Frederick Douglass, the Orator - Monroe County Library System

Central Library of Rochester and Monroe County · Historic Monographs Collection
262 LIFE OF FREDERICK DOUGLASS.
zens can make use of the opportunities which
the country offers to them, but here was a man
who, when his country held out the hand of
opportunity, although it was a scanty hand, he
made use. of it and made more opportunities to
use.
" Could there have been a future more unpromising
than that before Frederick Douglass ? Nature
gave him birth, but denied him a father and almost
denied him a mother. He was born a slave in
1817, forty years before anti-slavery was the word
in the mouth of every citizen in the North. You
know what the South was at that time, what a
living hell was before the slave who tried to
make freedom for himself. All of the Southern
States were linked together in laws to hold the
black man to the ground, and the law of the
North required that fugitive slaves should be sent
back to bondage. You know that public opinion
in the North was against the slave. At that time
in the South it was a crime for a slave to try to
learn to read, and it was a crime punished by
death for a slave to lift his hand against a white
man.
" The North was pledged to send fleeing
slaves back to that Southern hell. It was in
that time that Frederick Douglass was born.
What was his training? A kind mistress and
a hard master. He had no school advantages.