"douglass" - читать интересную книгу автора (Douglass Frederick)

Mississippi sweeps along.

Again, we have known you long, and can put the
most entire confidence in your truth, candor, and
sincerity. Every one who has heard you speak has
felt, and, I am confident, every one who reads your
book will feel, persuaded that you give them a fair
specimen of the whole truth. No one-sided portrait,
--no wholesale complaints,--but strict justice done,
whenever individual kindliness has neutralized, for
a moment, the deadly system with which it was
strangely allied. You have been with us, too, some
years, and can fairly compare the twilight of rights,
which your race enjoy at the North, with that "noon
of night" under which they labor south of Mason
and Dixon's line. Tell us whether, after all, the half-
free colored man of Massachusetts is worse off than
the pampered slave of the rice swamps!

In reading your life, no one can say that we have
unfairly picked out some rare specimens of cruelty.
We know that the bitter drops, which even you have
drained from the cup, are no incidental aggravations,
no individual ills, but such as must mingle always
and necessarily in the lot of every slave. They are the
essential ingredients, not the occasional results, of
the system.

After all, I shall read your book with trembling
for you. Some years ago, when you were beginning
to tell me your real name and birthplace, you may
remember I stopped you, and preferred to remain
ignorant of all. With the exception of a vague de-
scription, so I continued, till the other day, when
you read me your memoirs. I hardly knew, at the
time, whether to thank you or not for the sight of
them, when I reflected that it was still dangerous,
in Massachusetts, for honest men to tell their names!
They say the fathers, in 1776, signed the Declaration
of Independence with the halter about their necks.
You, too, publish your declaration of freedom with
danger compassing you around. In all the broad lands
which the Constitution of the United States over-
shadows, there is no single spot,--however narrow or
desolate,--where a fugitive slave can plant himself
and say, "I am safe." The whole armory of North-
ern Law has no shield for you. I am free to say that,
in your place, I should throw the MS. into the fire.

You, perhaps, may tell your story in safety, en-