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LIFE AND TIMES OF FREDERICK DOUGLASS 203

hesitate, but inclined me to abandon the undertaking. All previous attempts
to establish such a journal having failed, I feared lest I should but add
another to the list, and thus contribute another proof of the mental deficiencies
of my race. Very much that was said to me in respect to my imperfect
literary attainments, I felt to be most painfully true. The unsuccessful projectors
of all former attempts had been my superiors in point of education, and
if they had failed how could I hope for success? Yet I did hope for success,
and persisted in the undertaking, encouraged by my English friends to go
forward.

I can easily pardon those who saw in my persistence an unwarrantable
ambition and presumption. I was but nine years from slavery. In many
phases of mental experience I was but nine years old. That one under such
circumstances should aspire to establish a printing press, surrounded by an
educated people, might well be considered unpractical if not ambitious. My
American friends looked at me with astonishment. "A wood-sawyer'' offering
himself to the public as an editor! A slave, brought up in the depths of
ignorance, assuming to instruct the highly civilized people of the north in the
principles of liberty, justice, and humanity! The thing looked absurd.
Nevertheless I persevered. I felt that the want of education, great as it was,
could be overcome by study, and that wisdom would come by experience;
and further (which was perhaps the most controlling consideration) I thought
that an intelligent public, knowing my early history, would easily pardon the
many deficiencies which I well knew that my paper must exhibit. The most
distressing part of it all was the offense which I saw I must give my friends
of the old Anti-Slavery organization, by what seemed to them a reckless
disregard of their opinion and advice. I am not sure that I was not under the
influence of something like a slavish adoration of these good people, and I
labored hard to convince them that my way of thinking about the matter was
the right one, but without success.

From motives of peace, instead of issuing my paper in Boston, among
New England friends, I went to Rochester, N. Y., among strangers, where the
local circulation of my paper — THE NORTH STAR — would not interfere with
that of the Liberator of the Anti-Slavery Standard, for I was then a faithful
disciple of Wm. Lloyd Garrison, and fully committed to his doctrine touching
the pro-slavery character of the Constitution of the United States, also
the non-voting principle of which he was the known and distinguished advocate.
With him, I held it to be the first duty of the non-slaveholding States to
dissolve the union with the slaveholding States, and hence my cry, like his,
was "No union with slaveholders." With these views I came into western