in a great mass-meeting arranged for and held in the city of Washington in 1883. Frederick Douglass was selected, as a matter of course, as the one colored man in the country who could best voice the feelings of the people affected by the decision. The other speaker was the eloquent Robert G. Ingersoll. The meeting was a notable one in every respect. The most distinguished leaders of the race were there, and the audience was large and earnest. There were present, too, a great number of prominent white people who sympathized with the colored race. The address of Mr. Douglass was one of the most interesting ever made by him. In it he showed his ability to put into the most telling form the arguments with which it seemed possible at that time to counteract, to some extent, the moral effect of the decision upon the colored and the white communities. His speech showed a wide acquaintance with the principles of the law and more than usually profound knowledge of the philosophy of democracy. The following extracts will indicate its character, and reflect, no doubt, the opinions and sentiments of the meeting and the time:

“It makes us feel as if some one was stamping on the graves of our mothers, or desecrating our sacred temples.”

“We have been, as a class, grievously wounded in the house of our friends.”

“This decision has swept over the land like a cyclone, leaving moral desolation in its track.”

“Inasmuch as the law in question is in favor of liberty and justice, it ought to have had the benefit of any doubt which could arise as to its strict constitutionality.”

“If any man has come in here with his breast heaving with passion and expecting to hear violent denunciation of the Supreme Court on account of this decision, he has mistaken the object of this meeting. Its judges live, and ought to live, an eagle’s flight beyond the reach of fear or favor, praise or blame, profit or loss.”

“In humiliating the colored people of this country, this decision has humbled this nation.”

“No man can put a chain about the ankle of his fellow-men without at least finding the other end of it about his own neck.”

“Prejudice is a spirit infernal, against which enlightened men should wage perpetual war.”

“We want no black Ireland in America. We want no aggrieved class in America. Strong as we are without the Negro, we are stronger with him than without him.”

“Our legislators, our President, and the judges should have a care lest by forcing these people outside the law, they destroy that love of country, which in the day of trouble is needful to the nation’s defense.”

“Oh, for a Supreme Court of the United States which shall be as true to the claims of humanity as the Supreme Court formerly was to the demand of slavery.”

“What is a state in the absence of the people who compose it?”

“Land, air, and water do not discriminate. What does it matter to the colored citizen that a state may not insult him if the citizen of the state may? The decision is a concession to race pride, selfishness, and meanness, and will be received with joy by every upholder of caste in the land, and for this I deplore and denounce the decision.”

The few addresses just referred to are, in point of the subject-matter and the occasions that called them forth, the most important and able made by Frederick Douglass after emancipation. On each occasion there was a call for the supreme man of the Negro race and there were few, except a small group of colored people, to question his right to be so regarded.

Frederick Douglass, however, was something more than a “race leader”; he was always an eminent citizen of the republic, and as such his interests were not wholly rimmed about by the sorrows and aspirations of his own people. He was a careful student of his times and had an intelligent concern in all the great questions that arose and called for an opinion. It was quite in keeping with his cosmopolitan spirit that he should be opposed to the policy of our government in excluding the Chinese from American shores because, as he said, “I know of no rights of race superior to the rights of humanity.” His views on the question, which twenty-five years ago was an urgent one, are more fully expressed in the following extract from one of his addresses on the subject of the “Composite Nation”:—

“Our republic itself is a strong argument in favor of cosmopolitan nationality.... Let the Chinaman come; he will help to augment the national wealth. He will help to develop our boundless resources; he will help to pay off our national debt. He will help to lighten the burden of our national taxation. He will give us the benefit of his skill as a manufacturer, and as a tiller of the soil in which he is unsurpassed. Even the matter of religious liberty, which has cost the world more tears, more blood, and more agony than any other interest, will be helped by his presence. I know of no church more tolerant, of no priesthood, however enlightened, which could safely be trusted with the tremendous power which universal conformity would confer. We should welcome all men of every shade of religious opinion, as among the best means of checking the arrogance and intolerance which are the almost inevitable concomitants of general conformity. Liberty always flourishes best amid the clash and competition of rival religious creeds.”

