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He arrayed the arguments side by side: on this side lay success; the greatest office ever held by a Negro in America greater than Douglass or Bruce or Lynch had held a landmark, a living example and inspiration. A man owed the world success; there were plenty who could fail and stumble and give multiple excuses. Should he be one? He viewed the other side. What must he pay for success?
"Well, Philetus, what are you looking for?" "Do, Mis' Douglass!" it is impossible to express the abortive attempt at a bow which accompanied this salutation "I want to know if the minister 'll be in town to-day." "What do you want of him?" "I don't want nothin' of him. I want to know if he'll be in town to-day?" "Yes; I expect he'll be along directly. Why, what then?"
The next two days seemed to be very busy ones to one member of the Ried family. Dr. Douglass sometimes appeared at meal time and sometimes not, but the parlor and the piazza were quite deserted, and even his own room saw little of him.
They halted for half an hour in the upper park while she called the squirrels to her and fed them from her own hands those wonderful hands that had so often lured with jewels and threatened with steel. No one seeing this refined, sweet woman in tasteful furs would have related her with the Gismonda and Istar, but Douglass thrilled with sudden accession of confidence.
This had been proved in the extraordinary effect produced in Great Britain by Frederick Douglass in 1845 and 1846. The American Committee in connection with the Peace Congress were also desirous of sending to Europe coloured representatives of their Society, and Mr. Brown was selected for that purpose, and duly accredited by them to the Paris Congress.
While Grace Carter was speeding homeward with a heavy heart, out at the VN ranch Constance Brevoort was In a delirium of feverish happiness, and Douglass, thrilled by her passionate abandon, had not yet tired. Upon him she showered all the affection so long repressed; and her fervor and intensity, which awed him not a little, was very flattering to his vanity.
Frederick Douglass once remarked that Lincoln was one of the few white men he ever passed an hour with who failed to remind him in some way, before the interview terminated, that he was a negro. "He always impressed me as a strong, earnest man, having no time or disposition to trifle; grappling with all his might the work he had in hand.
He was an insurgent slave, taking hold on the rights of speech, and charging on his tyrants the bondage of his race." In Holland's biography of Douglass extracts are given from letters of distinguished contemporaries who knew the orator.
In 1859, very shortly before the raid at Harpers Ferry, Douglass met Brown by appointment, in an abandoned stone quarry near Chambersburg, Pennsylvania. John Brown was already an outlaw, with a price upon his head; for a traitor had betrayed his plan the year before, and he had for this reason deferred its execution for a year.
As a result of their stand for justice, they found themselves utterly deserted by all the great leaders with whom they had labored so earnestly and harmoniously for many years Garrison, Phillips, Greeley, Curtis, Tilton, Higginson, Douglass, Gerrit Smith. Of all the old Abolitionists only four Samuel J. May, Robert Purvis, Parker Pillsbury and Stephen S. Foster remained loyal to their standard.
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