Men of Our Times; Or, Leading Patriots of the Day: Being narratives of the lives and deeds of statesmen, generals, and orators. Including biographical sketches and anecdotes of Lincoln, Grant, Garrison, Sumner, Chase, Wilson, Greeley, Farragut, Andrew, Colfax, Stanton, Douglass, Buckingham, Sherman, Sheridan, Howard, Phillips and Beecher.Stowe, Harriet Beecher
History
Men of Our Times; Or, Leading Patriots of the Day: Being narratives of the lives and deeds of statesmen, generals, and orators. Including biographical sketches and anecdotes of Lincoln, Grant, Garrison, Sumner, Chase, Wilson, Greeley, Farragut, Andrew, Colfax, Stanton, Douglass, Buckingham, Sherman, Sheridan, Howard, Phillips and Beecher.
Stowe, Harriet Beecher
United States -- Biography; United States -- History -- Civil War, 1861-1865 -- Biography
The face alluded to is copied from a head of Rameses the great
Egyptian king of the nineteenth dynasty. The profile is European in
its features, and similar in class to the head of Napoleon. From all
these considerations, we have supposed that the mother of Douglass must
have been one of that Mandingo tribe of Africans who were distinguished
among the slaves for fine features, great energy, intelligence and
pride of character. The black population of America is not one race. If
slaveholders and kidnappers had been busy for years in Europe stirring
up wars in the different countries, and sending all the captives to
be sold in America, the mixture of Swedes, Danes, Germans, Russians,
Italians, French, might all have gone under the one head of _Whitemen_,
but they would have been none the more of the same race. The negroes
of this country are a mixture torn from tribes and races quite as
dissimilar. The Mandingo has European features, a fine form, wavy, not
woolly hair, is intelligent, vigorous, proud and brave. The Guinea
negro has a coarse, animal head, is stupid, dirty, cunning. Yet the
argument on _negro_ powers is generally based on some such sweeping
classification as takes the Guinea negro for its type.
The father of Frederick Douglass was a white man, who, he never
knew--it would have been of no advantage to him had he known--but there
is reason to think that those fine intellectual gifts, that love of
liberty, and hatred of slavery which have led him to the position he
now occupies among freemen, were due to the blood of his mother. That
silent, noble black woman, whose wrongs were borne in such patience,
whose soul must so often have burned within her, whose affections were
stronger than weariness, and whose mind _would_ possess the key of
knowledge even though she gained it at such terrible sacrifices and
hazards, she is to be honored as the mother of Garrison is, as having
lived in her son and being the true author and inspirer of all that is
good and just in him.
After a few short interviews the communication between Douglass and his
mother ceased. She was taken sick, had a long illness and died without
a word or message, or any token passing between her and her child. He
running wild, a dirty little animal on the distant plantation, she
suffering, wasting, dying in silence--going into the great Invisible
where so many helpless mothers have gone to plead for their children
before God.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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