Reference has already been made to Douglass’s services to the cause of female suffrage. His presence at nearly all of the anniversaries and other important gatherings of those who advocated the enfranchisement of women was expected and his utterances were warmly received.

In the matter of religion, Mr. Douglass was not strictly orthodox in his beliefs, although it will be remembered that during his enslavement he found much consolation in the Bible, and was for a time a Methodist exhorter. His religious views, as he grew older, underwent a radical change. He had no patience with hypocrites. He had seen and heard so much that was cruel, unjust, and almost fiendish under the name of religion, that his faith in sectarianism was badly shaken. In his early anti-slavery addresses, he indulged in many absurd parodies of the pious frauds whom he had known. However, he was not an atheist. He had a deep religious sense, but was more fully under the influence of the theological opinions of Theodore Parker than of any other school of religious thought. His best friends and associates were among the Unitarians, the Quakers, and others of liberal faith. His views on religion are finely expressed in a bit of correspondence published by Mr. Holland in his biography. In response to a cordial invitation to speak before the “Free Religious Association” in Boston, in 1874, he wrote:

“I cannot be present at your Free Religious Convention in Boston. This is, of course, of smaller consequence to others than to myself, for I should come more to hear than to be heard. Freedom is a word of charming sound, not only to the tasked and tortured slaves, who toil for an earthly master, but for those who would break the galling chains of darkness and superstition. Regarding the Free Religious movement as one for light, love, and liberty, limited only by reason and human welfare, and opposed to those who convert life and death into enemies of human happiness, who people the invisible world with ghastly taskmasters, I give it hearty welcome. Only the truth can make men free, and I trust that your convention will be guided in all its utterances by its light and feel its power. I know many of its good men and women, who are likely to assemble with you, and I would gladly share with them the burden of reproach which their attacks upon popular error will be sure to bring upon them.”

Extracts from letters to friends indicate still more clearly the deeper currents of his thought.

“I once had a large stock of hope on hand, but like the sand in the glass, it has about run out. My present solace is in the cultivation of religious submission to the inevitable, in teaching myself that I am but a breath of the infinite, perhaps not so much. I was very sorry not to be able to attend the Free Religious Convention. I shall, hereafter, try to know more of these people.... I sometimes, at long intervals, try my old violin; but after all the music of the past and of imagination is sweeter than any my unpracticed and unskilled bow can produce. So I lay my dear old fiddle aside, and listen to the soft, silent, distant music of other days which, in the hush of my spirit, I still find lingering somewhere in the mysterious depths of my soul.”

“I do not know that I am an evolutionist, but to this extent, I am one. I certainly have more patience with those who trace mankind upward from a low condition, even from the lower animals, than with those who start him at a point of perfection and conduct him to a level with the brutes. I have no sympathy with a theory that starts man in Heaven, and stops him in Hell.... An irrepressible conflict, grander than that described by the late William H. Seward, is perpetually going on. Two hostile and irreconcilable tendencies, broad as the world of man, are in the open field; good and evil, truth and error, enlightenment and superstition.”

One of the stirring incidents of this post-slavery period was the “exodus movement.” In the summer of 1879, great numbers of Negroes, as if by concerted action, began to emigrate from the South and the southwestern states toward the North and West. This movement was the first manifestation of discontent ever made by the colored people on a large scale. It was in no way due to politics, but was rather an effort to free themselves from the conditions under which they were compelled to work and live. Their economic state was bad, and there seemed to be little hope of improvement. The exodus grew to such an extent that it produced something like national alarm and there were grave apprehensions that much suffering would attend the efforts of the Negroes to escape from poverty and dependence. Mr. Douglass has given the following reasons for the dissatisfaction:

“Work as hard, faithfully, and constantly as they may, live as plainly and as sparingly as they may, they are no better off at the end of the year than at the beginning. They say that they are the dupes and victims of cunning and fraud in signing contracts which they cannot read and cannot fully understand; that they are compelled to trade at stores owned in whole or in part, by their employers; and that they are paid with orders and not with money. They say that they have to pay double the value of nearly everything they buy; that they are compelled to pay a rental of ten dollars a year for an acre of ground that will not bring thirty dollars under the hammer; that land-owners are in league to prevent land owning by Negroes; that when they work the land on shares, they barely make a living; that outside the towns and cities no provision is made for education, and, ground down as they are, they cannot themselves employ teachers to instruct their children.”

