Project Gutenberg's Frederick Douglass, by Charles Waddell Chesnutt

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Title: Frederick Douglass
A Biography

Author: Charles Waddell Chesnutt

Release Date: February 8, 2004 [EBook #10986]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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[Illustration]

FREDERICK DOUGLASS 1899

Charles Chesnutt

The Beacon biographies of eminent Americans. Includes bibliographical
references (p.).

Preface

Frederick Douglass lived so long, and played so conspicuous a part on
the world's stage, that it would be impossible, in a work of the
size of this, to do more than touch upon the salient features of his
career, to suggest the respects in which he influenced the course of
events in his lifetime, and to epitomize for the readers of another
generation the judgment of his contemporaries as to his genius and his
character.

Douglass's fame as an orator has long been secure. His position as the
champion of an oppressed race, and at the same time an example of its
possibilities, was, in his own generation, as picturesque as it
was unique; and his life may serve for all time as an incentive
to aspiring souls who would fight the battles and win the love of
mankind. The average American of to-day who sees, when his attention
is called to it, and deplores, if he be a thoughtful and just man,
the deep undertow of race prejudice that retards the progress of the
colored people of our own generation, cannot, except by reading the
painful records of the past, conceive of the mental and spiritual
darkness to which slavery, as the inexorable condition of its
existence, condemned its victims and, in a less measure, their
oppressors, or of the blank wall of proscription and scorn by which
free people of color were shut up in a moral and social Ghetto, the
gates of which have yet not been entirely torn down.

From this night of slavery Douglass emerged, passed through the limbo
of prejudice which he encountered as a freeman, and took his place in
history. "As few of the world's great men have ever had so