Frederick Douglass, the Orator - Monroe County Library System

Central Library of Rochester and Monroe County · Historic Monographs Collection
282 LIFE OF FREDERICK DOUGLASS.
In looking back over this life, in studying it
carefully, as he himself has written it out, the first
thing that impresses us, and that gives promise
that something may yet come out of it, is his
rebellion against this system under which he was
born. It asserted his inferiority, it declared that
he was created simply for the convenience and
the pleasure of others. This, in his inmost soul,
he branded as a lie. Slave though he was, there
came welling up into his soul the conviction that
he was a man. And with that conviction its
necessary corollary, that, being a man, he ought to
be free. Byron, in his Prisoner of Chillon, speaks
of the "eternal spirit of the chainless mind,"
and it was this spirit that came into his soul, and
that came there never, never to be extinguished.
The consciousness, I am a man, I ought to be
free, are the first two steps in the progress of this
life upwards.
A third step was soon taken, when he pleaded
with his mistress for the privilege of learning to
read, and by her assistance mastered the alphabet,
thereby getting hold of the key which was to
unlock to him the treasures of wisdom and
knowledge. One of the most pathetic things in
this history is the eagerness, the avidity, with
which this little slave boy appropriated the
crumbs of knowledge that lay about him. In
imagination, I can see him now, with his spelling