Page 52 - Historical Dictionary of Political Communication in the United States

forget
his
shall
it
never
I DOUGLASS, FREDERICK first speech at the convention—the extraordinary emotion 41
excited in my own mind—the powerful impression it created upon a crowded auditory—
the applause which followed from the beginning to the end of his felicitous remarks. I
think I never hated slavery so intensely as at that moment.
After speaking there, Douglass was employed by several societies as a lecturer
and became known as one of the best orators in the United States and in En-
gland. In 1845, he published his first autobiography, Narrative of the Life of
Frederick Douglass, a powerful account of the cruelty and oppression of the
Maryland plantation culture into which he was born. Two years later he became
associate editor of the Ram's Horn, a strong antislavery paper. Later in the same
year, Douglass announced the publication of his own paper, the North Star, in
the Ram's Horn: "The object of the North Star will be to Attack Slavery in all
its forms and aspects: advocate Universal Emancipation; exalt the standard of
Public Morality; promote the Moral and Intellectual Improvement of the Colored
People; and hasten the day of Freedom to the Three Millions of our Enslaved
Fellow Countrymen."
Douglass saw early that the Negro's cause and the women's cause were in-
tertwined. Therefore, the North Star carried in its masthead: ' 'Right is of no
sex—Truth is of no Color—God is the Father of us all, and we are all
Brethren." In 1851, the name of the paper was changed to Frederick Douglass'
Paper. It lasted 16 years.
In his second autobiography, My Bondage and My Freedom, published in
1855, Douglass expanded the account of his slave years. It included his views
and lectures on antislavery. For example, in a speech in Rochester on July 5,
1852, on "What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?" he said that it revealed to
him "the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim." After
the Civil War, Douglass started another paper in 1870, the New National Era,
the motto of which was ' 'free men, free soil, free speech, a free press, every-
where in the land. The ballot for all, fair wages for all."
His last autobiography, Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, published in
1881, records his efforts to keep alive the struggle for racial equality in the years
following the Civil War. In the conclusion of his book, he wrote, ' 'Forty years
of my life have been given to the cause of my people, and if I had forty more
they should all be sacredly given to the same great cause. If I have done some-
thing for that cause, I am, after all, more a debtor to it, than it is a debtor to
me."
SOURCES: Douglass' autobiographies published by the Library of America, 1994;
Philip S. Froner, ed., Frederick Douglass on Women's Rights, 1976; Nathan Irvin Hug-
gins, Slave and Citizen: The Life of Frederick Douglass, 1980.
Anju G. Chaudhary