uglass offered himself as a refutation of the last
speaker's argument, Rynders replied that Douglass was half white.
Douglass thereupon greeted Rynders as his half-brother, and made this
expression the catchword of his speech. When Rynders interrupted from
time to time, he was silenced with a laugh. He appears to have been
a somewhat philosophic scoundrel, with an appreciation of humor that
permitted the meeting to proceed to an orderly close. Douglass's
speech was the feature of the evening. "That gifted man," said
Garrison, in whose _Life and Times_ a graphic description of this
famous meeting is given, "effectually put to shame his assailants by
his wit and eloquence."

A speech delivered by Douglass at Concord, New Hampshire, is thus
described by another writer: "He gradually let out the outraged
humanity that was laboring in him, in indignant and terrible
speech.... There was great oratory in his speech, but more of dignity
and earnestness than what we call eloquence. He was an insurgent
slave, taking hold on the rights of speech, and charging on his
tyrants the bondage of his race."

In Holland's biography of Douglass extracts are given from letters
of distinguished contemporaries who knew the orator. Colonel T.W.
Higginson writes thus: "I have hardly heard his equal, in grasp upon
an audience, in dramatic presentation, in striking at the pith of an
ethical question, and in single [signal] illustrations and examples."
Another writes, in reference to the impromptu speech delivered at the
meeting at Rochester on the death of Lincoln: "I have heard Webster
and Clay in their best moments, Channing and Beecher in their highest
inspirations. I never heard truer eloquence. I never saw profounder
impression."

The published speeches of Douglass, of which examples may be found
scattered throughout his various autobiographies, reveal something of
the powers thus characterized, though, like other printed speeches,
they lose by being put in type. But one can easily imagine their
effect upon a sympathetic or receptive audience, when delivered with
flashing eye and deep-toned resonant voice by a man whose complexion
and past history gave him the highest right to describe and denounce
the iniquities of slavery and contend for the rights of a race. In
later years, when brighter days had dawned for his people, and age
had dimmed the recollection of his sufferings and tempered his
animosities, he became more charitable to his o