I knew very little about Frederick Douglass when I first set out to read his autobiography. We had to read three or four chapters for our American Literature class. But when I saw the size of the book I didn't think it would hurt to just go ahead and read the whole thing. I'm glad I did.
When you ask the layperson who Frederick Douglass was the answers you usually get are runaway slave, orator, abolitionist, and the like. Are these accurate? Yes. But try this one:
American Hero!
We usually think of Benjamin Franklin as the ultimate self-made American. But it was actually Frederick Douglass. Yes, Franklin started with virtually nothing and worked his way into financial and professional prosperity, finding success in a variety of fields. But Frederick Douglass did the same thing, except he started with absolutely nothing but the rags on his back. (He didn't even start out with his freedom!) He risked his life to prove that a free man is the best man. Even as he wrote his autobiography, he refused to mention the details of his escape, fearing that it would jeopordize the possible escapes of other slaves.
One of the things that I found very disturbing in this book (there are many disturbing passages in this book) was the fact that of all the slaveholders he had to contend with, the most brutal of all were the ones who claimed to be Christians. (I'm glad that Douglass was himself a strong enough Christian to not be misguided by those pious hypocrites.) One of the saddest passages in the book is as follows:
"Were I to be again reduced to the chains of slavery, next to that enslavement, I should regard being the slave of a religious master the greatest calamity that could befall me. For of all slaveholders with whom I have ever met, religious slaveholders are the worst. I have ever found them the meanest and basest, the most cruel and cowardly, of all others." (Page 85, Signet Classic)
This was a very controversial statement made not by someone who gets his kicks from mocking Christianity, but by someone who has experienced, first-hand, the love and forgiveness of Jesus Christ but then had to suffer at the hands of people who claimed that their "love" for Jesus Christ gave them license to brutalize and torment any under their charge.
I believe that Douglass knew the dangers of going public with this information. I believe he knew of the possibilities of his being returned to a state of slavery - whether it be through political unrest and upheaval in the North, or kidnapping, or any possible way. I believe that he knew that there would be people in both the South and the North who would want to see him dead because of what he was saying.
This is why I call him an American hero.
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