3fl fi73 
 
 
LIBRARY 
 
 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA. 
 
 c i i F~ r ( > K 
 
 Received 
 Accession No . 
 
 , 189 
 
 Cla*s No. 
 
MEMORIAL 
 
 OF 
 
 FREDERICK DOUGLASS 
 

 
MEMORIAL 
 
 FREDERICK DOUGLASS 
 
 FROM THE 
 
 CITY OF BOSTON 
 
 BOSTON 
 PRINTED BY ORDER OF THE CITY COUNCIL 
 
 MDCCCXCVI 
 
BOSTON 
 
C I T Y O F B O S T O N . 
 
 IN COMMON COUNCIL, December 26, 1895. 
 
 Ordered, That the Clerk of Committees, under the direction of the Com 
 mittee on Printing, be directed to prepare and publish an edition of one 
 thousand copies of a volume containing an account of the memorial services 
 in honor of FREDERICK DOUGLASS ; the expense attending the same to be 
 charged to the appropriation for City Council, Incidental Expenses. 
 
 Passed. Sent down for concurrence. December 30, came up concurred. 
 Approved by the Acting Mayor, January 1, 1896. 
 
 A true copy. 
 
 Attest : 
 
 JOHN M. GALVIN, 
 
 City Clerk. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 DEATH OF FREDERICK DOUGLASS ...... 11 
 
 ACTION OF THE CITY COUNCIL . .... 15 
 
 MEMORIAL SERVICES ....... 19-23 
 
 THE EULOGY . . . 27-67 
 
 PERSONAL REMINISCENCES ....... 71-90 
 
 FINAL PROCEEDINGS 93-94 
 
DEATH OF FREDERICK DOUGLASS 
 
DEATH OF FREDERICK DOUGLASS. 
 
 FREDERICK DOUGLASS died at his home in Washington, 
 D.C., on Anacosta Hill, just across the eastern branch of 
 the Potomac River from Capitol Hill, on the evening of 
 the twentieth of February, 1895. The immediate cause 
 of his death was heart failure. 
 
ACTION OF THE CITY COUNCIL 
 
 
 
 
ACTION OF THE CITY COUNCIL. 
 
 ON the twenty-first of March, Mr. STANLKY Ri FFIN, of 
 Ward ( .>, offered the following order : 
 
 Ordered, That a committee of five, with such as the 
 Board of Aldermen may join, be empowered to make 
 arrangements for a public memorial in honor of the late 
 Hon. FREDERICK DOUGLASS ; the expense attendant on 
 the same to be charged to the Contingent Fund of the 
 City Council. 
 
 The order was concurred in by the Board of Aldermen 
 April first, and approved by the Mayor April third. 
 
 The following-named members were appointed upon the 
 Committee, viz. : Aldermen HORACE (r. ALLEN, JOHN II. LEE, 
 and KDWARD Y\ . PKKSIIO, Councilmen STANLEY RIFFLN, 
 MICHAEL T. CALLAHAN, MICHAEL E. GADDIS, CHARLES II. 
 HALL, and J. HENDERSON ALLSTON. 
 
MEMORIAL SERVICES 
 
MEMORIAL SERVICES. 
 
 THE Committee of Arrangements did not progress sufli- 
 cicntly in their preparations to enable them to bold the 
 memorial services prior to the summer vacation, and conse 
 quently were compelled to defer them until fall. Thev suc 
 ceeded in securing the services of Hon. ALHIOX W. TOIKGEK, 
 as eulogist, a gentleman who, on account of his fine literary 
 attainments and intimate acquaintance with DOUGLASS, was 
 peculiarly well tilted for the duty. It was decided to hold 
 the service in Fancuil Hall on the evening of December 
 twentieth. Mr. RICIIAHD T. GREENER, a long-time friend of 
 DOI GLASS, accepted an invitation from the Committee to o ive 
 some personal reminiscences of DOUGLASS, and the Dumas 
 Male Quartet was engaged to furnish music for the occasion. 
 
 Invitations were sent to the Mayor, City Council, and City 
 officials, to members of the D.OUGLASS family, the survivors of 
 the old Anti-Slavery Society, and to many prominent colored 
 people in Boston and vicinity. 
 
 The weather was propitious, and the hall was well tilled 
 with interested auditors. At the appointed time Chairman 
 ALLEX, of the Committee, took the chair, and the exercises 
 commenced with singing by the quartet Day Slowly Declin 
 ing." The Chairman then made the following introductory 
 remarks : 
 
20 MEMORIAL OF FREDERICK DOUGLASS. 
 
 REMARKS OF ALDERMAN ALLEN. 
 
 LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, We are assembled to-night, 
 at the invitation of the City of Boston, to pay a tribute 
 of respect to the life and character of FREDERICK DOUG 
 LASS. Eminence in any walk of life may well be 
 commended, and in all cases should be appreciated and 
 fittingly recognized ; but it is particularly commendable 
 where the goal has been reached after a terrible struggle 
 and in the face of such difficulties as beset Mr. DOUGLASS. 
 Born a slave, in actual want for food, cruelly treated, no 
 one interested in him save with the interest of an owner 
 for a growing chattel, he yet, by perseverance, upright 
 life, and broad-mindedness, became, I may safely say, the 
 most eminent man of his race during the latter years of 
 his life. 
 
 It seems also particularly appropriate that this service 
 should be held in Faneuil Hall, Boston, pregnant as it is 
 with historical incidents so important to the race to 
 which he belonged, in whose behalf these walls have 
 echoed the stirring utterances of a PHILLIPS and a GAR 
 RISON, and of many another earnest and intelligent 
 worker for freedom, for common humanity, and common 
 mankind. 
 
 I will ask Rev. Mr. ROBERTS to open the meeting with 
 prayer. 
 
 PRAYER BY REY. I). ]. ROBERTS. 
 
 Thou Holy One, Thou who art the Author of all 
 being, the Life of all existence, the Spirituality of all 
 spirit, and the Thought of all thinking, Thou High and 
 
MEMORIAL SERVICES. 21 
 
 Holy One, who inhabiteth not only temples made with 
 hands, but who inhabiteth eternity, we recognize in Thee 
 the Source of our being, the Spring of all our delights, 
 the One to Whom we are accountable and unto Whom 
 we shall render an account for our stewardship here 
 below ; that One who presideth not only over the des 
 tinies of nations and of worlds, but Who presideth over 
 the destinies of the individual ; that One Who hath such 
 a tender regard for the workmanship of His own hand 
 that not a sparrow falleth to the ground without Him. 
 
 We thank Thee, Father, that we again come into Thy 
 presence to-night and in this service recognize Thee and 
 Thy hand that hath brought us here. We come, blessed 
 Father, to show our respect to the memory of one whom 
 Thou hast given to this generation, to this century, and 
 to the world. 
 
 We thank Thee, blessed Father, to-night, that from 
 depths the lowest in which it is possible for Thy creat 
 ures to be found Thou hast made it possible for them 
 to rise. We thank Thee for that height to which men 
 may reasonably aspire, that height to which by perse 
 verance, by energy, and by fidelity, man may attain. 
 We thank Thee for all that Thou hast done for us in 
 creation, in giving unto us this beautiful world as our 
 home, with all its vast resources and possibilities. 
 
 We thank Thee, our Heavenly Father, for what Thou 
 hast done for us in Thy Providence, for all along 
 through the ages past Thy footsteps can be traced and 
 Thy handiwork in the affairs of men can be seen. 
 
 We thank Thee for what Thou hast done for redemp 
 tion, for the noble manhood and divinity Thou hast sent 
 
22 MEMORIAL OF FREDERICK DOUGLASS. 
 
 to the world in the presence of Thy Son, to teach us 
 those lessons of virtue, mercy, and equality, which God 
 only can impress, in His goodness and spirit, upon the 
 heart and mind of man. 
 
 We thank Thee for all the noble characters Thou hast 
 given us in all the ages of the past, and for all the 
 noble character Thou hast given us in the presence of 
 the person whose memory we cherish and whose life we 
 honor. We ask that to-night in all that may be said, 
 proper and due regard and respect may be shown for 
 the memory of that great man whose life and character, 
 whose attainment and personality, evidenced the possi 
 bilities of that race from which he came. 
 
 We ask Thy blessings, Heavenly Father, on this great 
 city that has sought to do him this honor and whose 
 people have turned out here to-night to show officially 
 their regard for him as a man, as an American citizen, 
 and as one of America s greatest men. 
 
 We ask Thy blessings on his dear family, and grant, 
 God, that we all live to emulate his virtues in our own 
 lives, to follow the example he has set, and to scpiare 
 our lives with the rule of justice he has laid out before us. 
 
 We ask all these blessings in the name of Christ. 
 Amen. 
 
 At the close of the prayer, Ji response, "Amen," was sunir 
 by the quartet. 
 
 Then followed a song, "The Plains of Peace," sung by Mr. 
 SIDNEY WOODMAX. The Chairman then introduced the orator 
 of the evcninir, Hon. ALBION W. ToriMJEK, who delivered 
 the eulogy. He occupied an hour and tifty minutes, but was 
 
MEMORIAL SERVICES. 23 
 
 listened to throughout with unabated interest by his appre 
 ciative audience, and at the close he received a hearty outburst 
 of applause. 
 
 The solo, " O Rest in the Lord," was then sung by Mr. 
 HODGES, of the quartet. 
 
 The Chairman then introduced Mr. RICHARD T. GRKKNKR, 
 as follows : 
 
 Chairman ALLEN. Mr. TOURGEE has eloquently and 
 interestingly told us of FREDERICK DOUGLASS as he was 
 known to the world. I know it will give you pleasure 
 to listen for a few moments to some personal reminis 
 cences of Mr. DOUGLASS by his intimate and personal 
 friend, Prof. RICHARD T. GREENER. 
 
 Mr. GREENER delivered an eloquent and interesting address, 
 which was received with favor by the audience and frequently 
 applauded. 
 
 At the close of his remarks, the quartet sang the part 
 song rr Lovely Night." The benediction was then pronounced, 
 and the audience dispersed. 
 
THE EULOGY 
 
 BY 
 
 ALBION W. TOURGEE 
 
THE EULOGY. 
 
 THE life we commemorate to-night was, in some re 
 spects, among the most remarkable the world has ever 
 known. In sharp and swift recurring contrasts it has 
 never been excelled. In the distance from its be^in- 
 
 o 
 
 ning to its ending it has rarely been equalled. If a 
 man s capacity be measured by what he achieved, 
 FREDERICK DOUGLASS must be ranked among the great 
 men of a great day ; if by the obstacles overcome, he 
 must be accounted among the greatest of any time. 
 
 HISTORICAL PARALLEL. 
 
 In all history there is but one parallel of his ca 
 reer, and that one lacks the most important element. 
 Twenty-five hundred years ago a slave so won upon 
 his master s love and pride that he was set free. 
 The most cultivated people in ancient history hung 
 upon his words in admiration. Their philosophers imi 
 tated his methods ; their poets parodied his fables. He 
 became the friend, counsellor, and ambassador of the 
 greatest kini? of his time. When he died Athens voted 
 
 O O 
 
 him a statue, and four cities claimed the honor of 
 being accounted his birthplace. He is said to have 
 been a hunchback, and this fact is always cited as 
 
28 MEMORIAL OF FREDERICK DOUGLASS. 
 
 evidence of his transcendent genius because of the added 
 burthen it imposed. He had not only to overcome the 
 prejudice attaching to his station, but also the aversion 
 inspired by his uncouthness. The schoolboy of to-day, 
 as he cons this story, wonders how he could rise to 
 such heights in the face of such obstacles, especially 
 among a beauty-loving people like the Athenians. 
 
 Yet, what were the difficulties in the way of ^Esop 
 compared with those which DOUGLASS overcame ? What 
 was Grecian bondage in comparison with American slav 
 ery ? What was ^Esop s hump when compared with 
 DOUGLASS color, considered as an obstacle to personal 
 success ? What was the patronage of Croesus to the 
 friendship of Lincoln and Grant, Sumner and Garrison, 
 Whittier and Phillips - - and all the unnumbered host of 
 good men and women to whom DOUGLASS name became 
 a household word and in whose homes he was a wel 
 come guest ? No slave was ever before so potent in the 
 counsels of freemen. No negro ever before became so 
 widely and favorably known among an Anglo-Saxon 
 people. 
 
 CONTRASTED WITH ^SOP. 
 
 jEsop w T as freed from bondage by the favor of his 
 master ; DOUGLASS, through the admiration of thousands 
 of dwellers in another land who had heard his voice 
 and wondered at his words while yet a slave, and gladly 
 gave their money to melt the shackles of American bar 
 barism that fettered his limbs and galled his free spirit. 
 
 ^Esop became the ambassador of a sovereign, DOUG 
 LASS the plenipotentiary of two republics. 
 