As a general rule, the colored people in the North looked upon the exodus hopefully. To them it was a sign of courage on the part of their Southern brethren, and a protest against bad treatment. Frederick Douglass, however, who was always expected to have an opinion and express it, deplored the “unintelligent and somewhat aimless running away from the ills they have to others they know not of.” He could see no salvation for the Negro in the Northern states. “For him, as a Southern laborer,” he said, “there is no competition or substitute,” and he insisted that the freedman is always to be “the arbiter” of Southern “destiny.” He held that the best place for the Negro to work out his salvation was at home. His arguments are condensed in the following extracts from his published views:

“It may well enough be said that the Negro question is not so desperate as the advocates of this exodus would have the public believe; that there is still hope that the Negro will ultimately have his rights as a man, and be fully protected in the South; that in several of the old slave-states his citizenship and his right to vote are already respected and protected; that the same, in time, will be secured by the Negro in other states.... The Fourteenth Amendment makes him a citizen, and the Fifteenth Amendment makes him a voter. With power behind him, at work for him, and which cannot be taken from him, the Negro, at the South may wisely bide his time.

“As an assertion of power hitherto held in bitter contempt; as an emphatic and stinging protest against high-handed, greedy, and shameless injustice to the weak and defenseless; as a means of opening the blind eyes of oppressors to their folly and peril, the exodus has done valuable service. Whether it has accomplished all of which it is capable in this particular direction for the present, is a question which may well be considered. With a moderate degree of intelligent leadership among the laboring classes at the South, properly handling the justice of their cause, and wisely using the exodus example, they can easily exact better terms for their labor than ever before. Exodus is medicine, not food; it is for disease, not health; it is not to be taken from choice, but necessity. In anything like a normal condition of things, the South is the best place for the Negro. Nowhere else is there for him a promise of a happier future.

“Let him stay there if he can, and save both the South and himself to civilization. The American people are bound, if they are or can be bound to anything, to keep the north gate of the South open to black and white and to all people. The time to assert a right, Webster says, is when it is called into question. If it is attempted by force or fraud, to compel the colored people to stay, then they should by all means go; go quickly and die if need be in the attempt. Thus far and to this extent any man may be an ‘emigrationist.’ In no case must the Negro be bottled up or caged up. He must be left free like any other American citizen, to choose his own habitation, and to go where he shall like. Though it may not be for his interest to leave the South, his right and power to leave it may be his best means of making it possible for him to stay there in peace. Woe to the oppressed and destitute of all countries and races, if the rich and powerful are to decide when and where they shall go or stay.”

These sentiments of Mr. Douglass are interesting, not only as having a bearing on a question still vital to the South, but also as showing the orator’s secret affection for the land of his birth and early struggles. In spite of his fifty years of life and triumphs in the North, he was still a Southerner in spirit and in his primary attachments. His imagination and memory still traveled back to the associations that contained more of bitterness than joy,—yet some joy. There seemed to be in the depths of his soul a living sympathy for those who were enslaved with himself, and who were still wearing the scars of servitude. The land that was worked by the toil and sweat of generation after generation of his people, and the land in which they were still laboring and hoping on, he loved in spite of himself. He believed in the race in spite of its apparent helplessness, and he believed in the South in spite of all that he had suffered. It pained him to see his people flee from the land of their birth, of their sorrows, but also the land of their better destiny. He would not have them abandon what would some day be theirs if they could but endure, and work, and wait.

With this sort of attachment to the South, it is not strange that, even after fifty years of complete separation, he still cherished the hope and eagerly welcomed an opportunity when it was offered him, to return to Talbot County, Md., his birthplace.

