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READER RESPONSES. 1881 - 93

to dark, does not give out any large hope of manhood. But nevertheless the manhood
was there, and brutality and persecution and starvation could not obliterate it. The
story of slavery he recites to a multitude of younger readers will be a revelation, and
will serve to awaken a new interest in this poor, despised race, which for generations
has been the unpaid chattels of the white man. That the pictures of slavery are as true
as if drawn by a camera none can doubt and in keeping with the forgiving spirit of
the black man- no spirit of revenge crops out in any line. No race so long misused
and abused ever so fully demonstrated in their acts the prayer of Christ - "Forgive
them, they know not what they do" - as the black race during the late war. Had their
places been filled by Italians or Chinese or Frenchmen or Englishmen or even
Americans, hundreds of plantations and villages of the South would have witnessed
horrible scenes of disorder and bloodshed. It was not because the black man did not
understand fully the situation. He did. We note this same spirit of forgiveness in the
story of Mr. Douglass. But no brief notice in the space allowed can do justice to the
book. Its illustrations are pointed. It is written, as we have observed, in the best
spirit, and its elegant literary style is well nigh faultless. The volume, truthful in its
history, and covering one of the most eventful periods of history, enriches the best
biographical literature. and deserves, as it will doubtless receive a wide reading.

LIFE AND TIMES OF FREDERICK DOUGLASS [Heman Lincoln Wayland].
[Philadelphia National Baptist], [n.d.]. Subject File. reel 10. frame 421. FD Papers.
DLC.

The life which this book presents is a stronger argument for the manhood and
the capacity of the colored man than any ethnological or humanitarian process of
reasoning. Mr. Douglass, beginning a slave in Tuckahoe, Talbot Co. on the eastern
shore of Maryland, at a time when it was a penitentiary crime to teach a negro his
letters. Bought and sold and flogged, running away a little past the age of twenty
with a price set on his head, finds himself to-day at the age of seventy-five, honored
having held the offices of United States Marshal, Register of Deeds, Commissioner
to San Domingo, Minister Resident and Consul General to Hayti, and Haytian commissioner to the World's Columbian Exposition. Long ago, the Hon. John G. Palfrey,
member of Congress from the Middlesex District Mass., said of him, on the floor
of Congress. "He writes and speaks the English language in a manner of which any
member of this house might be proud."

While Mr. Douglass has himself passed thro this honorable experience, he has
the no less keen gratification of seeing the members of a once enslaved race now
emancipated and enfranchised. It is true they have not yet reached the enjoyment of
all the rights guaranteed them by the Constitution; but this will come.

The editor of this paper gratefully acknowledges the personal reference made
by Mr. Douglass to the slight aid which it was the privilege of the editor. then a tutor
in the University of Rochester, to give to Mr. Douglass forty years ago. And the editor remembers with sincere gratification that when he called upon Mr. Douglass at

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