United States or Turkmenistan ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
In passing through the States in 1859 an unrest was everywhere observable. The pulse-beat of the great national heart quickened at impending danger. The Supreme Court had made public the Dred Scott decision; John Brown had organized an insurrection; Stephen A. Douglass and Abraham Lincoln at the time were in exciting debate; William H. Seward was proclaiming the "irrepressible conflict."
"Did she hesitate at all?" "Not she!" declared Miss Douglass. "She's no Harriet Freeze." Lloyd did not answer. This case of Harriet Freeze was one that the nurses of the house had never forgotten and would never forgive.
Douglass disclosed to the public how he succeeded in making his daring escape. "Murder itself," he says, "was not more severely and surely punished in the State of Maryland than aiding and abetting the escape of a slave."
I regretted that time did not permit of my visiting the celebrated Ostrich Farm of Mr. Arthur Douglass, at Heatherton Towers, about fifteen miles from Grahamstown. Mr. Douglass has the largest and most successful Ostrich Farm in the Colony, in addition to which he is the patentee of an egg hatching machine, or incubator, which is very much used in various parts of South Africa.
There were Negro inventors, a few lawyers, a number of physicians and dentists, many teachers, a score of intelligent preachers, some scholars of note, and even successful blacks in the finer arts. Some of these, with Frederick Douglass as the most influential, were also doing creditable work in journalism with about thirty newspapers which had developed among the Negroes as weapons of defense.
Parker Pillsbury, Lydia and Lucretia Mott, Frederick Douglass, Anna E. Dickinson, the Stantons, and others lined up with Phillips, whose vehement and scathing criticism of reconstruction policies seemed to them the need of the hour.
He was a conspicuous figure at the meeting in Tremont Temple, Boston, on January 1, 1863, when the Emancipation Proclamation, hourly expected by an anxious gathering, finally flashed over the wires. Douglass was among the first to suggest the employment of colored troops in the Union army. In spite of all assertions to the contrary, he foresaw in the war the end of slavery.
But I am glad to be able to say in equal honesty that I believe I was over-cautious, that Dr. Douglass was never so little worthy of regard as I supposed him to be, and that nothing could have more rejoiced my heart than the noble stand which he has so recently taken. Indeed his conduct has been so noble that I feel honored by his acquaintance." He was interrupted by a mischievous laugh.
Douglass sought no personal reward for his services in this campaign, but to his influence was due the appointment of several of his friends to higher positions than had ever theretofore been held in this country by colored men.
"She can't be all of her parts which one of them will I find as I enter her room?" he asked himself for the hundredth time. "Miss Merival will see Mr. Douglass," said the bell-boy. "This way, sir." As he stepped into the elevator the young man's face grew stern and his lips straightened out into a grim line.
Word Of The Day