The time of his visit to the land upon which he had formerly been held as a slave, was happily chosen so as to heighten the contrast between the past and present, for he was now United States Marshal of the District of Columbia. It required a vivid imagination to see anything in common between the barefooted, half-naked, half-starved, and penniless slave boy of fifty years ago and the stately-mannered gentleman and high government official of this day.

The man whose misfortune it was at that time to have been Douglass’s master, lay on a bed of sickness with little hope of recovery. Thomas Auld had passed the allotted three score years and ten. When he learned that Marshal Douglass was actually on his ground as a visitor, he at once sent for him. The name of Thomas Auld was made noted all over the land wherever Douglass had spoken concerning slavery and slave-holders, and because of this he had for several years harbored a strong resentment against his one-time runaway slave. Now all was wonderfully changed, and each was in a mood to make amends for the wrongs he was impelled to commit against the other. Mr. Douglass feelingly says:

“Had I been asked, in the days of slavery to visit this man ... it would have been an invitation to the auction block; now he was to me no longer a slave-holder, either in fact or spirit, and I regarded him as I did myself, as a victim of circumstances of birth and education, law and custom. Our courses had been determined for us and not by us. We had both been flung by powers that did not ask our consent, upon a mighty current of life which we could neither resist nor control.... Now as our lives were verging toward a point where differences disappear, even the constancy of hate breaks down and the clouds of pride, passion and selfishness vanish before the brightness of infinite light.”

The meeting between the ex-master and ex-slave was impressive and beautiful. They were both so overcome with emotion for some moments that neither could speak. Tears dimmed their eyes and the silence was more eloquent than words. As soon as he regained his power of speech, Mr. Douglass, with that instinctive politeness which was characteristic of him, made apology to his former master for the many harsh accusations uttered in the days of slavery, when passion was in the ascendency. The old master was equally frank and said: “I always thought, though, that you were too smart to be a slave, and had I been in your place, I should have done as you did.”

“Captain Auld,” replied Douglass, “I did not run away from you, but from slavery. It was not that I loved Cæsar less, but Rome more.”

With this exchange of apologies and expressions of mutual good-will, the visit came to an end. If Mr. Douglass had any lingering bitterness in his soul, on account of the past, this face-to-face meeting, after so many years and so many changes, had now forever removed it. The laws and customs that so often made it impossible for good men, standing in the intimate relation of master and slave, to understand and respect each other, no longer existed.

Shortly after this interview Mr. Auld passed away, and the fact that the Marshal of the District of Columbia had once been the property of the dead man became a matter of wide comment.

Two years later, Mr. Douglass was again a visitor to Talbot County. He now went on the private yacht of John L. Thomas, United States Collector of Customs at the port of Baltimore. This time he returned to the scenes of his early life on the Lloyd plantation. It will be remembered that it was here the boy was separated from his grandmother, and left the only home he ever had before he became free. His master, Captain Anthony, lived on the Lloyd estate. It was at this place, too, that he was cuffed and half-starved by the hated Aunt Katy, and saw his own loving mother for the last time. Standing amid the scenes of his childhood miseries, looking in vain for faces that he once saw or knew in the long ago, he embodied in himself, perhaps, more changes than have been experienced in the life of any other American.

Colonel Lloyd was away at the time, but every one on the estate was made aware of the visit of Marshal Douglass. The place was rich in traditions concerning this strange visitor, who had come out of a strange past, an era known to but few now living, and he was treated with marked deference by all.

He also visited Easton, which will be remembered as the county-seat of Talbot County, where young Douglass, with his companions, was locked up in jail on the charge of conspiracy to escape from slavery. The old sheriff, who had placed him behind prison-bars, was still living, and said that he was proud to shake hands across the chasm of nearly fifty years. White and black crowded into the little court-house and listened with profound interest to the address he was asked to deliver. The young people, who belonged to the new era of freedom, wondered at his eloquence, and the older ones heard with confused and bewildering emotions.

There seemed to be more of romance than reality, more of apparition than of real substance, in this man, for whom, at one time, the jail, and not the court-house, would have been regarded as a more fitting place.