THE EULOGY. 29 
 
 Athens gave ^Esop a statue because of his wit ; 
 DOUGLASS was honored because of the services he had 
 rendered a great nation. 
 
 Three classes of the American people are under spe 
 cial obligations to him : the colored bondman whom he 
 helped to free from the chains which he himself had 
 worn ; the free persons of color whom he helped to 
 make citizens; the white people of the United States 
 whom he sought to free from the bondage of caste and 
 relieve from the odium of shivery. 
 
 As it was meet that Athens, the home of wit, should 
 vote ^Esop, the most illustrious of ancient slaves, a 
 statue when he died, so it is most fit, that " in the 
 cradle of liberty," his life should be commemorated who 
 while yet a slave became renowned throughout the world 
 as a champion of freedom. Every citizen of the United 
 States is a debtor to his memory ; every colored man 
 because he relieved them, by his admirable exemplifica 
 tion, from the curse of incapacity which had been put 
 upon them, as an excuse for slavery ; and every white 
 man because he did so much to take away the shame 
 that rested on the Republic. The material ills of slavery 
 affected chiefly the colored race; its moral blight 
 was shared by the white people of the country as well. 
 The wrongs of slavery attached to the colored man ; its 
 shame rested wholly with the white man. So the 
 obligation of gratitude for its extinction is not a one 
 sided matter, and it is - especially appropriate that Bos 
 ton, the birthplace of two great revolutions for the 
 promotion of liberty, should be the first American city 
 to do honor to a colored man for his services to the 
 
30 MEMORIAL OF FREDERICK DOUGLASS. 
 
 nation which had condemned him and his people to 
 hopeless bondage. 
 
 The chief merit that attaches to the people of the 
 North in the great conflict in which slavery perished, 
 consisted not in the fact that we fought for the Federal 
 Union or resisted its disruption ; but in the far nobler 
 fact that we fought for liberty --the liberty of a poor, 
 weak, despised people. The tramp of our legions was in 
 tune with that most glorious of national anthems : 
 
 " As He died to make men holy, 
 Let US die to make men FREE ! " 
 
 So, too, the slave who fought for his own freedom, 
 in the field or in that great conflict that came before 
 the sword was drawn, fought also to take away the 
 shame of the oppressor. He who fights for his own 
 liberty is a hero ; he who strikes a blow for another s 
 rights is the brother of Him who died for man, and 
 fit to wear Excalibar. 
 
 A FIRST MEETING. 
 
 Some forty years ago a country lad sat in an audience 
 which an orator was addressing in impassioned tones, on 
 an unpopular theme. The speaker was in the prime of 
 manhood. His dark cheek flushed, his eyes flashed ; his 
 lithe but powerful frame swayed with the force of his 
 emotion as he denounced wrong and pleaded for justice. 
 Suddenly one of the shafts of his denunciation struck 
 deeper than the others. There was a murmur of dis 
 approval swelling to an angry roar, and then a storm 
 of groans and hisses. From the neighborhood of the 
 
THE EULOGY. 31 
 
 youngster an egg was thrown which struck the speaker 
 on the shoulder. Other missiles were thrown also, but 
 this one splashed up on his long wavy hair and left 
 yellow streaks on his black beard and mustache. There 
 was an instant s hush broken only by the bov s lauiHi. 
 
 *J v *J O 
 
 Then for half an hour that audience were thrilled and 
 hushed to breathless silence, by an overwhelming tide of 
 denunciatory eloquence rarely equalled in any age or by 
 any orator. The speaker evidently thought the young 
 ster who laughed had been guilty of the offence. Others 
 thought so, too. It is not the first time a laugh has 
 condemned the innocent. The next morning the young 
 man called upon the orator to apologize, not for the 
 egg, of which he was guiltless, but for the laugh, which 
 he regretted. It was not a pleasant call. The orator 
 was still sore over the indignity that had been offered 
 him. The affront was one apologies could not cure. 
 He told the wondering boy a furious tale of insults 
 he had suffered because he was a colored man pleading 
 for justice to his people. The interview ended peace 
 fully, however, as if in apology for its rough beginning. 
 
 A PLEASANT ACQUAINTANCE. 
 
 This was my first meeting with FREDERICK DOUGLASS. 
 It was the beginning of a pleasant but desultory 
 acquaintance. When we next met, the flood of battle 
 had swept away the legal estate of slavery. I was a 
 dweller in a southern state, he was my guest. Around 
 us were scattered the fragments of a disrupted social 
 and economic system a slave-civilization to which 
 men were trying to fit the garments of liberty. The 
 
32 MEMORIAL OF FREDERICK DOUGLASS. 
 
 result was grotesque it is still grotesque. Wise theo 
 rists made it a scarecrow, and those who had little 
 comprehension either of liberty or justice as the heritage 
 of the colored man, have shred away the patches and 
 left it a ghastly skeleton. He was seeking in wonder 
 and amaze to penetrate the future and read the destiny 
 of his people. He had known two phases of American 
 life in the slave-republic the slave-life into which he 
 was born ; the free life to which he had fled. How to 
 reconcile the fragments of the one with the triumphant 
 confidence of the other was the problem that confronted 
 all. He knew what had been in the old slave-epoch ; 
 the young man realized more keenly, perhaps, the char 
 acter of the new one. Neither was confident of what 
 would be. From that time until just before his death, 
 we met occasionally as our paths crossed, here and there. 
 Our acquaintance was always candid, earnest, thoughtful 
 -never continuous or intimate. I shall speak of him 
 to-night, therefore, not as one having special knowledge 
 of those qualities which appear only in personal relations, 
 but as a public man in his relations to the epoch in 
 which he lived, the institution he helped to overthrow, 
 the race whose obloquy he bore, the nation he helped 
 to redeem from ignominy, and the people whose destiny 
 he left unsolved. I shall consider only the man whom 
 the world knows, in the light the future must regard 
 him. 
 
 THE THOUGHT THAT UNDERLIES A LIFE. 
 
 Emerson has noted the value of the man who stands 
 behind a thought. There is also a value to be esti 
 mated of the thought that lies back of a man s life. 
 
THE EULOGY. 33 
 
 Every man is, in a sense, chameleonic. He gives back, 
 more or less clearly, the color of his day. If he is 
 careful only of his own comfort or seeks only his own 
 advantage, he reflects but little of the life which is 
 the light of his world. Its rays fall upon him and 
 glance off without any added flash or fresh throb of 
 interest. If, however, its glare enters his soul, fires his 
 brain, and animates his being, he becomes transparent, 
 like the little creature whose flesh absorbs the sunshine 
 so that we see his heart-beats through the glowing walls. 
 This was true in an especial manner of the man we 
 are assembled to commemorate. The thought of his 
 epoch was his thought he had little outside of or 
 beyond it. From the past he had received only life 
 as his inheritance. His present had nothing to offer 
 but one dominant, controlling idea. This entered his 
 soul and filled it. No wonder : the thought of his 
 time was of himself himself and his fellows and 
 liberty their relations to the dominant class in the 
 land of his birth, to the State, to the government, 
 to Christianity, to God. In the church, on the ros 
 trum, in the Congress, in the Legislatures of the 
 country, in the city mart, and in the country store 
 wherever men were assembled the one object of all- 
 absorbing interest was the colored man, his character, 
 qualities, capacity, and the relations which God and 
 nature designed that he should hold to his fellow-mortals 
 of a lighter hue. In a sense, this was no new question. 
 The only new thing about it was that there were those 
 who contended that the theory which had so long 
 prevailed in regard to it was not the true one ; that 
 
34 MEMORIAL OF FREDERICK DOUGLASS. 
 
 the wisdom of the ages was not only incorrect, but 
 that its conclusions were incontestibly based on false 
 premises. 
 
 SLAVERY AND CIVILIZATION. 
 
 Four hundred years before, Prince Henry, of Portugal, 
 the grandson of that English John of Gaunt whose blood 
 flows in the veins of every monarch of to-day, received 
 a grant from the Roman Pontiff authorizing him, among 
 other things, to seize and hold in captivity as many as 
 he saw fit of the black heathen who inhabited the 
 region which lay beyond the terrible Cape Non, which 
 his caravels had finally passed in safety, in order that 
 they might be taught the principles of the Christian 
 faith and, by and by, be sent back to win over that 
 realm of marvel and mystery, the " Land of the Black 
 amoors," to the religion of Christ and obedience to Mother 
 Church. The Father of Discovery the man whose labor 
 and learning, patience and devotion, made Columbus a 
 possibility was, also, the father of African slavery, 
 made such by his zeal for the religion of which he was 
 a sincere and faithful devotee. 
 
 From that time forward, the Church, almost regardless 
 of name or sect, was the guardian and protectress of 
 the traffic in human bodies ; all the time with the 
 professed purpose of saving human souls. It came at 
 length to be the accepted theory that the mystery of 
 redemption for Africa lay in the forced migration of 
 the Negro to the slave-republic of the New \Vorld, 
 whence, after a time, he was to be returned, Chris 
 tianized and outworn, to carry the gospel absorbed in 
 
THE EULOGY. .}.) 
 
 bondage, taught by enforced adultery, and exemplified 
 by wholesale robbery and inconceivable oppression, to 
 enlighten the spiritual darkness of Africa. Even yet 
 the pulpit echoes with soul-cheering explications of the 
 divine mystery by which the supernumerary African in 
 our land is to be driven across the sea, to hold up the 
 banner of the Cross and bring the knowledge of the 
 religion of justice and love to them that sit in darkness, 
 leaving this land of liberty to the exclusive enjoyment 
 of those for whom it was created and on whom it was 
 divinely bestowed the white men, who are openly or 
 itnpliedly proclaimed the worthiest and most favored sons 
 of God. 
 
 The doctrine seems a little strange to-day. When 
 FREDERICK DOUGLASS was born, it was a universally 
 accepted truth which was stamped upon his soul in 
 the very instant that he drew the breath of life. It 
 was a slave s breath the first of a caste-cursed life ! 
 The religious and political world have swung forward 
 into a new realm of spirituality and justice, largely 
 through his efforts and the effect of his exemplifi 
 cation of the wrong and shame of the past. We might 
 have endured the wrong which others suffered, but 
 the shame we had ourselves to bear was too much 
 for a sensitive people to endure. For the Yankee is 
 the most sensitive type of humanity; consequently the 
 most chameleonic. He changes quicker and oftener than 
 any other people in the world s history; is sincerely 
 grateful as each Thanksgiving Day comes round that he 
 is not as he was ; but has not even yet learned to 
 openly thank God for the fact that he is white. Yet, 
 
;j() MEMORIAL OF FREDERICK DOUGLASS. 
 
 next to life and health a white skin is the greatest 
 blessing that has been enjoyed on American soil since the 
 Dutch lugger landed the first dusky cargo at Jamestown. 
 We are destined some time to be as ashamed of caste 
 based on color, as we are now ashamed of slavery based 
 on caste. Whether it will require two centuries and a 
 half to overthrow this monster, as it did destroy its 
 fellow, Heaven only knows. 
 
 HIS INHERITANCE. 
 
 Three-quarters of a century ago, or thereabouts, the 
 child who grew to be the man we call FREDERICK 
 DOUGLASS was born on a Maryland plantation. He never 
 knew the date. Years afterward he said, " I am seven 
 teen ; " and on that assumption counted the future mile-, 
 stones of his life. Slavery had robbed him even of a 
 birthday. 
 
 Who was his father? None knew. The law forbade 
 marriage to such as his mother was. Marriage is a 
 contract ; and the slave could make no contract. Such 
 was the law ! A slave could have no will, no power of 
 self-disposition, no right of person or possession. So this 
 child had no father and no name. The law of a Christian 
 land denied to him a legal name as well as legal parentage. 
 Among the millions of slaves there was not a single hus 
 band ; not a legal wife ; not a parent who had a parent s 
 right; not a child who could inherit a father s name. Jim, 
 or Jack, or Joe was all the appellation a, slave could bear. 
 A name imputed family; and Christian civilization denied 
 the family relation to the slave. "Marriage cannot exist 
 between slaves" was the deliberate judgment of the 
 
TIIK KL LOGV. 37 
 
 Supreme Court of every slave-state. This was M child 
 to whom the past gave only life ; to whom the present 
 brought only such joys as come with health and sense; 
 to whom the future offered nothing. He was a slave, 
 whom the law defines as "a person without rights;" whom 
 reason defines as a human being deprived of selfhood, 
 opportunity, hope, and ambition (which is based on hope) 
 for the profit and pleasure of another. The law decreed 
 that this child should never have a name, a home, a wife, 
 a child; should never learn to read or write; should never 
 speak to one of the dominant race save hat in hand ; 
 should never meet more than two of his fellows for coun 
 sel unless a white man was present; should never utter 
 a word of remonstrance, or strike a blow in self-defence 
 or for another s rights, against a man with a white skin 1 
 We shudder at such doctrines now. When this child 
 was born, they were the almost unquestioned beliefs of 
 the American people. No ; not unquestioned. There were 
 those who doubted, some that feared, and a few who 
 denied that slavery was either righteous or divine. But 
 they who uttered such denials were accounted guilty of 
 treason and sacrilege ; enemies of country, society, and 
 God ! This nameless man-child made himself a name ; 
 helped to liberate a people; was honored by a great nation; 
 and to-night we meet to commemorate his virtues. Were 
 ever so many miracles crowded into a single life ? 
 
