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LIFE AND TIMES OF FREDERICK DOUGLASS 295

sure helping to lift my race into consideration; for no man who lives at all,
lives unto himself; he either helps or hinders all who are in anywise connected
with him. I never rise to speak before an American audience without something
of the feeling that my failure or success will bring blame or benefit to
my whole race. But my activities were not now confined entirely to lectures
before lyceums. Though slavery was abolished, the wrongs of my people were
not ended. Though they were not slaves they were not yet quite free. No man
can be truly free whose liberty is dependent upon the thought, feeling, and
action of others; and who has himself no means in his own hands for guarding,
protecting, defending, and maintaining that liberty. Yet the negro after his
emancipation was precisely in this state of destitution. The law on the side of
freedom is of great advantage only where there is power to make that law
respected. I know no class of my fellowmen, however just, enlightened, and
humane, which can be wisely and safely trusted absolutely with the liberties
of any other class. Protestants are excellent people, but it would not be wise
for Catholics to depend entirely upon them to look after their rights and interests.
Catholics are a pretty good sort of people (though there is a soul-shuddering
history behind them), yet no enlightened Protestants would commit
their liberty to their care and keeping. And yet the government had left the
freedman in a worse condition than either of these. It felt that it had done
enough for him. It had made him free, and henceforth he must make his own
way in the world, or as the slang phrase has it, "Root, pig, or die": yet he had
none of the conditions for self-preservation or self-protection. He was free
from the individual master, but the slave of society. He had neither property,
money, nor friends. He was free from the old plantation, but he had nothing
but the dusty road under his feet. He was free from the old quarter that once
gave him shelter, but a slave to the rains of summer and the frosts of winter.
He was in a word literally turned loose naked, hungry, and destitute to the
open sky. The first feeling towards him by the old master classes, was full of
bitterness and wrath. They resented his emancipation as an act of hostility
towards them, and since they could not punish the emancipator, they felt like
punishing the object which that act had emancipated. Hence they drove him
off the old plantation, and told him he was no longer wanted there. They not
only hated him because he had been freed as a punishment to them, but
because they felt that they had been robbed of his labor. An element of greater
bitterness still came into their hearts: the freedman had been the friend of the
Government, and many of his class had borne arms against them during the
war. The thought of paying cash for labor that they could formerly extort by
the lash did not in anywise improve their disposition to the emancipated slave,