Shadow and Light: An Autobiography with Reminiscences of the Last and Present CenturyGibbs, Mifflin Wistar
History
Shadow and Light: An Autobiography with Reminiscences of the Last and Present Century
Gibbs, Mifflin Wistar
African Americans
For the conditions that confronted him and the anti-slavery crusade,
have been well and eloquently portrayed by the late George William
Curtis. That how terribly earnest was the anti-slavery agitation this
generation little knows. To understand is to recall the situation of the
country. Slavery sat supreme in the White House and made laws at the
capitol. Courts of Justice were its ministers, and legislators its
lackeys. It silenced the preacher in the pulpit; it muzzled the editor
at his desk, and the professor in his lecture-room. It sat a price on
the heads of peaceful citizens; robbed the mails, and denounced the
vital principles of the declaration of independence as treason. In the
States where the law did not tolerate slavery, slavery ruled the club
and drawing room, the factory and the office, swaggered at the dinner
table, and scourged with scorn a cowardly society. It tore the golden
rule from the school books, and from the prayer books the pictured
benignity of Christ. It prohibited schools in the free States for the
hated race; hunted women who taught children to read, and forbade a free
people to communicate with their representatives.
It was under such conditions so pungently and truthfully stated that
Douglass appeared as a small star on the horizon of a clouded firmament;
rose in intellectual brilliancy, mental power and a noble generosity.
For his devotion was not only to the freedom of the slave with which he
was identified, but for liberty and the betterment of humanity
everywhere, regardless of sex or color. His page already luminous in
history will continue to brighten, and when statuary, now and hereafter,
erected to his memory, shall have crumbled "neath the beatings of
time;" the good fame of his name, high purpose and unflinching integrity
to the highest needs of humanity, will remain hallowed "foot prints in
the sands of time." Eminently fit was the naming of an institution in
Philadelphia "The Frederick Douglass Hospital and Freedman's School;"
the assuaging of suffering and the giving of larger opportunity for
technical instruction were cherished ideals with the sage of Anacostia;
also the lives of Harriet Beacher Stowe, Lucretia Mott and Francis E.
Harper, and the noble band of women of which they were the type, who
bravely met social ostracism and insult for devotion to the slave, will
ever have a proud place in our country's history. Of this illustrious
band was Julia Griffith, hitherto referred to, a grand representative of
those renowned women, who at home or abroad, did so much to hasten the
downfall of slavery and encourage the weak and lowly to hope and effort.
Thackery has said that, "Could you see every man's career, you would
find a woman clogging him, or cheering him, or beckoning him on."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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