 A HOPELESS PROSPECT. 
 
 Fate hung about the young child s neck two burdens, 
 either of which might well suffice to break the spirit 
 of the strongest man - - he was a slave, and bore the 
 
38 MEMORIAL OF FREDERICK DOUGLASS. 
 
 mark of African blood in a nation of Protestant white 
 people, boastful of their liberty. Either of these cnrses 
 was enough to crush hope out of the bravest heart. 
 Made slaves at birth, how few of our children would 
 break their fetters ! Given a trace of color, how few of 
 our greatest men would ever have been heard from ! It 
 needs something more than talent, and learning, and 
 eloquence to open the door of success to a colored man, 
 and make him welcome on the platform, in the clubs, 
 and in the homes of men who count their hue a mark 
 of divine and exclusive favor. If, at the Christmas-tide 
 which is so near, the Holiest should come again, in hue 
 and likeness of a negro, even if the heavenly radiance 
 still shone about His head, I fear me He would meet a 
 very chilly welcome in the churches and homes of our 
 land. Clad in a colored integument, there lives not to-day 
 a single man who could attain to the highest eminence 
 in our government, or receive a call to a fashionable 
 church, no matter what his attainments or how Christ- 
 like his character ! What, then, shall we say of the 
 prospects of the young child about whose gum-tree cradle 
 the twin pythons of Slavery and Caste reared their 
 horrid heads, twined, and hissed to drive away his hope 
 and dissipate even the dream of aspiration ? How shall 
 we measure his success and estimate his power ? 
 
 I said he had neither father nor mother. Even the 
 poor shred of motherhood that slavery left possible was 
 denied him. He was reared, like any domestic animal, in 
 the manner best suited to the master s profit ; as one of 
 a family of nondescripts known as " pickaninnies." The 
 dam was allowed to visit him now and then for his 
 
THE EULOGY. J-J9 
 
 nutrition ; then wholly excluded, and he was removed 
 to a distance from her. 
 
 Once only, in the silence of a summer night, he had 
 a dream of one who came to the rude pallet where he 
 slept, knelt beside him, folded him in her arms, and 
 covered his face with tears and kisses, He knew she 
 was his mother, though he hardly knew her name, 
 the single name she was allowed, and would scarce 
 have known her face had he seen her by day. But he 
 did not see her by day. Long before the dawn she lied 
 in terror lest she should not be able to repass the nine 
 long miles that lay between her and the home of him 
 to whom her service and labor was due, before the day 
 should come. He never saw her, never heard her voice 
 or felt her kiss again. Slavery and caste held him in 
 their clutches as he grew to man s estate. 
 
 J , SLAVE-LIFE. 
 
 His slave-life w r as not remarkable. He changed 
 masters once or twice; was accounted irritable, if not 
 discontented and dangerous ; tried to break into the 
 Temple of Knowledge and decipher its mystic scrolls; 
 learned a trade, and became a skilled worker. Finally 
 "the time came which he was wont to refer in inspired 
 moments as his "second birth," when he was born, not 
 into liberty, but into a life where the shackles did not 
 all the time chafe his limbs. As at his previous birth 
 he had not been allowed a name, so now, being without 
 father or mother, he christened himself. It was no 
 slight testimony to his strength of mind and pertinacity 
 that he dared to plan and e fleet his escape from bondage 
 
40 MEMORIAL OF FREDERICK DOUGLASS. 
 
 into that condition of half-liberty which he found in 
 New England. It was evidence of the character and 
 quality of his genius that the name he chose was at 
 once strong, distinctive, and pleasing. That another had 
 borne it was no matter ; it was his by free choice, 
 having all the names of the earth to choose from. He 
 did not seek to borrow fame, nor exalt himself by 
 another s renown. The slave atom did not ask a staff 
 for his feet, but a symbol for his manhood. 
 
 Seventeen years, more or less, FREDERICK DOUGLASS 
 was a slave. Rough fare, enforced toil by day and 
 rest by night, had ministered to his bodily develop 
 ment. Slavery was a hard mistress, but she nourished 
 tough thews. As for his mind, he had mastered a 
 few letters and formed a desperate resolution. Trained 
 in those arts of simulation which slavery taught to 
 every pupil who had aptness enough to learn, he 
 toiled and waited, not " for something to turn 
 up" -there was nothing of the Micawber in his 
 nature but for the door of opportunity to open even 
 the least before him. When that time came, he fled 
 through it to the protection some of the Northern 
 States tried to give those who dwelt within their 
 borders. Five years afterwards, the Supreme Court of 
 the United States decided that such attempted security 
 was vain. 
 
 American . slavery was the greatest crime of the 
 ages : first, because of its utter hopelessness ; and, 
 second, because the intelligence and inventiveness of 
 the American people had been applied to the refine 
 ment and perfection of the legal relations of the 
 
THE EULOGY. 41 
 
 slave, until there was literally no chance for the 
 palliation or amendment of his condition. The State 
 could make him free indeed. This had been done in 
 five of the original colonies. That curious piece of 
 legislation hy which slavery was excluded from the 
 Northwest Territory, had saved the whole region west 
 of Pennsylvania and east of the Mississippi, from the 
 contamination of its presence, though even here it 
 held sway over men s hearts and minds. The nation 
 was kept half-free and half-slave by the most nicely 
 adjusted system of checks and balances the ingenuity 
 of man has ever devised. Slavery being based on 
 race and color, the presumptions of the law in favor 
 of liberty were reversed to secure its perpetuity, and 
 the teachings of religion were made the cloak for 
 legalized violation of all the laws of God and nature. 
 While the half-free North had rid herself of Slavery, 
 Caste held sway throughout its length and breadth. 
 Equality of opportunity, which is the touchstone of 
 liberty, was denied to all having traces of colored 
 blood. 
 
 THE ABOLITION EPOCH. 
 
 Almost contemporaneous with the "second birth " of 
 the slave, thereafter for all time to be known as FREDERICK 
 DOUGLASS, the American people began to awaken to the 
 enormity of that greatest of all crimes against God and 
 man, American slavery. 
 
 The New England Anti-Slavery Society had been 
 organized five years before the foot of DOUGLASS touched 
 free soil ; the national society, a year or two later. 
 
42 MEMORIAL OF FREDERICK DOUGLASS. 
 
 Garrison had established the " Liberator," and was 
 beating it into the hearts of men with palpitant 
 strokes, that slavery was the sin of sins, and crime 
 of crimes. Phillips had just dedicated the powers which 
 were to thrill the world, to the cause of human 
 liberty and righteousness. Whittier was tuning the harp 
 whose lays were to make him for all ages the prophet- 
 poet of Liberty. Birney had already begun that career 
 which was to drive him from his southern home. 
 Garret Smith was preaching liberty in that strange 
 confusion of rich metaphor, overflowing kindness, and 
 inconsequent conclusion, which marked him one of the 
 worthiest and strangest of patriots and philosophers. 
 Elijah Lovejoy had just given up his life for liberty, and 
 Owen, kneeling on his brother s grave, had just vowed 
 eternal war against Slavery. Thousands more, bursting 
 the green withes of prejudice, were pressing forward, 
 eager to give life and strength to the conflict of freedom. 
 Boston was the storm-centre, for here the fiery heart 
 of Garrison sent forth the flaming sheets which flew 
 over the whole land and, in every home they entered, 
 kindled a fire, which nor time nor tyranny could ever 
 smother. Even yet, thousands of hearts glow and 
 flutter in breasts, now weak and shrivelled, at the 
 memory of his utterances. The ferment had begun 
 which was to culminate in years of strife and bloody 
 expiation a struggle not yet ended ! 
 
 DOUGLASS, still in bonds, caught the echoes of this 
 conflict. He had the slave s fear of beini^ thrust back 
 
 o 
 
 into the Gehenna from which he had fled. He had 
 the slave s intuition that his safety lay in silence and 
 
THE EULOGY. 43 
 
 obscurity. For years, lie looked with apprehension in 
 the face of every white stranger whom he met, fearing 
 he might bear the warrant for his arrest as a fugi 
 tive. By night and by day, the nightmare of recaption 
 and reenslavement followed him. He was determined 
 to die rather than submit. He had muscles of iron, 
 health, and strength. Slavery, harsh mother as she 
 was, had trained him well for self-support. Should he 
 labor in silence, win enough for his wants, and let 
 obscurity ripen into safety ? Or should he risk his own 
 liberty to help bring his race the Jubilee the hour of 
 deliverance from bondage long prayed for ? No one 
 could have blamed him if he had remained silent. The 
 hand of the master reached to every corner of the land. 
 Some of the States remonstrated, but the nation upheld 
 his right. 
 
 It was no trivial matter, even for a white man, in 
 New England to espouse the cause of liberty. Society 
 frowned upon him ; the pulpits fulminated against him. 
 On that first year of DOUGLASS semi-freedom, even the 
 Thanksgiving sermons in Boston reeked with denun 
 ciation of the crime and sin of obeying the scriptural 
 behest to " Proclaim / liberty throughout the land unto 
 all the inhabitants ^here*f ! " American slavery had 
 no year of jubilee, and was far behind that Jewish 
 bondage of twenty centuries before, in humane and 
 merciful character. It not only pursued the fugitive 
 slave to the uttermost borders of its jurisdiction, but 
 it persecuted those who aided him to escape or even 
 claimed for him the more tolerable condition of a 
 " free man of color." 
 
44 MEMORIAL OF FREDERICK DOUGLASS. 
 
 DOUGLASS might, with general approval, have re 
 mained in obscurity, won a reasonable competence 
 by his labor, and enjoyed as much liberty and respect 
 as was attainable by the "free person of color" 
 anywhere in the United States. Many had won a 
 precarious liberty in like manner, and kept it by 
 silence. They were not to be blamed. Not only is 
 self-preservation the first law of nature, but the inher 
 itance of slavery does not incline one to sacrifice for 
 others. The slave s peril, privation, and the dwarfing 
 effect of generations of enforced ignorance and restraint 
 but poorly fitted the slave for self-sacrifice for the 
 good of others, let alone the succor of his fellows. 
 There were some who took the same risk and adopted 
 the same course as DOUGLASS, but more who sought 
 safety in the obscurity which soon became insufficient 
 to conceal his identity. He went to an " Abolition 
 meeting." He heard the woes of the slave related by 
 those who knew them not, except through imagination 
 and hearsay. To him the horrors of slavery stood 
 out in all their naked enormity. He had never spoken 
 to an audience before ; that night he rose and, begging 
 pardon for his weakness, set forth in a clearer light 
 than any one present had ever heard it told, the 
 horror of that bondage from which he had fled. 
 
 DOUGLASS AX ABOLITION ORATOR. 
 
 Those engaged in the abolition movement were earnest 
 people. They did not shrink from the logic of their 
 own teachings. They welcomed the new worker in 
 the struggle they had undertaken as having something 
 
THE EULOGY. 4,1 
 
 they had not a concrete knowledge more potent with 
 average minds than the most clearly woven theory. 
 They noted, too, the fire of genius under his unprepar- 
 edness. "From night to night/ said one, "I watched 
 the growth of his vocabulary arid the fuller play of 
 his imagination. It was marvellous ! " 
 
 He was an orator by natural inclination. There 
 was a rumor that his father might have been one 
 who " swayed the listening Senate " with his honeyed 
 words. It matters not whence it came, the natural 
 aptitude cannot be denied, and the school where he was 
 put in training was one never excelled in the world s 
 history. It was the golden age of American oratory - 
 its most earnest, impassioned, and characteristic epoch. 
 Of the masters of eloquence of that time many of 
 the most accomplished were already enlisted, and others 
 were being daily enrolled among the Abolition forces. 
 No wonder that DOUGLASS natural powers were so 
 swiftly developed that he was soon proclaimed " a most 
 marvellous orator, when one considers what the life was 
 from which he came." Under such masters, and with 
 such a theme, one must have been dull indeed not to 
 have felt the glow of inspiration ! 
 
 He had two great advantages over those with whom 
 he wrought little was expected of him by his first 
 audiences, and he was a living refutation of the 
 charge that his people were incapable of civilization 
 and fit only for servile tasks. 
 
