Frederick Douglass for two or three decades was one of the favorites of the lyceum, which he abandoned only after the emancipation of his race. Douglass was beyond all comparison the ablest man whom the black race ever produced in our country, either among the pure black or the class of mixed blood. He himself was a mulatto. His father was pure white of a distinguished Maryland family. His mother was pure black and his father’s slave--that is, his mother was a pure black and his father a pure--I should say impure--white. He always gave his mother the credit of his talents. Douglass was born a slave. In early manhood he managed to escape on a ship, and landed in New Bedford, Mass. There he soon learned to read, and worked at such work as he could find. By and by he attended anti-slavery meetings, and soon became a popular speaker and the pet of the abolitionists. His graphic accounts of his life as a slave were very popular. From giving the story of his life, he gradually branched out into discussions of the political questions of the day, and, next to Phillips, was probably the ablest orator of the anti-slavery movement. Eventually he went to Rochester and published, for many years, a weekly antislavery paper. Its title was _Frederick Douglass’s Paper_, which, next to Garrison’s _Liberator_ and _The Anti-Slavery Standard_, was recognized as the ablest anti-slavery paper in America. Then he became a lecturer, and his fame spread so rapidly that he took rank in the favor of the lecture-going public with Phillips and the other leading lights of the lyceum. When Lincoln came into power, Douglass moved to Washington, and was appointed to office in the District of Columbia as Marshal, a position he held during the entire period of Lincoln’s administration. Douglass’s first wife was a plantation negress without any education. A few years ago he married again. His second wife was white, and a woman of education and ability. The black race has developed under freedom many effective speakers, but Douglass was the only man among them who deserved to be regarded as a real orator. Most of the negro speakers were really benefited in public esteem on account of their color--that is, they could not have had as good a reputation as they won if they had been white, for their audiences made excuses for them that they would not have made for a white man. But Douglass was retarded by his color, for he would have won a higher rank if he had been a white man. After hearing Douglass and Anna Dickinson speak at the first Southern Loyalist Convention at Philadelphia, John Minor Botts, the famous Virginian political leader, said: “To-day I have heard the greatest white woman and the greatest colored orator in America. I tell you, sir, if Douglass had been a white man he would have been regarded as one of the greatest men in America.”