5

LIFE AND TIMES OF FREDERICK DOUGLASS 5

It is more than forty years now that he has been before the world as a
writer and speaker—busy, active, wonderful years to him—and we are
called upon to pass judgment upon his labors. What can we say? Can he
claim the well done good and faithful? The record shows this, and we must
state it, generally speaking, his life has been devoted to his race and the
cause of his race. The freedom and elevation of his people has been his life
work, and it has been done well and faithfully. That is the record, and that is
sufficient. No higher eulogium can be pronounced than that Longfellow says
of the Village Blacksmith:

"Something attempted, something done,
Has earned a night's repose."

Douglass found his people enslaved and oppressed. He has given the
best years of his life to the improvement of their condition, and, now that he
looks back upon his labors, may he not say he has "attempted'' and "done"
something? and may he not claim the "repose" which ought to come in the
evening of a well spent life?

The first twenty-three years of Douglass' life were twenty-three years of
slavery, obscurity, and degradation, yet doubtless in time to come these years
will be regarded by the student of history the most interesting portion of his
life; to those who in the future would know the inside history of American
slavery, this part of his life will be specially instructive. Plantation life at
Tuckahoe as related by him is not fiction, it is fact; it is not the historian's
dissertation on slavery, it is slavery itself, the slave's life, acts, and thoughts,
and the life, acts, and thoughts of those around him. It is Macaulay (I think)
who says that a copy of a daily newspaper (if there were such) published at
Rome would give more information and be of more value than any history
we have. So, too, this photographic view of slave life as given to us in the
autobiography of an ex-slave will give to the reader a clearer insight of the
system of slavery than can be gained from the examination of general
history.

Col. Lloyd's plantation, where Douglass belonged, was very much like
other plantations of the south. Here was the great house and the cabins, the
old Aunties and patriarchal Uncles, little picanninies and picanninies not so
little, of every shade of complexion, from ebony black to whiteness of the
master race; mules, overseers, and broken down fences. Here was the negro
Doctor learned in the science of roots and herbs; also the black conjurer with
his divination. Here was slave-breeding and slave-selling, whipping, tortur-
ing, and beating to death. All this came under the observation of Douglass