 The question of the colored man s capacity was the 
 most important premise in the argument which occu 
 pied the universal thought. Politics and religion ; 
 
40 MEMORIAL OF FREDERICK DOUGLASS. 
 
 business and science ; society and economics all were 
 colored with the pros and cons of this subject. The 
 right and wrong of slavery was held to depend upon 
 it. If the negro was incapable of civilization, slavery, 
 though an ugly thought, must be endured for the 
 common welfare and security. On the other hand, if 
 he was capable of even approximate attainment with 
 the white race, slavery became at once a monster of 
 too horrible a mien to be contemplated with anything 
 like forbearance or approval. Volumes were written 
 upon the subject. Science and theology went hand 
 and hand in the service of slavery. Wrong has ever 
 been a good paymaster, and slavery paid him who 
 proclaimed its sanctity, and him who upheld its neces 
 sity alike, with honors and approval. So the most 
 noted scientists avouched the negro s inferiority, basing 
 their judgments upon the curl of his hair, the breadth of 
 his nose, and the hue of his skin, the convolutions of his 
 brain, the flatness of his foot ! The pulpit used these 
 demonstrations to prove the wisdom and mercy of God in 
 fastening on the sons of Hani the curse of the drunken 
 patriarch. There were lots of loop-holes in the reason 
 ing of both ; but they both proved what was wanted, 
 and were accounted oracles in their day. So science and 
 religion became the willing servants of Slavery and cast 
 the cloak of duty and necessity over its unutterable in 
 famies. Everybody who was of any consequence formed 
 and expressed an opinion on this engrossing subject. 
 Every lawyer, every statesman, every politician, every 
 divine, almost every man and woman of any prominence 
 in the land, was drawn into the vortex of controversy in 
 
THE EULOGY. 4_7 
 
 regard to the negro s capacity for civilization and the 
 resulting question as to whether he should be free or 
 slave. What tomes of wasted learning were put forth ! 
 What ingenious theories were invented to reconcile God s 
 mercy with man s depravity ! How many a grandson 
 would be glad to-day to obliterate the evidence of an 
 ancestor s folly ! But what is writ, what is printed, 
 can never be recalled. Brass may inelt and marble 
 crumble, but printer s ink endureth forever and ever ! 
 scientist ! bigot ! if you wish to learn humility 
 and avoid the shame of the world s ridicule, read the 
 record of your predecessors of only fifty years ago, and 
 see how feeble is the wisdom of man when he seeks 
 to put bounds to the mercy and justice of God ! 
 Many a man in that day made swift shipwreck of a 
 fair renown in seeking to wrest God s truth to the 
 devil s service. The vast majority of the people, even 
 of the North, were against the negro s right to be 
 free, and that opposition was based almost wholly upon 
 a profound and sincere conviction of his unfitness for 
 civilization and lack of capacity for freedom and self- 
 direction and control. 
 
 The Attorney-General of the Commonwealth of Massa 
 chusetts, if I mistake not, about that time declared, 
 perhaps in this historic hall, that " one might as 
 well talk about releasing the wild beasts in the 
 Zoological Garden to run about the city s streets as 
 think of freeing negroes to prey upon the w r hite peo 
 ple of the country." 
 
 Under these circumstances, it was of vast importance 
 to the Abolition movement to have one who in himself 
 
48 MEMORIAL OF FREDERICK DOUGLASS. 
 
 was an undeniable refutation of this claim. Nobody 
 could question the ability of FREDERICK DOUGLASS. 
 He was an opponent whom any man had need beware 
 of, and no champion of slavery cared to encounter 
 him a second time. While he studied carefully the 
 eloquence of others and assimilated with amazing readi 
 ness the best thoughts and the most striking argu 
 ments of his co-laborers, they came forth from the 
 laboratory of his fiery brain essentially modified and 
 not seldom greatly improved. From the first, he had 
 the self-possession of the natural orator. An audience 
 inspired him ; interruptions only brought fresh corrus- 
 cations. His humor was heightened by an artful assump 
 tion of the slave s humility, and, scathing as was his 
 denunciation, he had a way of excusing it because of his 
 race and lack of preparation, that somehow deprived it of 
 offence. Even insult, he turned back on the offender in 
 a way that not only made him the subject of general 
 laughter, but not seldom transformed into the insulter 
 a champion and defender. So he not only rose to 
 the rank of one of the most noted champions of 
 liberty, but he became also one of the strongest argu 
 ments of all those who fought beside him. Within a 
 decade he had become one of the most popular of Abo 
 lition orators. Many times he was listened to with 
 patience and applause, when a white orator could hardly 
 make himself heard because of the hisses and jeers of 
 unfriendly audiences. Yet there were times when the 
 very reverse was true, and noble women showed their 
 courage and devotion to liberty, by gathering around 
 him and with their persons shielding him from the 
 
THE EULOGY. 49 
 
 wrath of mobs whose only answer to his irrefutable 
 argument was the cry, "Kill the nigger!" 
 
 For a dozen years before the war of words grew 
 silent in the clash of arms, it may be doubted if 
 there was any more effective speaker in the Abolition 
 host. His arguments had not the polish of many others ; 
 they were not so generally reported by the press, because 
 his efforts were almost always extemporaneous in form, 
 and the stenographer was not then omnipresent ; but 
 there was a life, a fire, a personal magnetism about him, 
 which made even the most polished oratory seem weak 
 and vain beside his fiery onslaught. 
 
 I was a lad of a dozen years, or less, when I first 
 heard him at a meeting where some of the most elo 
 quent of the white champions of liberty had also spoken. 
 On the way home a crowd of thoughtful country people, 
 of varying opinions, were discussing what they had 
 heard. One of the most intelligent, a leader in his 
 neighborhood, said : 
 
 "Well, you may say what you please about the others; 
 the nigger settled it with me. When a Negro who 
 has been a slave can make such a speech as that, it is 
 time that every one of them should be free. I am 
 against slavery from this day." 
 
 And he kept his word. 
 
 During this time Mr. DOUGLASS became the one 
 colored man who was well and favorably known to the 
 whole American people. At that time, the country- 
 people represented the heart of American sentiment. 
 Only one-fifth of the population lived in great cities, 
 instead of fifty-eight per cent, as now. Throughout all 
 
50 MEMORIAL OF FREDERICK DOUGLASS. 
 
 the country regions of the North the colored man was 
 rarely seen. There were whole counties without a single 
 colored inhabitant. Now and then, a fugitive struggled 
 into a community, and settled down. But in the main, 
 sentiment of the North in regard to the Negro was based 
 on hearsay ; and very queerly, in this case, the hearsay 
 of the interested planter was generally preferred over 
 the testimony of the disinterested observer. To this mass 
 of opinion, Mr. DOUGLASS came as a concrete fact of 
 tremendous force. Almost every one spoke kindly and 
 pleasantly of him ; thousands took him into their homes, 
 and made him the basis of their conclusions in regard 
 to the righteousness of Slavery. In a dozen States he 
 had come to be known to a large proportion of the 
 people, who had little if any knowledge of any other 
 colored man. When the time came, he was naturally 
 looked upon as the embodiment of all his race s 
 x interests and qualities. 
 
 AS A POLITICIAN. 
 
 With the organization of the Republican party in 
 1854, Mr. DOUGLASS became at once an active and 
 honored member. This appears the more remarkable 
 when we consider the fact that there were no colored 
 voters of any consequence at the North who could be 
 said to constitute what might be termed a " following " 
 of his own people. The "free person of color," though 
 he could not be a citizen of the United States, nor a 
 citizen of any State, within the meaning of that term 
 in the Constitution of the United States, by a singular 
 inconsistency, could be a voter in any State which saw 
 
THE EULOGY. 51 
 
 fit to give him the ballot, and could thus become a part 
 of the electoral power of the nation. This power was, 
 however, conferred on him by only four or five States 
 of the Union, and in these the colored population was 
 very small, and the Republican majorities very reliable. 
 So that, in fact, there was no colored vote which it was 
 of any material consequence to the new party to secure. 
 Besides that, the plain interest of the colored voter has 
 always lain with the Republican party, since through 
 that he has obtained all the rights he has enjoyed, and 
 to that he must still look to secure their enjoyment. 
 
 It cannot be said, therefore, that Mr. DOUGLASS was 
 welcomed to the councils of the Republicans because of 
 any influence he had among those of his own race or 
 color whose votes the new party desired to secure. The 
 simple truth is, that he was welcomed as an orator of 
 singularly convincing power, and as a living justification 
 of the party tendency, if not its avowed purpose. He was 
 the first instance of a colored man being regarded as an 
 important factor of a national party, that party being 
 composed entirely of white voters. 
 
 As -a politician, Mr. DOUGLASS was always cautious 
 and practical. He believed in the theory that every 
 man should use his power as a citizen to secure as much 
 actual betterment as possible, instead of refusing to 
 exercise it unless he could obtain, at once, all that he 
 desired. Had he been a white citizen of Massachu 
 setts, with the advantages of opportunity and education 
 her sons have so long enjoyed, I have no doubt he 
 would have been one of her most noted political leaders. 
 The fact that he broke away from those with whom he 
 
52 MEMORIAL OF FREDERICK DOUGLASS. 
 
 had been so long associated, and gave his allegiance to 
 the Kepublican party because, though not professing a 
 purpose to abolish slavery, it did evince a most earnest 
 purpose to restrict it, is a fine illustration of the 
 intensely practical character of his mind. 
 
 "To such a cause as ours," he said, "a little done is 
 worth more than ages of clamor about what ought to 
 ~be done!" 
 
 It was this quality which eminently fitted him for 
 the role of the practical statesman. He did not originate 
 policies nor invent methods, but he had an unerring 
 instinct as to what promised to advance the cause 
 nearest his heart and bring the public sentiment ulti 
 mately to entertain and indorse his plea for liberty and 
 justice for his people. This he always kept steadily 
 in view. Until the emancipation of the slave, politics 
 meant nothing to him except as it bore upon that event. 
 Very many of the leaders of the Abolition movement 
 had imbibed the common fallacy that the only way to 
 secure a needed reform in a republic, is to demand that 
 all other political questions shall be subordinated to it. 
 Mr. DOUGLASS, with a political instinct which seems 
 marvellous now, when we consider the entire exclusion 
 of all other interests from his thought and purpose, 
 recognized the broader fact that a minority should 
 always strive not merely to overcome or force a majority 
 to yield to all their demands upon any subject, but to 
 persuade them, if possible, to accept some of them. The 
 tact, patience, and knowledge of human nature which he 
 manifested at this period of his career, prove conclu 
 sively the eminence he would have attained had not 
 
THE EULOGY. 53 
 
 caste thrown an insuperable barrier in his way. Given 
 a white skin, and there is no limit to be placed on the 
 political success he might have achieved. 
 
 EELEASE FROM BONDAGE. 
 
 There is something very curious in the fact that 
 FREDERICK DOUGLASS remained for years a slave even 
 after he had achieved no little eminence as a public 
 speaker and had become especially distinguished as an 
 Abolition orator. He was by no means lacking in busi 
 ness capacity, and he must have been in receipt of a 
 fair income during this period. Why he or his friends 
 -in the North did not raise the insignificant sum neces 
 sary to set his mind at rest and save him from the 
 constant fear of recapture and reenslavement, instead 
 of waiting for two English women to collect and for 
 ward to his owner the very moderate sum requisite to 
 set him free and relieve him from such apprehension, 
 I have always been unable to understand. It has been 
 said that some were so opposed to recognizing the claim 
 of property in man that they refused to countenance 
 any such proceeding, and that there were others who 
 thought his capture and rendition as a fugitive slave 
 would have such an effect upon the public sentiment 
 of the North as to advance the cause of liberty even 
 more than his ceaseless labors as an agitator could. 
 Of all these things I speak not from personal knowl 
 edge. Except the progress of public sentiment which 
 a boy notes even better than a man, I knew nothing 
 of the Abolition movement until it entered on its last 
 stage and became not distinctly a separate movement, 
 
54: MEMORIAL OF FREDERICK DOUGLASS. 
 
 but part of a great national impulse. But hearing 
 him relate his profound emotion at being made entirely 
 a free man how he went out and walked the streets 
 saying to himself as a strange face appeared : 
 
 " I am not afraid ! I am free, and no power can 
 tear me from my home or send me back to bondage!" 
 
 Hearing him speak of the rapture of this release from 
 the bondage of apprehension, I have wondered that 
 he should have counted it a duty, or that others should 
 have regarded it as a case in which he should have 
 been allowed to suffer for so long a time rather than 
 recognize even by his deliverance the doctrine of prop 
 erty in man. 
 
