himself to read and write before he was ten years of
age, and three years after his escape from slavery at the age of
twenty-one, he completely captured an audience at an anti-slavery
convention in Nantucket by his brilliant speaking. This gave him
employment as an agent of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, and
four years later brought him crowded audiences, in England, Scotland,
and Ireland.

Frederick Douglass was a favourite everywhere. He had wit and humour,
and spoke with the refinement of a cultivated scholar. He did not
become a narrow and monotonous agitator. The variety of his
intellectual sympathies, controlled by the constancy of a high moral
impulse, wholly exempted him from the rashness of a conceited zealot;
and, though often brilliant and at times rhetorical, his style was
quiet and persuasive, reaching the reason as easily as the emotions.
Coming as he did, out of slavery, at a time when the anti-slavery
sentiment was beginning to be aggressive and popular in New England
and other free States, Douglass seemed to be the Moses of his race as
much as Booker T. Washington in these later years. Englishmen raised
one hundred and fifty pounds and bought his freedom in 1846. The next
year, as a Garrisonian disunionist, he began the publication of a
weekly journal in Rochester; but he soon renounced disunionism,
maintaining that slavery was illegal and unconstitutional. In the year
the Liberty party nominated him for secretary of state, his publishers
sold eighteen thousand copies of his autobiography, entitled _My
Bondage and My Freedom_.

Before the campaign was far advanced it became evident that the
Republican party was not drawing all the anti-slavery elements to
which it was thought to be entitled; and, on the 12th of October,
Seward made a speech in Albany, answering the question, "Shall we form
a new party?" The hall was little more than two-thirds filled, and an
absence of joyous enthusiasm characterised the meeting. Earnest men
sat with serious faces, thinking of party ties severed and the work of
a lifetime apparently snuffed out, with deep forebodings for the
future of the new organisation. This was a time to appeal to
reason--not to the emotions, and Seward met it squarely with a
storehouse of arguments. He sketched the history of slavery's growth
as a political power; he explained that slave-holders were a
privileged class, getting the better of the North in appropriations
and by the tarif