Frederick Douglass, the Orator - Monroe County Library System

Central Library of Rochester and Monroe County · Historic Monographs Collection
LIFE OF FREDERICK DOUGLASS. 103
to establish it. To assert it, is to call forth a
sympathetic response from every human heart,
and to send a thrill of joy and gladness round
the world. Tyrants, oppressors, and slaveholders
are stunned by its utterance, while the oppressed
and enslaved of all lands hail it as an angel
of deliverance. Its assertion in Russia, in Austria,
in Egypt, in fifteen states of the American
Union, is a crime. In the harems of Turkey,
and on the Southern plantations of Carolina, it is
alike prohibited; for the guilty oppressors of
every clime understand its truths and appreciate
its electric power."
The following extract, a model of passionate
eloquence, is from an oration delivered on the
Fourth of July, 1852, to the citizens of Rochester.
"THE WHITE MAN'S FOURTH OF JULY.
" To me the American slave-trade is a terrible
reality. When a child, my soul was often pierced
with a sense of its horrors. I lived on Philpot
street, Fells Point, Baltimore, and have watched
from the wharves the slave-ships in the basin, anchored
from the shore, with their cargoes of
human flesh, waiting for favorable winds to waft
them down the Chesapeake. There was at that
time a grand slave-mart kept at the head of Pratt
street, by Austin Woldfolle. His agents were
sent into every town and county in Maryland,