The following Report will show to Marylanders, how a runaway slave talks, when he reaches the Abolition regions of the country. This presumptive negro was even present at the London World's Temperance Convention, last year; and in spite of all the efforts of the American Delegates to prevent it, he palmed off his Abolition bombast upon an audience of 7000 persons! Of this high-handed measure he now makes his boast in New-York, one of the hot-beds of Abolitionism. The Report is given exactly as published in the New-York Tribune. The reader will make his own comments. Mr. Douglass was introduced to the audience by Wm. Lloyd Garrison, Esq., President of the American Anti-Slavery Society, and, upon taking the platform, was greeted with enthusiastic and long-continued applause by the vast concourse which filled the spacious Tabernacle to overflowing. As soon as the audience became silent, Mr. D. with, at first, a slight degree of embarrassment, addressed them as follows: "I am very glad to be here. I am very glad to be present at this Anniversary-glad again to mingle my voice with those with whom I have stood identified, with those with whom I have labored, for the last seven years, for the purpose of undoing the burdens of my brethren, and hastening the day of their emancipation. I do not doubt but that a large portion of this audience will be disappointed, both by the manner and the matter of what I shall this day set forth. The extraordinary and unmerited eulogies which have been showered upon me, here and elsewhere, have done much to create expectations which, I am well aware, I can never hope to gratify. I am here, a simple man, knowing what I have experienced in Slavery, knowing it to be a bad system, and desiring, by all Christian means, to seek its overthrow. I am not here to please you with an eloquent speech, with a refined and logical address, but to speak to you the sober truths of a heart overborne with gratitude to God that we have in this land, cursed as it is with Slavery, so noble a band to second my efforts and the efforts of others in the noble work of undoing the Yoke of Bondage, with which the majority of the States of this Union are now unfortunately cursed.
About the Author: Frederick Douglass, born Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey in 1817 or 1818, and died February 20, 1895 in Washington DC, is an American abolitionist, publisher, and public speaker. Born a slave, he succeeded in learning and escaping. An eloquent communicator, he became an agent of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, and wrote his autobiography: The Life of Frederick Douglass, an American slave, written by himself. Celebrity puts his illegal freedom in the non-slavery states of the North in danger, and he takes refuge in Europe, where his new friends get his manumission, and eventually funding him to found The North Star on his return. He distanced himself from his early collaborators with the American Anti-Slavery Society, and his mentor William Lloyd Garrison, after his positive opinion on the value of the United States Constitution, to rally to more conservative abolitionists, Whose action was centered on politics rather than essentially on a moral reform of public opinion. His association with Gerrit Smith, a major contributor to the "Liberty Party" (United States, 1840), founded by James Birney, is concretized by the merger of their respective newspapers. Douglass was the seventh man in what historians called the secret group of six, transmitting money and recruiting acolytes to Captain John Brown, 2 for a plot with the truly illusory purpose of a generalized insurgent movement Against slavery. After the outbreak of the American Civil War, Douglass was among the first to suggest to the federal government to employ troops formed of black men. A popular lecturer from 1866, Douglass held various administrative functions in the government between 1871 and 1895. Frederick Douglass firmly believed in the equality of all, including the descendants of Africans, women, natives, immigrants, and of course the Scottish, Irish and other American Anglo-Saxons. Some commentators and historians have said of Douglass that he has fallen into self-promotion, but if he has been able to promote a separate agenda for his ethnic group, for example in schools or because of an ephemeral newspaper Washington in 1869, his personal qualities are undeniable for all: courage, perseverance, intelligence, and resilience.