Frederick Douglass, the Orator - Monroe County Library System

Central Library of Rochester and Monroe County · Historic Monographs Collection
LIFE OF FREDERICK DOUGLASS. 235
knew what it was to be compelled to yearn in
vain for mother-love; to fight his way, inch by
inch, into the simplest rudiments of human
speech, of human knowledge, into any of the
prerogatives of manhood.
THE BEGINNING OF THE END.
I do not at all underrate the work done by
those magnificent champions of freedom who
took this young man at twenty-five into the
charmed coterie of their fearless eloquence ; who
gave him the baptism of their approval, who laid
their hands upon his head, William Lloyd Garrison,
Wendell Phillips, and their associates. But
they needed him as much as he needed them.
After their cool and eloquent logic, after their
studied irony and invective, which, mighty as it
was, was wanting in the tremolo of the voice of
one that has suffered, of one whose very modulations
signified more than their words ; when this
man arose, as one rises from the dead, as the
ghost of one, the crown and scepter of whose
manhood has been stolen away, while he goes
from land to land proclaiming the wrong and
asking for justice, then the climax was reached.
This man made the work of such men as Garrison
and Phillips and Sumner, and even Lincoln,
possible. I do not wish to use the language of
exaggeration. It is not fitting the occasion. It