 I have been told very recently, indeed, that he stoutly 
 opposed any such project, and would have forbidden it 
 when set on foot in England had it been in his power. 
 There is no reason to doubt this statement. Indeed, it 
 furnishes the only reasonable solution of the situation, 
 and raises him to the position of a hero, offering his 
 liberty and life to promote the liberation of his people. 
 
 Yet it seems hardly in accord with the severely prac 
 tical quality of his mind, and can only be accounted 
 for upon the fact that individual property in man was 
 then accounted the most essential quality of slavery. 
 In truth, the legal condition of inferiority was, as time 
 has shown, the most important feature of the legal 
 estate of slavery. But whatever the fact, we may be 
 sure that the desire to promote the cause of liberty 
 lay at the bottom of this refusal to buy or to be bought; 
 since those who gave their hearts and hands to the 
 Abolition movement were not the men and women to 
 
THE EULOGY. 55 
 
 permit any other consideration to restrain them from 
 giving liberty to such a devoted co-worker in the cause. 
 Indeed, I have no doubt that a penny collection set 
 on foot among the American people would very soon 
 have yielded enough to have purchased his liberty, and 
 for one, I am sorry to-night that this opportunity was 
 not accorded to them, and the honor of freeing the 
 most distinguished American slave was permitted to fall 
 to the lot of the English friends of liberty. No doubt 
 the course adopted was well-meant ; perhaps it was 
 wise, but I would have been glad to hand the message 
 down to my descendants, that I had given even a penny 
 to take the badge of servitude from the neck of one 
 who did so much to wake the conscience of the nation 
 to the shame which was dragging it down to deserved 
 ignominy. 
 
 THE FIRST LEADER OF II IS RACE. 
 
 With the outbreak of the War of Rebellion, Mr. 
 DOUGLASS appears in a new role, that of representative 
 and leader of his people. 
 
 Without embroiling himself with those leaders of the 
 Abolition movement, for whom he had so profound a 
 veneration, and to whom the world owes an inextin 
 guishable debt of gratitude, he saw their error and 
 realized, as they did not always, that the trend of events 
 was toward the liberation of his people. 
 
 u The more I saw of Abraham Lincoln," he said in 
 1866, " the more surely I became convinced that he 
 was the instrument selected by Divine wisdom for the 
 liberation of my people, and I determined that no effort 
 
56 MEMORIAL OF FREDERICK DOUGLASS. 
 
 should be lacking on my part to uphold his hands. 
 Many of my friends, many of my own people, differed 
 with me, but to my mind the tendency seemed all the 
 time as clear and evident as the sun in heaven." 
 
 Of the details of this time I know but little. That, 
 in the main, Mr. DOUGLASS stood firm in his faith in 
 that man who, as the years go by, is seen more and 
 more clearly to have been in brain, in tact, in unob 
 trusive steadfastness, in faith and prophetic clearness of 
 vision, the greatest man of his age, if not of any age, 
 -Abraham Lincoln, there can be no question. That 
 he should sometimes have wavered is not to be won 
 dered at, when Sunnier and Wilson, Phillips and Wade, 
 lost faith in the leader whose greatness and wisdom, 
 patience and sagacity, they failed to comprehend. 
 
 From the first, Mr. DOUGLASS urged upon the Pres 
 ident the employment of colored men, if not as soldiers, 
 at least as organized laborers. As soon as the time 
 was ripe, he began to urge their enlistment as soldiers, 
 and devoted himself to the recruiting and organization 
 of such forces. It is said that one who was urging 
 the organization of colored troops said to Mr. Lincoln : 
 "Why do you not give FRED DOUGLASS a commission?" 
 "What rank would you suggest?" asked the President. 
 -"Why not make him a brigadier?" was the reply. 
 " He could easily raise a division of colored troops." 
 
 "Where would you get the officers?" asked Lincoln. 
 " If Mr. DOUGLASS had a military training and we could 
 find colored men capable of service as field, line, and 
 staff for such a command, it would be different. But 
 you jnust remember that even then the problem would 
 
THE EULOGY. 57 
 
 not be solved. Mr. Douglass is not a citizen of the 
 United States. Would I be justified in appointing him 
 to a responsible command ? The truth is, he is too big 
 for a small place. He is the representative of his people, 
 and it would not be to their interest that he should 
 hold a subordinate position. I appreciate Mr. DOUG 
 LASS merit, and he appreciates the difficulties of my 
 position." 
 
 " I felt abashed," said my informant, " that I had 
 not realized these difficulties before they were pointed 
 out to me." 
 
 There is no doubt that there was a disposition to urge 
 such action upon the President, and if Mr. DOUGLASS 
 had taken counsel of his ambition instead of keeping in 
 view the welfare of his people and the country whose 
 destiny they must share, it is quite probable/ that such 
 an experiment might have been tried. That it would 
 have been hazardous to the Union cause, the emancipa 
 tion of the slaves and the fame of Mr. DOUGLASS, there 
 can be little doubt. Without the recognition to which 
 he was so well entitled, and which few men would have 
 foreborne to claim, Mr. DOUGLASS devoted himself to 
 the raising of troops for the defence of the Union. 
 
 EMANCIPATION. 
 
 At the close of the war, Mr. DOUGLASS found him 
 self in a position of the highest honor and extremest 
 difficulty. By the white people of the North he was 
 regarded as in an especial manner the representative of 
 the colored people. The colored people of the South, 
 only half-informed with regard to his peculiar relation 
 
58 MEMORIAL OF FREDERICK DOUGLASS. 
 
 to the long struggle which had culminated in their 
 emancipation, as yet regarded him simply as the 
 most fortunate of his race, whose position in the esteem 
 of the country only showed to what others might attain. 
 They did not realize that during all these years while 
 he had been fighting valiantly the battle of freedom, 
 he had been under a process of education the like of 
 which no other man of his race ever enjoyed. From 
 slavery to the society of men and women of the highest 
 culture in the land; from service under a harsh task 
 master to being the honored guest in the best white 
 homes of the land, was a transformation few men 
 would have had the moral quality to experience without 
 becoming giddy with an undue sense of their own per 
 sonal merit. Escaping that, however, such a life was 
 the most perfect of educational forces which swiftly 
 removed him to an infinite distance from the life from 
 which he had fled. He became a slave who had put 
 slavery under his feet. He found himself, in sentiment 
 and feeling, much nearer akin to the most refined white 
 society of the North than to the " freedmen " of the South. 
 They had been freed in an instant. The moral and intel 
 lectual stamp of slavery was still upon them. He had 
 had thirty years of preparation for the miracle he lived 
 to behold. 
 
 During all this time, his whole thought had been liberty. 
 Freedom for all, equal right before the law ; that was 
 all he asked for those akin to him in blood and linked 
 with him in destiny. His mind had never gone beyond 
 this climax. He had never asked himself what would 
 happen afterwards. Until the outbreak of the war, 
 
THE EULOGY. 59 
 
 indeed, he never expected to see this result. He did 
 not doubt that it would come, but looked upon it as 
 being generations away rather than close at hand. While 
 his caution and sense of practicality showed him the 
 utterly delusive character of John Brown s vision of a 
 government based on the hope of systematic cooperation 
 of the slave-population of the South in an endeavor to 
 destroy slavery by force, yet his despair of better 
 results under existing conditions was such as to restrain 
 him from giving information in regard to the same or 
 approving the desperate venture on which this " inspired 
 maniac " was about to engage. Had he been able to 
 forecast even possible success, there is no doubt that 
 he would have engaged in it most heartily. But he 
 saw only defeat, useless sacrifice, and the contempt of 
 all practical people. Brown was angry because he did 
 not give entire approval to his desperate venture. It 
 was well that he did not. Its hopelessness was the 
 very element that gave it strength. That such a little 
 company should embark upon so desperate a venture 
 to secure liberty for a despised race, fixed the world s 
 attention and made the leader s death a grand and 
 awful spectacle. If he had been in fact, as he desired 
 and hoped to be, the advance-guard of a popular move 
 ment to free the slaves by force of arms, his act would 
 have been robbed of the moral grandeur on which its 
 effect depended. 
 
 It was not, of course, possible that Mr. DOUGLASS 
 should foresee such result. The question in his mind was 
 merely as to its success, and this he at once decided in 
 the negative. He was willing to engage in anything 
 
GO MEMORIAL OF FREDERICK DOUGLASS. 
 
 that promised good results, no matter how desperate, but 
 would not give his approval to what seemed destined to 
 hinder rather than advance the end he sought. 
 
 Emancipation came to him, as to all others, as a 
 surprise. Until the very last moment it was doubtful 
 whether the government would appeal to this extraordi 
 nary power in order to put down rebellion. When it 
 was done it was doubtful whether the people of the 
 North would approve. Even if they did approve, it was a 
 question as to what would be the legal result. Not until 
 December, 1865, was the XHIth Amendment of the Con 
 stitution made the law of the land and slavery abolished. 
 Even then, the problem of the future relations of the 
 white and colored man in the American republic was 
 but half-solved perhaps not even half-solved. Five 
 millions of people who had been slaves were made free 
 by its provisions. Yet they were not citizens. No man 
 could buy or sell them or control their labor for his 
 own advantage; but they had no rights, except such as 
 the several States might confer upon them ; they were 
 not citizens, but freedmen, or, in the language of the 
 Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, 
 in the Dred Scott decision, they were " free persons of 
 color^" "mere inhabitants" of the several States, without 
 rights, except such as the States might confer upon them. 
 
 It was three years afterward, in July, 1868, when 
 the XlVth Amendment was proclaimed, and for the 
 first time in our history, a colored man became a CITIZEN 
 OF THE UNITED STATES. 
 
 During these years the fact developed that mere lib 
 erty, the abolition of " slavery and involuntary servitude," 
 
THE EULOGY. 61 
 
 was not .enough to secure for the colored man that 
 equal enjoyment of privilege and opportunity which is the 
 essence of liberty. It became apparent to all observers 
 that the long struggle for the abolition of slavery was not 
 the end of conflict for the establishment and perfection 
 of the liberty of the individual. The destruction of slavery 
 had only unmasked the other and more difficult problem 
 of Caste. 
 
 A RACE REDEEMED. 
 
 There was something pathetic in the feeling of dis 
 appointment which came over Mr. DOUGLASS as he 
 realized this fact. He had fought so long for liberty, 
 had hoped for so much, and now it seemed as if 
 the great conflict for justice had just began. He was 
 not a leader in the sense of one who devises policies or 
 methods. He did not originate. His function was to 
 judge of what others might offer to pass upon the 
 practicability of the plans of others. \Yhat was needed 
 to make the work of emancipation and enfranchisement 
 complete and effectual ? This was the question he was 
 always asking, until the end came. At first he relied on 
 the provisions of the XlVth Amendment. They seemed 
 to him suffcient ; but as they were bent and twisted, 
 in the process of legal construction, he gave up that 
 hope. Of the opinion in the case of the United 
 States vs. Cruikshank, he said pithily : " It is the Dred 
 Scott case of the new dispensation." 
 
 To the clamorous and pathetic appeal of his people 
 to be delivered from unjust discrimination, from oppres 
 sion and outrage, which they suffered because of race 
 and color, he could only answer, " Wait, work, hope ! " 
 
02 MEMORIAL OF FREDERICK DOUGLASS. 
 
 It was a vague remedy how vague he well knew, 
 as those to whom it was addressed fully realized. 
 In this again, that strong and cautious self-restraint 
 which was a marked feature of his character showed 
 itself most clearly. He dreaded above all things 
 giving any advice to his people that might work them 
 injury. He recognized his inability to cope with the 
 new problem. His life-thought had been fixed on 
 liberty. He had studied slavery in all its phases. 
 Caste, the distinction in legal right or opportunity 
 based on race or color and having its root in legisla 
 tion of a subtle, evasive, and fraudulent character 
 this was an enemy of a new type. The old arguments 
 would not do. The old weapons were powerless against 
 it. The old allies were dispersed and could not be 
 rallied to fight the new wrong. Other men must be 
 trained for the warfare. Other hands must forge the 
 new weapons. Other hearts must bear the burden. 
 Other souls must endure the scath of the impending 
 conflict. This was the conclusion at which he arrived 
 during the years that lay between emancipation and 
 the time when he was called to give up his work on 
 earth. 
 
 Once during the last year of life the old lion roused 
 himself for battle. In the congress in regard to the 
 state and condition of the Negro, held at Chicago 
 during the World s Fair, the old argument of the 
 essential and organic inferiority of the colored race was 
 put forth with almost as much particularity as in the 
 old days when it was made the justification of iniquity 
 and the excuse of oppression. At the sound of this 
 
TIIK EULOGY. ()3 
 
 familiar war-cry the old soldier mustered his failing 
 energies, and the torrent of ridicule and denunciation 
 of this infamous standard by which it is still sought 
 to measure his people s right to enjoy " life, liberty, 
 and the pursuit of happiness/ is said by those who 
 heard it, to have been worthy of his best estate. 
 
