54

OverviewTranscribeVersionsHelp

Facsimile

Transcription

Status: Complete

206 LIFE AND TIMES OF FREDERICK DOUGLASS

Rev. Samuel J. May, and many others, who though of lesser note were
equally devoted to my cause. Among these latter ones were Isaac and Amy
Post, William and Mary Hallowell, Asa and Huldah Anthony, and indeed all
the committee of the Western New York Anti-Slavery Society. They held
festivals and fairs to raise money, and assisted me in every other possible
way to keep my paper in circulation, while I was a non-voting abolitionist,
but withdrew from me when I became a voting abolitionist. For a time the
withdrawal of their cooperation embarrassed me very much, but soon
another class of friends were raised up for me, chief amongst whom were the
Porter family of Rochester. The late Samuel D. Porter and his wife Susan F.
Porter, and his sisters, Maria and Almira Porter, deserve grateful mention as
among my steadfast friends, who did much in the way of supplying pecuniary
aid.

Of course there were moral forces operating against me in Rochester, as
well as material ones. There were those who regarded the publication of a
"Negro paper" in that beautiful city as a blemish and a misfortune. The New
York Herald, true to the spirit of the times, counselled the people of the place
to throw my printing press into Lake Ontario and to banish me to Canada,
and while they were not quite prepared for this violence, it was plain that
many of them did not well relish my presence amongst them. This feeling,
however, wore away gradually, as the people knew more of me and my
works. I lectured every Sunday evening during an entire winter in the beautiful
Corinthian Hall, then owned by Wm. A. Reynolds. Esq., who though he
was not an abolitionist, was a lover of fair-play and was willing to allow me
to be heard. If in these lectures I did not make abolitionists I did succeed in
making tolerant the moral atmosphere in Rochester; so much so, indeed, that
I came to feel as much at home there as I had ever done in the most friendly
parts of New England. I had been at work there with my paper but a few
years before colored travelers told me that they felt the influence of my
labors when they came within fifty miles. I did not rely alone upon what I
could do by the paper, but would write all day, then take a train to Victor,
Farmington, Canandaigua, Geneva, Waterloo, Batavia, or Buffalo, or elsewhere,
and speak in the evening, returning home afterwards or early in the
morning, to be again at my desk writing or mailing papers. There were times
when I almost thought my Boston friends were right in dissuading me from
my newspaper project. But looking back to those nights and days of toil and
thought, compelled often to do work for which I had no educational preparation,
I have come to think that, under the circumstances it was the best school
possible for me. It obliged me to think and read, it taught me to express my

Notes and Questions

Nobody has written a note for this page yet

Please sign in to write a note for this page