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]