 "It is the old, old fight," he said to me a few months 
 afterwards. " The strange claim that a white, intelli 
 gent, Christian people makes of right dependent on race 
 or color of a right to oppress, to degrade, to sub 
 jugate, or destroy another people, merely because they 
 are not as white or as wise or as strong as them 
 selves. Will it never end ? Will the civilized white 
 man never cease trying to outdo the savage in bar 
 barity ? Will the Christian never learn that the 
 colored man is only a weaker brother ? God only 
 knows what the end will be ! I am waiting waiting 
 with my ear close to the ground to catch the sound 
 of the chariot wheels ! " 
 
 REWARDS OF LABOR. 
 
 His prominence as a colored man the fact that he 
 was, indeed, the only colored man known to the whole 
 country made it eminently proper that he should be 
 recognized by the government which he had served 
 in promoting its most important policy. 
 
 When President Grant proposed the acquisition of 
 a naval station in San Domingo, a proposal which 
 our present complications with England over the Ven 
 ezuelan boundary and possible complication with Spain 
 growing out of Cuban affairs show to have been 
 
(54 MEMORIAL OF FREDERICK DOUGLASS. 
 
 a policy of the highest wisdom, - - Mr. DOUGLASS, 
 with Dr. Howe and Senator Wade, were designated as 
 a commission to proceed to San Domingo and ascer 
 tain and report upon the conditions there prevailing, 
 and the desirability of such action. It was the first 
 time a Negro had been charged with any public 
 function by the government of the United States, and 
 this action of the great soldier was correctly construed 
 by the world into a purpose on his part to maintain 
 the policy and guarantee of equal citizenship for the 
 colored man, which his party had proclaimed and the 
 country had indorsed. 
 
 He was afterward appointed Marshal of the District 
 of Columbia, Register of the same, and Minister Pleni 
 potentiary to Hayti. These honors brought also wealth 
 and the means for enjoying a dignified and well-earned 
 leisure. For the first time in the history of the 
 Republic, a Negro became an important and universally 
 esteemed personage at the capital of the Union. He 
 was a marked and honored presence at all ceremonial 
 functions, and was sought out by travellers from all 
 lands as one of the most notable and distinguished 
 citizens of the Republic. In all his official relations he 
 was dignified, courteous, and incorruptible. 
 
 He realized the dignity of the position he held 
 and would not permit any one, however high, to ques 
 tion his rights or reflect upon his fitness or capacity 
 to discharge its duties. While Minister to Hayti a 
 naval officer was sent to the island charged with a 
 diplomatic mission which he was to perform, not in 
 connection with the Minister, but in disregard of him 
 
THE EULOGY. (j,> 
 
 and his high office. Mr. DOUGLASS regarded this as 
 an affront which was put upon him because of his 
 race, and promptly resigned. He was probably correct 
 in his conclusion that such a course would never have 
 been adopted if the Minister Plenipotentiary had been 
 a white man. At all events, he was right in resenting 
 it as an affront to himself, and through him to the 
 people of whom he was the special representative and 
 exponent. 
 
 THE LESSOR OE HIS LIFE. 
 
 His memory should be an inspiration to every colored 
 man and a warning to every white American that 
 caste discrimination, whether it be the prop of slavery 
 or other wrong, cannot long be justified by its results. 
 While it may be many years or even generations before 
 another colored man will attain the same distinctive 
 prominence in the whole country, Mr. DOUGLASS was 
 not only the exponent of new conditions but the excep 
 tion that proves the rule in regard to old ones. A 
 people that can produce a DOUGLASS under the condi 
 tions that beset his life, will unquestionably produce many 
 who shall be his superiors in attainment and power 
 under an improved environment. The law of the evo 
 lution of types in humanity is just as inflexible as in 
 the lower orders of life. One DOUGLASS born out of 
 slavery is the forerunner of many to be born out of the 
 semi-freedom which is all that Caste permits his race 
 yet to enjoy. 
 
 The difficulties that beset his life can never be 
 duplicated in all the world s life which is to be. One 
 
66 MEMORIAL OF FREDERICK DOUGLASS. 
 
 of the twin dragons of oppression has at least been 
 slain. Slavery is no more. From the rising to the set 
 ting of the sun there is no place in any civilized 
 land where oppression dare wear that name. The 
 slave-ship, the slave-mart, the auction-block, the life 
 which was in all things subject to another s will, the 
 political condition which denied marriage and family, 
 and legal offspring, which by law refused the rights of 
 self-defence, forbade the race to possess or to inherit; to 
 receive, to give or take ; to sue or be sued ; which denied 
 the sacred rite of marriage, and in the name of Christ 
 forced millions to an adulterous estate to gratify Christian 
 lust and greed this monster, which not only had survived 
 the Dark Ages but grew daily more horrible in character 
 and aspect with the advance of civilization, is at least no 
 more ! Not only in our land but in all the earth slavery 
 is dead ! Only the evil stench of its decay remains to 
 offend the moral sense of man ! 
 
 Caste, the twin demon, is yet to be destroyed. Let 
 the life of FREDERICK DOUGLASS be an example to 
 those who must take up the conflict where he was 
 obliged to lay it down, and a warning to those who 
 would put aside and cover up the wrongs done to-day, 
 in the name of science and of that new God which 
 measures human rights, not by manhood but by race 
 and color, making the shallow claim of a supreme supe 
 riority the excuse for wrong. A nation, a civilization, a 
 Christianity, which within one man s memory upheld 
 slavery with all its horrors should hesitate to proclaim 
 anew its infallibility. The land which gave a million 
 lives to destroy the demon Slavery, should beware of 
 
THE EULOGY. G7 
 
 enthroning in its place the fouler and more dangerous 
 Moloch, CASTE! 
 
 As slave, freedman, citizen, and patriot, FREDERICK 
 DOUGLASS life was such as to reflect fame upon his 
 people, credit upon those who listened to his admoni 
 tions, renown upon the nation, which finally recognized 
 his merits, and honor on all who do honor to his 
 memory. Within this fane dedicated to liberty and the 
 memory of noble sons of the Republic, no worthier life 
 has been commemorated. 
 
PERSONAL REMINISCENCES 
 
 
PERSONAL REMINISCENCES OF FREDERICK 
 DOUGLASS. 
 
 IT is peculiarly fitting that Boston, here in sacred 
 Faneuil Hall, should recognize the talents, admire the 
 wonderful career, and exalt the lofty virtues of one 
 among the most eminent of her adopted and favorite 
 sons. It was upon this free soil of Massachusetts that 
 FREDERICK DOUGLASS, the panting fugitive, first felt 
 secure from the bay of the blood-hounds of slavery. 
 
 It was here, alas! he awoke too soon to the fact that 
 not even the Bay State strand, at that time, could 
 really guarantee the liberty and privileges which the 
 Constitution of the United States had promised to her 
 citizens. Here, also, he learned that caste still dared 
 to ostracize where freedom nominally reigned ; and that 
 here free locomotion, manly expansion, and full Christian 
 development were not, at that time, considered wholly 
 necessary for those of a black skin. 
 
 But, on the other hand, it was Massachusetts at 
 Lynn, at Nantucket, at Salem, and even in the Boston 
 of that day who by her very atmosphere, even then 
 rapidly purifying, filled the lungs and roused all the 
 faculties of a great dormant soul. 
 
 This of itself is no small renown, even for so great a 
 State. No small plaudit, even for her whose boast still 
 
72 MEMORIAL OF FREDERICK DOUGLASS. 
 
 is that the brightest jewels of her crown are " her sons, 
 native and adopted, the character, services, and fame of 
 those who have benefited and adorned their day and 
 generation." 
 
 It was on Massachusetts soil FREDERICK DOUGLASS 
 laid aside the exhorter s robe, hushed the Baltimore 
 camp-meeting melodies and Sharpe-street s trumpet-calls 
 to salvation, and essayed rather to preach the living 
 gospel, not alone in the freedom of Christ but for the 
 freedom of humanity. 
 
 In the memorable school-house at Nan tucket the 
 home of great Paul Cuffee, navigator, merchant, colo 
 nizer, strenuous always for civil rights, teacher and 
 upholder of the Friendly Creed DOUGLASS found at 
 last his tongue suddenly and miraculously loosened ; saw 
 the blinding light from heaven, streaming in all efful 
 gence, lighting up the pathway before him. Here was 
 his earliest school, the Academy of the Abolitionists, 
 that log college of fiery eloquence, fierce dialectic, keen 
 analysis, and unsparing criticism, the best equipped of 
 its day, at once idealistic, realistic, and sternly practical. 
 
 To an unusually sensitive soul, to one extraordinarily 
 attuned and keyed to catch and return the slightest 
 emotion, everything at this remarkable period conspired 
 to develop, expand, and stimulate the late slave-boy of the 
 Chesapeake. Quaker prudence and the " inner light," 
 Puritan zeal for right, and Pilgrim faith and trust, the 
 friendly hand, the beaming, approving eye, the hearty 
 sympathy which not only recognized a new-found brother, 
 but resolved he should be heard, 
 
 " Though under ;i roof of black." 
 
PERSONAL REMINISCENCES. 73 
 
 The sights, the controversies of the time, historic 
 places, and venerated names, still kept alive in lofty 
 deed and noble aim by honored descendants, the 
 Sewalls, Quincys, Phillipses, Bowditches, and Pillsburys, 
 heirs of all the past, all combined to furnish this illus 
 trious fugitive the grandest opportunity for the best 
 instruction. Here was the finest anvil on which to beat 
 into sturdiest strength and deftest symmetry the polished 
 weapons of oratory, persuasion, pathos, humor, and 
 invective. 
 
 Bred upon the seashore, trained in the shipyard, hav 
 ing caught glimpses of the eloquence of the ages in 
 the " Columbian Reader ; " catching his first full, free 
 breath by " the deep-sounding waves " of Nantucket, 
 can we wonder why FREDERICK DOUGLASS, to his latest 
 day, always turned with full heart, trembling voice, and 
 ever respectful homage at the very name of Massachu 
 setts. 
 
 Upon the altar which she long years after raised to 
 defend the integrity of the Union he offered his sons 
 to the glorious Fifty-fourth Massachusetts Volunteers ; to 
 the equally meritorious Seventh Massachusetts Cavalry; 
 and took his part in the recruiting service. 
 
 Crude in thought, diffident and distrustful of his 
 powers, as I have heard him say, he was really fright 
 ened at his first success. He had the rare frankness in 
 later years to acknowledge that his first inspiration to 
 higher effort, to more sustained flights of oratory, and 
 more careful preparation, came from hearing the gifted, 
 eloquent negro, born under the shadows of Harvard, edu 
 cated at Salem, cultured by travel, and refined by the 
 
74 MEMORIAL OF FREDERICK DOUGLASS. 
 
 fortunate circumstances of cultivated friendships and 
 associations Charles Lenox Remond. 
 
 Mr. DOUGLASS used to say that inheriting the preju 
 dices among which he had grown up, there was no 
 surprise in the beginning at Garrison, Quincy, Phillips, 
 and Pillsbury. They were ail white men, diverse though 
 they were in culture, and talent, and eloquence. In his 
 mind they were naturally heirs to all the learning of 
 the ages. Hitherto he had heard only the intelligent 
 negro as a fervent exhorter in the religious home, in 
 Sharpe-street Church, Baltimore, wherein he had early 
 sought peace in religion. But the deep feelings, and the 
 untrained, rude language of these men, though freighted 
 with all the fullest and loftiest ideals of Christian truth, 
 yet jarred on his own sensitive and poetic ear, and 
 seemed mere noise and pathos, sincere though it was ; 
 it seemed, indeed, to lack the one note for which his 
 soul yearned cultivation. He had never expected to 
 find it among his own race, and had thought it unat 
 tainable until he heard Remoiid. 
 
 He deemed it even then peculiar to New England- 
 reared colored men, until in the national convention 
 of colored citizens, held at Buffalo, N.Y., August 15, 
 1843, where Remond, of Salem, and DOUGLASS, of 
 Boston, represented Massachusetts, he listened for the 
 first time to other educated, talented, and intrepid 
 colored men, preachers, teachers, business men, scholars, 
 and specialists Wright, Ray, Garnet, Beaman, Platt, 
 Johnson, Loguen, Malvin, Francis, and others, whose 
 friendship there begun, he enjoyed, in some instances, 
 for over forty years. Many persons, even now mure 
 
PERSONAL REMINISCENCES. 75 
 
 unfamiliar with the true history of the negro in America 
 than Mr. DOUGLASS was then, are inclined to look upon 
 him as the only intellectual, the only eloquent orator, 
 debater, and writer among his race ; but at no time of 
 his wonderful and varied career did any one hear him 
 even intimate, much less make, such an assertion. 
 
