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LIFE AND TIMES OF FREDERICK DOUGLASS 207

thoughts clearly, and was perhaps better than any other course I could have
adopted. Besides it made it necessary for me to lean upon myself, and not
upon the heads of our Anti-Slavery church. To be a principal, and not an
agent. I had an audience to speak to every week, and must say something
worth their hearing, or cease to speak altogether. There is nothing like the
lash and sting of necessity to make a man work, and my paper furnished this
motive power. More than one gentleman from the south, when stopping at
Niagara, came to see me, that they might know for themselves if I could
indeed write, having as they said believed it impossible that an uneducated
fugitive slave could write the articles attributed to me. I found it hard to get
credit in some quarters either for what I wrote or what I said. While there
was nothing very profound or learned in either, the low estimate of Negro
possibilities induced the belief that both my editorials and my speeches were
written by white persons. I doubt if this scepticism does not still linger in the
minds of some of my democratic fellow-citizens.

The 2d of June, 1872, brought me a very grievous loss. My house in
Rochester was burnt to the ground, and among other things of value, twelve
volumes of my paper, covering the period from 1848 to 1860, were devoured
by the flames. I have never been able to replace them, and the loss is immeasurable.
Only a few weeks before, I had been invited to send these bound
volumes to the library of Harvard University where they would have been
preserved in a fire-proof building, and the result of my procrastination attests
the wisdom of more than one proverb. Outside the years embraced in the late
tremendous war, there has been no period, more pregnant with great events,
or better suited to call out the best mental and moral energies of men, than
that covered by these lost volumes. If I have at any time said or written that
which is worth remembering or repeating, I must have said such things
between the years 1848 and 1860, and my paper was a chronicle of most of
what I said during that time. Within that space we had the great Free Soil
Convention at Buffalo, the Nomination of Martin Van Buren, the Fugitive
Slave Law, the 7th of March Speech by Daniel Webster, the Dred Scott decision,
the repeal of the Missouri Compromise, the Kansas-Nebraska bill, the
Border war in Kansas, the John Brown raid upon Harper's Ferry, and a part
of the War against the Rebellion, with much else, well calculated to fire the
souls of men having one spark of Liberty and Patriotism within them. I have
only fragments now, of all the work accomplished during these twelve years,
and must cover this chasm, as best I can from memory and the incidental
items, which I am able to glean from various sources. Two volumes of The
North Star have been kindly supplied me, by my friend, Marshall Pierce of