Frederick Douglass, the Orator - Monroe County Library System

Central Library of Rochester and Monroe County · Historic Monographs Collection
LIFE OF FREDERICK DOUGLASS. *]*]
cabin, but treated by everybody with special marks
of interest and esteem. It is true, that although
I belonged in the forward cabin forty years ago,
I made many friends during that voyage, and was
then, as on the late voyage, invited to deliver an
address on the saloon deck of the Cambria, but I
did not comply till invited to do so by the captain.
There were several slaveholders on board,
and a number of dough-faces from the North. I
had hardly been speaking ten minutes when one
of the wildest, bitterest, and most devilish rows
occurred that I ever saw. It was only put down
by the captain calling upon the boatswain to bring
up the irons and threatening to put anyone in
irons who dared to disturb me. A most unfair
account of this outbreak of pro-slavery violence
has gone into the history of the Cunard line, denouncing
me as the cause of the disturbance on
the same principle that the slaves used to be
denounced as the cause of the war. The fact is,
slaveholders at that time were dictators on sea
and land, and the Cunard line, although flying the
British flag, found it for their interest to yield to
slaveholding dictation, but I believe I am the last
man of color proscribed on the Cunard line. I
made such a noise in England about it at the time
that Samuel Cunard himself publicly declared
that there should be no more proscription on his
ships on account of race and color. Contempla-