 I remember hearing him say of the venerated Bishop 
 Loguen that he was " one of the most powerful orators " 
 he had ever heard ; of Garnet, that he was " a master of 
 invective ;" of Ringgold Ward, that "his eloquence was 
 as intense as his blackness," and "his gestures as grace 
 ful as his body was huge and ungainly ; " of Remond, 
 " I always kept him in mind, and became almost wild 
 when I read of his wonderful speeches in Exeter Hall." 
 
 So Themistocles was kept awake by the fame of the 
 illustrious dead of the Ceramicus. So genius ever needs 
 the stimulus of recorded deeds, or the hoof-beat of the 
 pacer, the snort of a rival, or the indefinable electric 
 presence of kindred genius, to rouse to highest effort. 
 
 As a Boston boy, I well recall my first sight of 
 Mr. DOUGLASS in the late fifties. It was in the 
 old Melodeon, on Washington street, where the Anti- 
 Slavery conventions and Woman s Rights conventions 
 were wont to be held. 
 
 I had been accustomed to read FREDERICK DOUGLASS 
 paper " The North Star," but was too young to have 
 formed any clear notion of his personality. Through 
 the kindness of my mentor and early friend, William 
 C. Nell, whose statue of Attucks his life s dream 
 is at last, thank God, erected, I was privileged to go 
 to the rear of the stage entrance and there for the 
 
76 MEMORIAL OF FREDERICK DOUGLASS. 
 
 first time saw in one group, DOUGLASS, Garrison, Abby 
 Kelly Foster, Purvis, Sojourner Truth, Phillips, Pills- 
 bury, and William Wells Brown. 
 
 To-night memory brings back the vision of ^Eschines 
 in exile, reading Demosthenes on the Crown to his 
 rapt pupils, " would that you could have seen, would 
 that you could have heard the great original." To my 
 boyish sight Mr. DOUGLASS appeared even taller and 
 brawnier of frame then than any of those about him, 
 and often afterwards I was inclined to think it the 
 natural exaggeration of youth ; but recently having come 
 across the photograph of the Santo-Domingo Commission, 
 where Mr. DOUGLASS is seen seated at the left of the 
 Commissioners, on the deck of the man-of-war, the same 
 physical superiority there manifest confirms my earliest 
 impression. Several generations must have combined to 
 produce that frame of rugged oak, as centuries must 
 have rolled by and many climes conjoined to have pro 
 duced that subtlety of mind, and those exquisite effects of 
 voice, of tone, so rich in its cadent swell, that resembled 
 what may seem a trite, but the only applicable, meta 
 phor, the rolling of the billows on the shore, the 
 booming of the sea beyond. 
 
 This first meeting with him brings out only the 
 central figure and that historic anti-slavery group. 
 There was a clash of opinion, all I at present recall, 
 and Sojourner Truth, slender, black, weird, seeress in 
 speech and manner sibyl, indeed, a fit foil to DOUGLASS 
 - was opposed ; but it was the fencing of the repre 
 sentatives, man and woman, of the black race. 
 
 Afterward, at the Annual Bazaars, at the Twelfth 
 
PERSONAL REMINISCENCES . 7 < 
 
 Baptist Church, where he lectured, and on the first an 
 niversary of the hanging of John Brown, when a Boston 
 mayor tried to put down free speech, and occasioned 
 Wendell Phillips finest effort, " Mobs and Education," 
 I had an opportunity to see, to know, to enjoy his 
 personal friendship, and reverently study the manifold 
 phases of his unique character. 
 
 In 1859-60 every Massachusetts breeze was surcharged 
 with the elixir of liberty. My recollections of that 
 time relate to places, men, and scenes to Phillips 
 " Toussaint L Ouverture" at Mercantile Hall; Theodore 
 Parker s and Emerson s discourses at Music Hall, on Sun 
 days ; Frank Sanborn, J. Sella Martin, Redpath, O Connor, 
 and Hinton ; Higginson, Bowditch, Merriam, Whipple, 
 and "The Traveller," Slack and "The Commonwealth," 
 Z. K. Pangborn and our grandest Governor, John A. 
 Andrew. One felt and knew that the contest was on ; 
 that the era of moral suasion had passed ; that there 
 was a Spartan band on Massachusetts soil determined 
 to grapple at once with slavery and fight it to the 
 death. 
 
 The meeting of the 3d December, 1860, was too large 
 for the lesser temple, the Meionaon, where Emerson and 
 the Woman s Rights advocates were wont to hold forth. 
 It was adjourned to the larger temple above, so his 
 torically sacred to free discussion. 
 
 I was there, and had edged my way near my friends, 
 Sella Martin and FREDERICK DOUGLASS, at the side plat 
 form, just as the howling mob swept into the hall 
 and took possession. 
 
 Not an Abolitionist retreated. On the contrary, 
 
78 MEMORIAL OF FREDERICK DOUGLASS. 
 
 Richard J. Hinton, known then to me by sight and 
 name, called me to him, asked if I knew where Red- 
 path s office was, and bade me take this card I now 
 hold up, a sacred relic, to that office and bring back 
 John Brown s revolver. 
 
 Mr. DOUGLASS said " Go ; " Mr. Martin said "Go;" 
 but I needed no second admonition. Inspired by the 
 errand, I ran and brought the revolver under my jacket, 
 and remained on the platform beside Mr. DOUGLASS 
 until the hall was cleared ; but the card I have religiously 
 preserved as a memento of a day few Bostonians now 
 feel proud to recall. There is a compensation, it is 
 said, in every untoward event. On that gloomy 
 night, when free speech seemed stifled in the city of 
 Boston, where were Sanborn, Phillips, DOUGLASS, and 
 Hinton forced to seek and find relief ? In the old ark 
 of safety on Joy street, the ancient church of Rev. 
 Nathaniel Paul, co-worker with Garrison in England, 
 the same building wherein the Massachusetts Anti- 
 Slavery Society drew its first breath, a church then 
 presided over by the eloquent J. Sella Martin. Here 
 the Abolitionists met, while the mob raged without, 
 and celebrated the martyrdom of John Brown. Here 
 they got their second wind for the conflict already 
 precipitated. 
 
 The war came. Mr. Phillips spoke for the first time 
 " under the flag." We know how Mr. DOUGLASS 
 threw himself all heart and mind and soul into that 
 conflict ; with what enthusiasm he and the Disunionists, 
 the Abolitionists, and the Republicans, and the Demo 
 crats, too, at last rallied together for the defence of the 
 
PERSONAL REMINISCENCES. 79 
 
 Union, which meant to all a land free without a slave 
 the ideal Republic. 
 
 I was at school at Oberlin during the battle years 
 1862-1863, and hence did not hear him, as some here 
 to-night heard him when Judge Russell ran up the 
 steps of the platform of that same Treinont Temple 
 bringing the despatch that Abraham Lincoln had 
 issued the Proclamation of Freedom ! What a coin 
 cidence ! From the very spot whence he had been 
 driven I860, the great FREDERICK DOUGLASS gave the 
 words to that waiting, anxious audience, " Praise God 
 from whom all blessings flow," and the vast throng 
 joined in the grand Benediction. 
 
 I stood in Faneuil Hall, however, when the sur 
 render at Appomattox came, and heard Rue s swelling 
 song of Jubilee ; heard shouts of victory, and those 
 Union choruses since known everywhere. The sten 
 torian notes of our greatest orator, great man, lover of 
 his race, but greater lover of humanity, sounded forth 
 the praises of the Great Ulysses, captain of armies, the 
 silent man of American history, whose fame, now 
 trumpet-tongued, has sw r ept over the world. 
 
 Who can ever forget that scene ? We seemed then 
 to be living we were living in an heroic age, when 
 words were deeds, and deeds were crystallized into ever 
 lasting principles ; when men seemed likest gods, living, 
 acting, breathing, and contending not for self, nor 
 place, nor power, not to rivet chains, but to strengthen 
 for all time the freedom of their country. 
 
 Party, faction, race, for once, at least, in America 
 were in reality lost sight of ; for once slavery, caste, 
 
80 MEMORIAL OF FREDERICK DOUGLASS. 
 
 rebellion found no defender, no apologizer throughout 
 the length and breadth of the reunited nation, and on 
 such occasion, brief, alas ! brief as it was, the great 
 orator whom we mourn to-night rose perhaps to the 
 transcendent heigbt of his aspiration and his fame. 
 
 That was an exultant hour ; too rapturous to last ! 
 Grave, grave, grave indeed is the responsibility of the 
 reactionists who began from that night the propa 
 ganda to regain, on the field of diplomacy, what they 
 had lost in the wager of battle ; to relegate to quasi- 
 peonage the slaves whom war and military necessity 
 had freed. 
 
 Thirty years have passed since that eventful night ; 
 thirty years of vast national progress in wealth, of phil 
 anthropic effort ; years marked in science and education; 
 in the restoration of the negro s right to suffrage ; in 
 the industrial development of the great mass of the 
 former bondmen ; but with all the progress, all the 
 education, thrift, patient endurance, and deferred hope, 
 the disgraceful fact remains, and the sacred cause of 
 truth requires it to be solemnly said here in Faneuil 
 Hall that FREDERICK DOUGLASS was untimely cut off, 
 through zeal, shame, indignation, and righteous wrath 
 at the barbarities perpetrated upon his race by men 
 indebted to them for citizenship ; at the unpardonable 
 indifference of Northern Christians, so solicitous for the 
 woes of far-off Armenians ; at the slow-footed Ameri 
 can justice ; at the sheathed sword of national author 
 ity, which flashes not forth like the mailed arm of 
 this Commonwealth, nor utters its time-honored and 
 ever-respected injunction : 
 
PERSONAL REMINISCENCES. 81 
 
 Man us haee inimica tyrannis, 
 Ense petit placidam, sub libertate 
 
 FREDERICK DOUGLASS undoubtedly died heart-broken 
 at the farce of freedom, the travesty of American citi 
 zenship, in the late rebellious States, and worn out with 
 speaking and writing, with the fervor of fifty years before. 
 
 Some of you saw him a year ago at Providence, at 
 that meeting where I had the honor to preside. We 
 saw then the handwriting on the wall. 
 
 It is not enough for us here to repeat the mar 
 vellous story of his life. No one will ever tell it 
 with more simplicity, more heart-stirring pathos, than he 
 himself has already done in matchless prose, worthy of 
 the simple annals of the Scotch peasantry. We are not 
 here to praise his eloquence, much less describe it. 
 We know that it is not lost to the world, but is 
 already coursing upon a thousand precious-laden breezes ; 
 has already swept over the entire land, and has touched 
 the hearts and lips, and fired the unconquerable souls 
 of a thousand black Douglasses, not so eminent, per 
 haps, as their great exemplar, but resolved, from the 
 rapt fervor of his latest exhortation to take up his 
 unfinished work ; the vindication of the complete, 
 indefeasible, unextinguishable citizenship of the American 
 negro, at this present moment in greater jeopardy 
 than it was even before Bull Run. 
 
 It is customary to speak of Mr. DOUGLASS as a 
 great negro, and to dismiss the race to oblivion, by 
 scanty accorded and only partial justice even to him. 
 He was a great man judged by any standard, of any 
 
82 MEMORIAL OF FREDERICK DOUGLASS. 
 
 race, at any time, in this world s history. Like his 
 prototype, Alexandre Dumas, pere, whom he resembled 
 only in genius, he will rank among Nordau s great 
 men of the world. Like the great Irish agitator, 
 O Connell, whom he so much resembled in many 
 respects, he was at once typical of the highest char 
 acteristics of the races w r hose mingled blood flowed 
 through his veins. 
 
 He was truly, as no white man could be, the typical, 
 composite American, for in his veins there flowed, 
 without a doubt, the negro, the indian, the white 
 strain of stock, and I always suspected a touch of 
 that Berber blood whose fire and genius in every south 
 ern State has helped to save the native African from 
 the extreme cruelty of the Anglo-Saxon. 
 
 There was a world of deep philosophy in a remark 
 made by him when he was unjustly and unduly criti 
 cised by some negroes, " I am not a negro ; look at 
 my features ; look at my hair." 
 
 He was not, it is true, a pure negro in blood ; such 
 was the ethnological fact ; that, however, was not 
 necessary either to assert his full claim to recognition 
 as a man and an American citizen, nor could the fact 
 disparage his intellect, or lessen the deep interest he 
 always felt in his mother s race. Had she not been 
 the guiding star of his childhood, though seen only at 
 night, like the fabric of a vision ? Did there not always 
 sing in his soul the mystical sounds crooned to him 
 in the lonely watches, words the childish mind could 
 not comprehend, which, perhaps, his maturer manhood 
 even never wholly fathomed. 
 