In the same year Frederick Douglass had another opportunity to revive the memories of the days preceding the war. He was asked to deliver an address on John Brown at Harper’s Ferry. He gladly accepted the invitation, and spoke to an immense concourse of Virginians, white and black, on the very spot where, less than twenty years before, he would, very possibly, have been tried and hanged on the charge of high treason, had he not escaped those who made efforts to arrest him. On the platform close beside him sat the man who was the attorney for the commonwealth of Virginia in the prosecution of Brown. Douglass spoke with boldness in his eulogy of the old raider, and what he said was heartily cheered.

In 1859 Douglass had fled to England as a fugitive from justice because of his presumed complicity in what was then called John Brown’s “crime.” In less than twenty years he was honored by many of the same people who had then hated his name and thirsted for his blood. He could rightly claim to be a part both of the cause and the effect of this remarkable revolution of public opinion. The possibilities of American life were, perhaps, never better illustrated than in his person.

In the fall of 1886, Mr. Douglass, accompanied by his wife, made an extensive tour of Europe and Egypt. He revisited some of the cities in Italy, and crossed the Mediterranean to the land of the Pharaohs. He has written most delightfully of his travels in his _Life and Times_. Everything of historical value in Europe meant a great deal to him, because he was so earnest a student of men and events. Of Victor Hugo, he said, on seeing a memorial to him, that “he was a man whose heart was broad enough to take in the whole world and to rank among the greatest of the human race.”

Upon returning to this country, he had many pleasing evidences that he was greatly missed in his absence, and that his opinions were as eagerly sought as ever on any question that came within the range of his interest.

One of the first public addresses made by him after his return from abroad was in behalf of woman’s suffrage, in Washington, at a meeting of the International Council of Women. He spoke ardently of the progress of the human mind as evidenced by the unveiling of a statue to Galileo, which he had witnessed in Rome. He said:

“Whatever revolutions may have in store for us, one thing is certain: the new revolution in human thought will never go backward. When a great truth once gets abroad in the world, no power on earth can imprison or proscribe its limits, or suppress it. It is bound to go on until it becomes the thought of the world. Such a truth is woman’s right to equal liberty with man. She was born with it, it was hers before she comprehended it. It is inscribed upon all powers and faculties of her soul, and no custom, law, or usage can ever destroy it. Now that it has got fairly fixed in the minds of the few, it is bound to become fixed in the minds of the many, and be supported at last by a great cloud of witnesses which no man can number and no power can withstand.”

In the same year, addressing a suffrage association in Boston, he said: “If the whole is greater than a part; if the sense and sum of human goodness in man and woman combined are greater than that of either alone and separate, then this government that excludes women from all

## participation in its creation, administration, and perpetuation demeans

itself.”

In the matter of the education of his people, Mr. Douglass had a deep and abiding interest. It will be remembered that he believed in the broadest and best possible schooling of the masses. He regarded it as important to consider the Negro’s opportunity in planning for his education. Hence it was that, in addressing the students of Tuskegee in 1892 on the subject of “Self-Made Men,” he laid special stress on the necessity of the learning of trades in connection with other training. Hence his saying that “the earth has no prejudice against color; crops yield as readily to the touch of the black man’s hand as to that of his white brother.”

“Go on,” he continued; “I shall not be with you long; you have heights to ascend and breadths to fill such as I never could and never can. Go on. When you are working with your hands they grow larger; the same is true of your heads.... Seek to acquire knowledge as well as property, and in time you may have the honor of going to Congress. Congress ought to be able to stand a Negro, if the Negro can stand Congress.”

In these addresses before students in college or trade-schools, he took pains to urge that the man with a trade, as well as the man with a profession should be respected and honored, according to the amount of character and intelligence he puts into his work. He insisted that there was no such thing as servility or degradation for one who made his way through the world with an honest heart and skilled hands.

His earnestness in this conviction is further evidenced by one of his last acts in behalf of his people, when he helped to found the Industrial School at Manassas, Va.

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