Frederick Douglass, the Orator - Monroe County Library System

Central Library of Rochester and Monroe County · Historic Monographs Collection
234 LIFE 0F FREDERICK DOUGLASS.
as is the movement, powerful as are the delineations,
we all know it is fiction. It is founded on
fact. But this narrative is fact.
And I say that just as God sent Joseph down
into Egypt preparatory to great events which
were to follow; to save much people alive; just
as His word tried him in the house of Potiphar
and in the dungeons of Egypt, so it was with the
boy, the young man Douglass. When he was
praying there with Uncle Lawson, God was girding
him for that day when he was to go from
town to town, from state to state, a flaming herald
of righteousness; to cross oceans, to gain
admission to palaces, lifting up the great clarion
voice, which no one who ever heard can ever forget
or forget its burden. So that I say Frederick
Douglass was fortunate in the misfortune of his
birth. If he had not been born of a slave mother,
one potent factor in the great work put upon the
men and women of his generation would have
been wanting. God wanted a witness. After
Dante wrote his " Inferno " the people of Florence
said as he walked their streets," There goes
the man who has been in hell! " What the
cause of freedom wanted was a man who had
been in hell; in the hell of human slavery, an
eyewitness of the dark possibilities and experiences
of the system into which he was born;
who had felt the iron enter his own soul; who