My Bondage and My Freedom | Page 7

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 <8>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
<9>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