Several days after the story ran, Douglass delivered his first speech at the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society's annual convention in Nantucket.Use Google Hangouts Meet or Zoom to bring your group work and study sessions online. The founder of the weekly journal The Liberator, William Lloyd Garrison, was impressed with Douglass’ strength and rhetorical skill and wrote of him in his newspaper.
AbolitionistĪfter settling as a free man with his wife Anna in New Bedford in 1838, Douglass was eventually asked to tell his story at abolitionist meetings, and he became a regular anti-slavery lecturer. Nonetheless, Douglass and Pitts remained married until his death 11 years later. Douglass’ children were especially displeased with the relationship. Their marriage caused considerable controversy, since Pitts was white and nearly 20 years younger than Douglass. A graduate of Mount Holyoke College, Pitts worked on a radical feminist publication and shared many of Douglass’ moral principles. Pitts was the daughter of Gideon Pitts Jr., an abolitionist colleague. Anna remained a loyal supporter of Douglass' public work, despite marital strife caused by his relationships with several other women.Īfter Anna’s death, Douglass married Helen Pitts, a feminist from Honeoye, New York. Charles and Rosetta assisted their father in the production of his newspaper The North Star. Let us have one law, one gospel, equal rights for all, and I am sure God's blessing will be upon us and we shall be a prosperous and glorious nation.”ĭouglass and Anna had five children together: Rosetta, Lewis Henry, Frederick Jr., Charles Redmond and Annie, who died at the age of 10. The problem is whether the American people have loyalty enough, honor enough, patriotism enough, to live up to their own constitution.” “Let us have no country but a free country, liberty for all and chains for none. It is easy to deny them the means of freedom and the rightful pursuit of happiness and to defeat the very end of their being.” “There is no negro problem. It may not be felt at the moment, and the evil day may be long delayed, but so sure as there is a moral government of the universe, so sure will the harvest of evil come.” “Believing, as I do firmly believe, that human nature, as a whole, contains more good than evil, I am willing to trust the whole, rather than a part, in the conduct of human affairs.” “To educate a man is to unfit him to be a slave.” “To deny education to any people is one of the greatest crimes against human nature. We cannot ignore it if we would, and ought not if we could.” “If I ever had any patriotism, or any capacity for the feeling, it was whipt out of me long since by the lash of the American soul-drivers.” “The ground which a colored man occupies in this country is, every inch of it, sternly disputed.” “The lesson of all the ages on this point is, that a wrong done to one man is a wrong done to all men. It never did and it never will.” “Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have the exact measure of the injustice and wrong which will be imposed on them.” “I prefer to be true to myself, even at the hazard of incurring the ridicule of others, rather than to be false, and to incur my own abhorrence.” “No man can put a chain about the ankle of his fellow man without at last finding the other end fastened about his own neck.” “People might not get all they work for in this world, but they must certainly work for all they get.” “I would unite with anybody to do right and with nobody to do wrong.” “Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made to feel that society is an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe.” “The life of the nation is secure only while the nation is honest, truthful, and virtuous.” “n all the relations of life and death, we are met by the color line. “If there is no struggle there is no progress.