My Bondage and My Freedom | Page 6

is demonstrated by the ease with which black men, scarce one
remove from barbarism--if slavery can be honored with such a
distinction--vault into the high places of the most advanced and
painfully acquired civilization. Ward and Garnett, Wells Brown and
Pennington, Loguen and Douglass, are banners on the outer wall, under
which abolition is fighting its most successful battles, because they are
living exemplars of the practicability of the most radical abolitionism;
for, they were all of them born to the doom of slavery, some of them
remained slaves until adult age, yet they all have not only won equality
to their white fellow citizens, in civil, religious, political and social
rank, but they have also illustrated and adorned our common country
by their genius, learning and eloquence.
The characteristics whereby Mr. Douglass has won first rank among
these remarkable men, and is still rising toward highest rank among
living Americans, are abundantly laid bare in the book before us. Like
the autobiography of Hugh Miller, it carries us so far back into early
childhood, as to throw light upon the question, "when positive and
persistent memory begins in the human being." And, like Hugh Miller,
he must have been a shy old-fashioned child, occasionally oppressed by
what he could not well account for, peering and poking about among
the layers of right and wrong, of tyrant and thrall, and the
wonderfulness of that hopeless tide of things which brought power to
one race, and unrequited toil to another, until, finally, he stumbled upon
<6>his "first-found Ammonite," hidden away down in the depths of his
own 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.
<7>
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