CHAPTER XXII.

FREDERICK DOUGLASS.

Abou Ben Adhem-may his tribe increase!
Awoke one night from a deep dream of peace,
And saw, within the moonlight in his room,
Making it rich, like a lily in bloom,

An angel, writing in a book of gold:

Exceeding peace had made Ben Adhem bold;
And to the presence in the room he said,

"What writest thou?" The vision raised its head,
And with a look made all of sweet accord,

Answered, "The names of those who love the Lord."
"And is mine one?" said Abou. 'Nay, not so;

Replied the angel. Abou spoke more low,

But cheerily still, and said: "I pray thee, then,
Write me as one who loves his fellow-men."
The angel wrote and vanished.

The next night

It came again with a great wakening light,

And showed the names whom love of God had blest;
And lo! Ben Adhem's name led all the rest.

It is the pride and boast of truly Republican institutions

that they give to every human being an opportunity of thus demonstrating what is in him. If a man is a man, no matter in what rank of society he is born, no matter how tied down and weighted by poverty and all its attendant disadvantages, there is nothing in our American institutions to prevent his rising to the very highest offices in the gift of the country.

As we recount the lives of the major portion of America's greatest, we find that by their own unaided efforts they have raised themselves, in spite of every disadvantage which circumstances could throw in their way; and it is with the purpose in view of inspiring our rising colored citizens with honorable ambition, that we record the biography of the illustrious Douglass.

Though a man like Charles Sumner, coming of an old Boston family, with every advantage of Boston schools, and of Cambridge College, becomes distinguished, yet side by side with him we see Abraham Lincoln, the rail-splitter, Henry

Wilson, from the shoemaker's bench, and Chase from a New Hampshire farm. But there have been in our country some three or four millions of human beings who were born to a depth of poverty, below what Henry Wilson or Abraham Lincoln ever dreamed of. Wilson and Lincoln, to begin with, owned nothing but their bare hands, but there have been in this country four or five million men and women who did not even own their bare hands. Wilson and Lincoln, and other brave men like them, owned their own souls and wills-they were free to say, "thus and thus I will do, I will be educated, I will be intelligent, I will be a Christian, I will by honest industry amass property to serve me in my upward aims." But there were four million men and women in America who were decreed by the laws of this country not to own even their own souls. The law said to them, they shall be taken and held as chattels personal to all intents and purposes. This hapless class of human beings might be sold for debt, might be mortgaged for real estate; nay, the unborn babe might be pledged or mortgaged for the debts of a master. There were among these unfortunate millions, in the eye of the law, neither husbands or wives, nor fathers or mothers; they were only chattels, personal. They could no more contract a legal marriage than a bedstead can marry a cooking stove, or a plow be married to a spinning wheel. They were week after week advertised in public prints to be sold in company with horses, cows, pigs, hens and other stock of a plantation.

They were forbidden to learn to read. The slave laws imposed the same penalty on the man who should teach a man to read, as on the man who wilfully put out his eyes. They had no legal right to be Christians, or enter the kingdom of heaven, because the law regarded them simply as personal property subject to the caprice of an owner, and when the owner did not choose to have his property be a Christian, he could shut him out from the light of the gospel, as easily as one can close a window shutter. Now if we think it a great thing that Wilson and Lincoln raised themselves from a state of comparatively early disadvantage to high places in the land, what shall we

think of one who started from this immeasurable gulf below them?

Frederick Douglass had as far to climb to get to the spot where the poorest free white boy is born, as that white boy has to climb to be President of the Nation, and take rank with Kings and Judges of the earth.

There are few young men born to competence, carried carefully through all the earlier stages of training, drilled in a grammar school, and perfected by a four years college course, who could stand up on a platform, and compete successfully with Frederick Douglass as an orator. Nine out of ten college educated young men would shrink even from the trial, and yet, Frederick Douglass fought his way up from a nameless hovel on a Maryland plantation, where with hundreds of others of the young live stock he shivered in his little tow shirt, the only garment allowed him for summer and winter, kept himself warm by sitting on the sunny side of out-buildings, like a little dog, and often was glad to dispute with the pigs for the scraps of what came to them to satisfy his hunger.

From this position he has raised himself to the habits of mind, thought and life, of a cultivated gentleman, and from that point of sight, has illustrated exactly what slavery was (thank God we write in the past tense) in an autobiography which most affectingly presents what it is to be born a slave. Every man who fought in our late great struggle every man or woman who made a sacrifice for it every one conscious of inward bleedings and cravings that never shall be healed or assuaged, for what they have rendered up in this great anguish, ought to read this autobiography of a slave man, and give thanks to God that even by the bitterest sufferings, they have been permitted to do something to wipe such a disgrace and wrong from the earth.

The first thing that every man remembers, is his mother. Americans all have a mother at least that can be named. But it is exceedingly affecting to read the history of a human being who writes that during all his childhood he never saw his mother only two or three times, and then in the night.

And why? Because she was employed on a plantation twelve miles away. Her only means of seeing her boy was to walk twelve miles over to the place where he was, spend a brief hour, and walk twelve miles back, so as to be ready to go to work at four o'clock in the morning. How many mothers would often visit their children by such an effort? and yet at well remembered intervals the mother of Frederick Douglass did this for the sake of holding her child a little while in her arms; lying down a brief hour with him.

That she was a woman of uncommon energy and strength of affection this sufficiently shows, because as slave mother she could do him no earthly good-she owned not a cent to bring him. She could not buy him clothes. She could not even mend or wash the one garment alloted to him.

Only once in his childhood did he remember his mother's presence as being to him anything of that comfort and protection that it is to ordinary children. He, with all the other little live stock of the plantation, were dependent for a daily allowance of food on a cross old woman whom they called Aunt Katy. For some reason of her own, Aunt Katy had taken a pique against little Fred., and announced to him that she was going to keep him a day without food. At the close of this day when he crept shivering in among the other children, and was denied even the coarse slice of corn bread which all the rest had, he broke out in loud lamentations. Suddenly his mother appeared behind him-caught him in her arms, poured out volumes of wrathful indignation on Aunt Katy, and threatened to complain to the overseer if she did not give him his share of food-produced from her bosom a sweet cake which she had managed to procure for him, and sat down to wipe away his tears and see him enjoy it. This mother must have been a woman of strong mental characteristics. Though a plantation field hand, she could read, and if we consider against what superhuman difficulties such a knowledge must have been acquired, it is an evidence of wonderful character. Douglas, says of her, that she was tall and finely proportioned. With affecting simplicity he says: "There is in Prichard's Natural