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1048 READER RESPONSES, 1881–93

to teach them how to earn their living would be of greater practical value. Another
person whom Douglass admired and loved was Abraham Lincoln, and well he
might. "I shall never forget my first interview with this great man." he writes; "I was
accompaned to the [271.26–272.4] without reserve or a doubt." The fairmindedness
and humanity of Abraham Lincoln's character were never better shown than in this
interview with Douglass. The latter came on behalf of the colored troops. He wanted
more favors for them. He was not satisfied with the entering of the wedge, but he
wanted to drive it up to the head with one blow. First, he wanted them paid the same
as the white soldiers; second, he wanted a Southern prisoner of war hanged for every
colored prisoner of war hanged in the South, and, third, he wanted them to be
rewarded by promotion for bravery the same as the white men. If Mr. Lincoln had
granted his requests Jefferson Davis would have been the next President of the
United States, and there would have been a national riot, exceeding in its horrors the
one in New York. I will give Mr. Lincoln's reply, as Douglass reports it:

"He began by saying that [272.29- 273.14] War should commend to him."

I have given up my entire letter to this book, but as your readers will probably
never meet it or know anything more of its contents, and as it is really an important
chapter in the history of the anti-slavery movement and of the war, it is well worth
the space.

ERASMUS

THE CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH OF A SLAVE. E.L.W. London Sunday
Magazine, (1882), 11.

SLAVERY in the British dominions was swept away by an outburst of generous
and humane feeling. In the United States the same institution was destroyed amid
the blood and fire of a tremendous revolutionary convulsion. Easy-going people are
now too ready to assume that slavery is a thing of the past, and that to dwell upon
its miseries and wrong at this time of day is to rake up an old story which had better
be forgotten. There could not be a greater mistake. Those who take the trouble to
inquire, or indeed to observe the statements contained in publications of the day,
know too well that slavery still exists, and not only so, but that in the interior of
Africa and on the African coast the slave-trade goes on in all its enormity. Thousands
of men, women, and children are every year captured, sold, driven long distances,
chained, beaten, starved, and dying "like flies" by the wayside and on board ship.
Slavery is not yet an extinct institution, and it is well that British people should
retain a vivid realisation of what slavery means, in order that sentiments of common
humanity and compassion may move them to sustain that honourable crusade
against this accursed system to which it is the distinction of the British Government
to have committed itself. It is therefore no mere old-world narrative. calculated only
to harrow the feelings and lead to no practical result, which we find in the pages of
the volume which has prompted us to write these lines.

The autobiography of Frederick Douglass. who was once well known in