Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass | Page 5

what you put in the other scale."
Reader! are you with the man-stealers in sympathy and purpose, or on
the side of their down-trodden victims? If with the former, then are you
the foe of God and man. If with the latter, what are you prepared to do
and dare in their behalf? Be faithful, be vigilant, be untiring in your
efforts to break every yoke, and let the oppressed go free. Come what
may--cost what it may--inscribe on the banner which you unfurl to the
breeze, as your religious and political motto--"NO COMPROMISE
WITH SLAVERY! NO UNION WITH SLAVEHOLDERS!"
WM. LLOYD GARRISON BOSTON, May 1, 1845.

LETTER FROM WENDELL PHILLIPS, ESQ.
BOSTON, APRIL 22, 1845.
My Dear Friend:
You remember the old fable of "The Man and the Lion," where the lion
complained that he should not be so misrepresented "when the lions
wrote history."
I am glad the time has come when the "lions write history." We have
been left long enough to gather the character of slavery from the
involuntary evidence of the masters. One might, indeed, rest
sufficiently satisfied with what, it is evident, must be, in general, the
results of such a relation, without seeking farther to find whether they

have followed in every instance. Indeed, those who stare at the
half-peck of corn a week, and love to count the lashes on the slave's
back, are seldom the "stuff" out of which reformers and abolitionists
are to be made. I remember that, in 1838, many were waiting for the
results of the West India experiment, before they could come into our
ranks. Those "results" have come long ago; but, alas! few of that
number have come with them, as converts. A man must be disposed to
judge of emancipation by other tests than whether it has increased the
produce of sugar,--and to hate slavery for other reasons than because it
starves men and whips women,--before he is ready to lay the first stone
of his anti-slavery life.
I was glad to learn, in your story, how early the most neglected of
God's children waken to a sense of their rights, and of the injustice
done them. Experience is a keen teacher; and long before you had
mastered your A B C, or knew where the "white sails" of the
Chesapeake were bound, you began, I see, to gauge the wretchedness
of the slave, not by his hunger and want, not by his lashes and toil, but
by the cruel and blighting death which gathers over his soul.
In connection with this, there is one circumstance which makes your
recollections peculiarly valuable, and renders your early insight the
more remarkable. You come from that part of the country where we are
told slavery appears with its fairest features. Let us hear, then, what it is
at its best estate--gaze on its bright side, if it has one; and then
imagination may task her powers to add dark lines to the picture, as she
travels southward to that (for the colored man) Valley of the Shadow of
Death, where the Mississippi sweeps along.
Again, we have known you long, and can put the most entire
confidence in your truth, candor, and sincerity. Every one who has
heard you speak has felt, and, I am confident, every one who reads your
book will feel, persuaded that you give them a fair specimen of the
whole truth. No one-sided portrait,--no wholesale complaints,--but
strict justice done, whenever individual kindliness has neutralized, for a
moment, the deadly system with which it was strangely allied. You
have been with us, too, some years, and can fairly compare the twilight

of rights, which your race enjoy at the North, with that "noon of night"
under which they labor south of Mason and Dixon's line. Tell us
whether, after all, the half-free colored man of Massachusetts is worse
off than the pampered slave of the rice swamps!
In reading your life, no one can say that we have unfairly picked out
some rare specimens of cruelty. We know that the bitter drops, which
even you have drained from the cup, are no incidental aggravations, no
individual ills, but such as must mingle always and necessarily in the
lot of every slave. They are the essential ingredients, not the occasional
results, of the system.
After all, I shall read your book with trembling for you. Some years
ago, when you were beginning to tell me your real name and birthplace,
you may remember I stopped you, and preferred to remain ignorant of
all. With the exception of a vague description, so I continued, till the
other day, when you read me your memoirs. I hardly knew, at the time,
whether to thank you or not for the sight of them, when I reflected that
it