BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH.

Slave, fugitive, crusader, champion achiever of truest success, statesman, wielder of vast usefulness, commander of the world's respect, yet with all of his honors humble, gentle as are all of the truly great-such was Frederick Douglass. In his immense ascent from the lower depths of condition where the masses were reached not even by the faintest glimmer of hope, to the heights of meritorious and even majestic triumph; in his vast compass of experience, his strivings and failures, his noble aspirations and persistent upward mountings, his final complete and serene success, the life of this man affords one of the most satisfying illustrations of high human realization, that appears in the whole history of the world. And beyond all this his character and career were distinctly and distinguishedly unique. He was to the Afro-American what Washington and Lincoln were to the Anglo-American.

Frederick Douglass was born a slave in Tuckahoe, near Easton, Md., on the plantation of Colonel Edward Lloyd. He never knew the exact time of his birth, but it was probably in February, 1817. The identity of his father was also a matter unknown, but he was unquestionably a white man. His mother, a slave, was Harriet Bailey, one of the five daughters of Isaac and Betsey Bailey, whose mere possession of a surname is evidence that they were one of the oldest and best class of slave families in Maryland, as it was not customary to allow any but such to bear surnames, and the superiority of the mother over the majority of her race in that time is further attested by the

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fact that she was the only colored person in the whole village who was able to read. She called her son Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey, but after his escape he took the simpler name which he made famous. His life was not dissimilar from that of other child slaves. Placed at work as early as his services had any value, he toiled on incessantly until he found freedom, seeing meanwhile with his own eyes, day by day, all of the details of slavery, the whippings, the outrages, the "grievous burden of life," and too, the little softening amenities, for such of course there He pondered upon the injustice of the "peculiar institution" as a million of his class had before him, but with a mind of far finer native fibre than the masses of his fellows he perceived far more than they-realized more acutely and we have his word for it spoken when he was near the meridian of his life, free and educated, that he became "just as well aware of the unjust, unnatural and murderous character of slavery when nine years old, as I am now." Among the few bright spots in the slave boy's plantation life was the kindness of his master's daughter, Mrs. Thomas Auld, and later he was the recipient of valuable favors from Mrs. Hugh Auld, of Baltimore, to whom as his new mistress he was taken in 1825, soon after he had begun his ninth year. She taught him to read, or at least gave him rudimentary instruction in that medium of knowledge until her husband forbade, and this forbiddance being in the hearing of the boy and coupled with a remark that education was a dangerous thing for a slave to possess, set the shrewd boy to thinking, with the result that he soon saw clearly the vast value of being able to read and sought to acquire the art with tenfold his former zeal, though surreptitiously, and he made rapid progress from that day forth. Education and freedom became coupled in his mind as a means and an end and he diligently worked his slow, hard way along the road toward

his great objective point. By the time he was fifteen years old, the comparatively easy life of the boy was exchanged for one of hard labor in Mr. Auld's shipyard in Baltimore, and by the death of his mistress soon after he became the property of her husband who removed in 1833 to St. Michael's, a fishing village on the bay about forty miles from Baltimore. In the meantime our hero had made some good friends, had got larger glimmerings of the light of possible freedom, had gleaned fragments of knowledge, grown in mind, and had become converted to the creed of Christianity. He endeavored to study and also in a small way to teach, even organized a little school of black boys, which was quickly dispersed by his master and was threatened with the lash and with bullets if he did not desist. His master finding that there was danger he would rise in spite of all his efforts, surrendered the completion of the obdurate young slave's industrial education to one Covey, who was famous alike for his devout religion and his success in breaking unruly slaves. By this man he was overworked and ferociously flogged for what it had been beyond his power to prevent. Again and again this chastisement was repeated during a period of six months, and the sterling, strong, courageous spirit which finally prevailed and became the champion of his race as well as the corrector of his own wrongs, was, for the time being, thoroughly cowed. Douglass has said that, if at any one time more than another, it was then that he was "made to drink the bitterest dregs of slavery. . . . A few months of this discipline tamed me. I was broken in body, soul and spirit. My natural elasticity was crushed; my intellect languished; the disposition to read departed; the dark night of slavery closed in upon me; and behold a man transformed into a brute! I had neither sufficient time in which to eat or sleep, except on Sunday. . . . I spent this in a sort of beast-like stupor, between sleeping

and waking under some large tree. . . . I was sometimes prompted to take my life and that of Covey, but was prevented by a combination of hope and fear. . . . The overwork and the brutal chastisement, combined with that ever gnawing and soul-devouring thought 'I am a slave—a slave for life-a slave with no rational ground to hope for freedom,' rendered me a living embodiment of mental and physical wretchedness." But a great change-a revulsion and revolution-was near at hand.

It soon came about that he was again most brutally assaulted, kicked and clubbed by Covey. He fled to his master, Captain Auld, who ordered his return to the overseer. He obeyed, but there had grown up in his heart a fierce and determined spirit of resentment and resistance in place of the submission which he had been taught was the only proper attitude toward the oppressor. The opportunity for exercise of this newly engendered heroism was not delayed. No sooner had he met the overseer than that individual proceeded to punish him for his absence and his appeal to his master. Instead of meekly receiving chastisement, the slave stood up manfully and a terrific fight followed in which Covey and those whom he ordered to his assistance were vanquished. The overseer never tried again to inflict punishment upon Frederick though he had opportunity and even provocation within the few following months. Douglass called this the "turning point in his life." It made him a man instead of a timid boy, or, as he says, "a freeman in fact while I remained a slave in form."

He was four years more in bondage, but was never again whipped, although it was several times attempted. For two years after that, in 1835 and 1836, he was hired out by Covey to a neighbor who treated his slaves much better than had been Frederick's lot for some time previously. Even the comparatively humane treatment that he