PERSONAL REMINISCENCES. 83 
 
 He resented the idea that an unknown father should 
 lay claim to his intellect, and we know to-day, thanks 
 to heredity and science, that in intellect and in feel 
 ing, in lofty aspiration, in uncommon good-sense, in 
 wondrous depths of humor, he was a true mother- 
 child. 
 
 Did he know much of grief in all that strange, 
 eventful life ? Many think not, because he did not 
 wear it on his sleeve. The devoted wife of his early 
 days, faithful companion, suggester and companion of 
 his flight, who combined, as some of us know, the 
 tenderest qualities of wife, mother, and friend, left at 
 her death a void in the heart of her husband and 
 of every friend who knew her intimately. 
 
 Mr. DOUGLASS mourned her as the husband mourns 
 the true wife, as the wife mourns the devoted husband ; 
 the pain that numbs and deadens, from which we rise 
 to life, with a slower step and a lessened ardor ; but 
 the greatest grief of Mr. DOUGLASS life, known only 
 to his most intimate friends, indeed sacredly guarded 
 as a vestal fire from the profane, came to him earlier 
 in life it was the loss of his favorite daughter, 
 Annie, the apple of his eye, the one clinging plant, of 
 that middle-life, his own image in the opposite sex; the 
 transmission and the cross, which perpetuates genius, 
 the heart which, above all others, he ever knew, re 
 sponded most completely to every note and tone of his 
 own soul s harmony. 
 
 For years no one dared to mention her to him, except 
 when he was alone ; while the souvenirs of her precocity, 
 her extreme sensibility, and her mobile and radiant 
 
84 MEMORIAL OF FREDERICK DOUGLASS. 
 
 nature, were a perennial source of comfort at times of 
 political distrust, of personal misrepresentation, of mis 
 understanding. 
 
 In the summer of 1868 he invited me, a college 
 student, to visit him at his home in Rochester, in 
 the old house well remembered by so many of 
 his intimate friends of that day. Here with his violin, 
 his books, and collection of English scenes and memen 
 toes, a new side of his nature was revealed, a side ever 
 ready to swing wide its portal, but always requiring 
 a sympathetic touch to move the springs. It was on 
 this visit I saw the relics of the daughter gone, and 
 there learned the wondrous hold she had upon his 
 whole being. 
 
 He had fled to England, on the opening of the 
 John Brown investigation, which meant evidently hang 
 ing for such as were proved cognizant of the hero s 
 plans. Ordinarily, she would have accompanied her 
 father ; but his safety demanded prudence. She liter 
 ally pined away with grief during his absence, and the 
 uncertainty of its duration, never having been sepa 
 rated from him before ; and she died at the budding 
 of womanhood, with a plaintive call for the absent 
 father last on her lips. 
 
 Honors came, many and greater than his fondest 
 dreams could have imagined ; brighter even than the 
 boyish visions by the shores of the Chesapeake when 
 the "slave-ships" sailed by; and the bright clouds 
 illumined by gorgeous, dazzling sunlight used to conjure 
 up visions worthy of the Apocalypse. No honor, how 
 ever, came too high nor undeserved ; none that did not 
 
PERSONAL REMINISCENCES. 85 
 
 have the bitter dreg of American prejudice thrown in 
 to poison the cup ; but neither the honors nor the dregs 
 of the chalice ever were able to make him forget the 
 one hand nor gave so lasting a pang as this worst grief. 
 
 It has been a matter of surprise to some persons that 
 a man of Mr. DOUGLASS physique and moral courage 
 should have had, as he freely confessed, such a dread, 
 daily, hourly, on his escape from bondage, of capture ; that 
 he should have fled to England, alarmed and dreading the 
 Fugitive Slave Law. The explanation has ever seemed 
 to me simple, not from any remark dropped from him, 
 but rather from an analysis of his peculiarly remarkable 
 organization. He was essentially a sensitive, in spite of 
 his sturdy, physical organization. In truth, a more highly 
 developed sensitive, from the very combination of massive 
 frame and delicacy of mind. He should have been able, 
 as he was, to strike the lowest and the highest notes, 
 and be alive to the varied strokes in turn, roused or 
 depressed to an extent which less acutely organized 
 beings cannot comprehend. 
 
 The horrible thought and fact of slavery had become so 
 abhorrent to him, so cumulative and harrowing in the quick 
 tense vibrations of his thought, that they certainly would 
 have beat higher and higher, and in time overbalanced 
 his reason, had the dread been permitted to remain, or 
 had the cloud not been lifted. 
 
 He was essentially a man of peace, and naturally took 
 to " non-resistance," the peaceful method of agitation of 
 the Society of Friends, whose interest in him never al 
 lowed its Light to grow dim, and to whom he owed 
 much that is unrecorded. 
 
86 MEMORIAL OF FREDERICK DOUGLASS. 
 
 At the convention of 1843 he was the consistent 
 opponent of the fiery Garnet and others, advising the 
 torch and physical resistance. We know now he never 
 favored Brown s plan as developed, and his opposition, 
 as early as 1843, and as late as 1859, yes, and 1893, 
 when plans were set on foot to apply the lex talionis in 
 lynching matters, his arguments, precedents, and bound 
 less faith, in all probability, prevented much bloodshed. 
 
 This aversion to force, and horror of even abstract 
 oppression, this frenzy of speech at all species of wrong, 
 arose, as can easily be imagined, from a nature capable 
 of the widest outbursts of feeling, the outcome of which 
 in more peaceful times would have been in the highest 
 degree poetic. 
 
 I have often conjectured whether or not his thought 
 ever took on this form; that the potency was there, 
 is seen in his speeches and in a venture of his, which 
 I only discovered by chance, a story, " Madison Wash 
 ington," written with all the gracefulness of his best 
 estate, a story needing only time and elaboration to 
 have made it a study of negro character worthy of later 
 times and his maturer years. 
 
 He never referred to it in my hearing ; perhaps he 
 was ashamed of this youthful venture. He need not 
 have discarded this early literary offspring, for in plot, 
 conception, and delineation it was worthy of its author, 
 and the theme. 
 
 Mr. DOUGLASS has always been spoken of as the 
 natural, " self-made " orator ; but with me there has 
 always been present, in everything that Mr. DOUGLASS 
 wrote, the unconscious trace, an odor of the lam}), one 
 
PERSONAL REMINISCENCES. 87 
 
 always well filled, well trimmed too, and kept brightly 
 burning. I find this as conspicuous in his lectures 
 on American slavery (Buffalo, 1851) as in the Lessons 
 of the Hour (A. M. E. "Church Review," July, 1894). 
 He seemed to have the grand Miltonic scorn of coming 
 into a contest of thought unprepared ; with his blade not 
 well sharpened, the hilt untried, and the point not tested. 
 I dare assert, judged by any papers of eminent American 
 statesmen, writers, or even lawyers, arguing from prece 
 dent, case, or analogy, Mr. DOUGLASS will be found never 
 to have been careless in the form of his thought, never 
 negligent in his method, and almost invariably accurate 
 and even elegant in choice and application of words ; 
 while some of his aphorisms are worthy of Victor Hugo 
 himself, and will live in American literature. " One, 
 with God, is a majority;" "The Republican party 
 is the ship, all outside is the sea ; " "In American 
 law the slave has no wife, no children, no country, no 
 home ; " " Slavery is always slavery ; always the same 
 foul, haggard, damning scourge;" "There comes no voice 
 from the enslaved ; " " The Irishman is poor, but he is 
 not a slave;" "I began to pray with my legs;" "When 
 men prefer the crooked to the straight road, it is not 
 because the one is crooked and the other is straight, 
 but because of some fancied advantage apart from the 
 character of the roads themselves;" "Mankind seems 
 fated to find Truth only through a howling wilderness of 
 Error. The wonder is less that they have gone wrong, 
 than that they have gone right at all. On first view, 
 Error would seem to have everything its own way, 
 opening wide its thousand gates against the single one 
 
88 MEMORIAL OF FREDERICK DOUGLASS. 
 
 of Truth. . . . By some means or other, whatever 
 may be said in favor of the doctrine of innate depravity, 
 men do and will in the end prefer truth to error, right 
 to wrong." 
 
 If my claim is well founded, it should dispose of the 
 semi-disparagement which makes mere oratorical emotion 
 the greatest strength, and fails to estimate the greater 
 glory which comes from a trained intellect wielding 
 the mightiest of weapons. 
 
 Those who only knew Mr. DOUGLASS as the bitter 
 opponent of slavery, the picturesque and typical negro, 
 Marshal of the District of Columbia, Recorder of Deeds, 
 and diplomat, saw only some milder phases of his 
 varied nature. Once, amid the Blue Ridge of Virginia, 
 we were invited to address an emancipation celebration 
 of colored people, gathered from several counties. It 
 was a characteristic scene amid the heights of Virginia, 
 -rural, jovial, eminently Southern in its types and 
 scenes, all that goes to make up the negro s per 
 sonality, not omitting his proverbial good nature and 
 superabundant vitality. 
 
 Mr. DOUGLASS was not entirely at ease on this occa 
 sion ; his mind was in the mountains and far away, so 
 he turned me in, as he said, "to do the hard work." By 
 the time I had finished he was strolling leisurely, viewing 
 the romantic scene, finding his way at last over the 
 ground to a carriage the occupants of which had beck 
 oned to him. They proved to be old friends : one, the 
 patriarch, a Pennsylvania Quaker, who had known him 
 years before. We were invited to the ancient homestead, 
 the earliest drift southward of the Penn stock, - 
 
PERSONAL REMINISCENCES. 81) 
 
 dating back to the seventeenth century, and there for 
 the first time in years I saw Mr. DOUGLASS at his best 
 estate, at once entertainer and entertained, witty, learned, 
 aphoristic, epigrammatic, bubbling over with brilliant 
 sayings, quotations ; radiantly happy among cultivated, 
 appreciative auditors ; felicitous in expression, and 
 literally flashing with quaint, humorous, and serious 
 reminiscences, just as some brown Brahmin shines in 
 cultivated Boston or New York society. And so it was 
 ever with him. His oratory was never conversational, 
 except in tone, for it was the oratory of his youth ; 
 but his conversation, when at his best, was the per 
 fection of speech of the true orator. And yet this 
 man, whom the impartial critic will rank among the 
 five truly great men of this country, could say of 
 himself : 
 
 " More than twenty years of my life were consumed 
 in a state of slavery. My childhood was environed 
 by the baneful peculiarities of the slave system. I 
 grew up to manhood in the presence of this hydra- 
 headed monster, not as a master, not as an idle spec 
 tator, not as a guest of the slave-holder, but as a 
 slave, eating the bread and drinking the cup of slavery 
 with the most degraded of my brother bondmen, and 
 sharing with them all the painful conditions of their 
 wretched lot." 
 
 And this American slave, whose freedom was ransomed 
 with a price ; who attained next to the highest honors 
 of his race ; the trusted friend of Abraham Lincoln ; the 
 friend, also, of General Grant; orator, office-holder, states 
 man, and diplomat, never became in sober truth a real 
 
90 MEMORIAL OF FREDERICK DOUGLASS. 
 
 citizen of the United States, so far as the rights, the 
 " privileges," so far as locomotion was concerned ; not 
 near so much a true citizen as the slave of Epaphro- 
 ditus, to whom Judge Tourge e has referred, was in the 
 days of heathen Rome. 
 
FINAL PROCEEDINGS 
 
FINAL PROCEEDINGS. 
 
 ON the sixteenth of January, 1896, Councilman STANLEY 
 RUFFIN introduced the following resolutions at the meeting of 
 the Common Council, and they were adopted by a unani 
 mous vote ; namely : 
 
 Resolved, That the thanks of the City Council be 
 hereby expressed to the Hon. ALBION W. TOURGEE 
 for the eloquent oration delivered by him at the memo 
 rial services in honor of the late FREDERICK DOUGLASS, 
 held under the auspices of the city at Faneuil Hall, 
 December 20, 1895. 
 
 Resolved, That the thanks of the City Council be 
 hereby expressed to RICHARD T. GREENER, Esq., for the 
 address delivered by him at the memorial services in 
 honor of the late FREDERICK DOUGLASS, at Faneuil 
 Hall, December 20, 1895. 
 
 Resolved, That the thanks of the City Council be 
 hereby expressed to the Rev. D. P. ROBERTS for offi 
 ciating as chaplain at the memorial services in honor 
 of the late FREDERICK DOUGLASS, held by the city in 
 Faneuil Hall, December 20, 1895. 
 
94 MEMORIAL OF FREDERICK DOUGLASS. 
 
 The Board of Aldermen concurred with the Common Coun 
 cil in the adoption of the resolutions, at their meeting, 
 January the twentieth, and the resolutions were approved by 
 the Mayor on the twenty-second of January, 1896. 
 
 i: 71 
 

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