On 3 September 1838 an unknown slave, Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey, escaped Maryland slavery. The twenty-year-old fugitive fled first to New York City and then to New Bedford, Massachusetts, where he changed his last name to Douglass. Three years later, he emerged on the public platform as a Garrisonian abolitionist with an electrifying speech at Nantucket, Massachusetts. For the next fifty-four years he devoted his life to the cause of his people--agitating for an end to slavery before the Civil War, working to define war aims and to enlist black soldiers during the conflict, and continuing the struggle for equal rights after the war was over. From 1841 until his death in 1895, this formerly unknown slave earned a reputation as the most distinguished and celebrated African American leader and orator of the nineteenth century.

From the beginning of his career as an abolitionist lecturer, Douglass committed himself to using the power of oratory to destroy the institution of slavery. From 1841 through 1845, he campaigned tirelessly through Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New York, Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, Maine, Vermont, Ohio, and Indiana. He spoke nearly every day--often several times a day--to audiences large and small in public parks, town squares, churches, schoolhouses, abandoned buildings, and lecture halls. He endured all the day-to-day hardships, loneliness, and physical demands faced by an itinerant abolitionist lecturer. He traveled by foot, horseback, railroad, stagecoach, and steamboat in an effort to vitalize local and county antislavery societies. Often braving bricks, rotten eggs, verbal attacks, racist remarks, and threats of physical assault, he at times risked his life speaking against the peculiar institution. Day and night he told listeners about his slave experiences and addressed such issues as the injustice of racial prejudice, the proslavery character of the clergy, the superiority of moral suasion over political action, and the proslavery nature of the U. S. Constitution. Undaunted by hostile and apathetic audiences, he ventured into hamlets where the rhetoric of abolitionism had never been preached.

From the outset, Douglass overwhelmed white audiences with his oratorical brilliance and his intellectual capacity. As he spoke at one antislavery meeting after another, his fame spread rapidly among abolitionists throughout the North. His reputation rested chiefly upon the passionate streams of rhetoric by which he gave vent to an unyielding hostility toward slavery and racial prejudice. Accounts of his early speeches show that he elicited powerful, positive reactions from almost all white abolitionist audiences. Tall and physically imposing, he presented himself with dignity and self-assurance. Listeners consistently commented on his powerful physical presence, his captivating delivery, his rich and melodious voice, his clear and precise diction. His impassioned bursts of wit, satire, sarcasm, humor, invective, and anecdotes made powerful impressions upon his auditors. In addition, he often used time-honored rhetorical devices such as anaphora, metaphor, simile, allegory, alliteration, parallelism, mimicry, and antithesis. Those who heard him speak were astonished that such eloquence could come from a fugitive slave. Typical is the comment of a correspondent for the Salem Register who heard Douglass speak in November 1842:

The most wonderful performance of the evening was the address of Frederick Douglass, himself a slave only four years ago! His remarks and his manner created the most indescribable sensations in the minds of those unaccustomed to hear freemen of his color speak in public, much more to regard a slave as capable of such an effort. He was a living, speaking, startling proof of the folly, absurdity and inconsistency...of slavery. Fluent, graceful, eloquent, shrewd, sarcastic, he was without making any allowances, a fine specimen of an orator. He seemed to move the audience at his will, and they at times would hang upon his lips with staring eyes and open mouths, as eager to catch every word, as any "sea of upturned faces" that ever rolled at the feet of Everett or Webster to revel in their classic eloquence.

As with the people of Salem, Douglass' contemporaries were often at a loss to explain his rhetorical proficiency; they could not reconcile his genius with the nineteenth-century stereotype that blacks were genetically and culturally inferior. Indeed, African Americans were perceived as being inherently irrational, unalterable beings who were morally and intellectually inferior to whites. As one auditor declared after hearing Douglass speak at Nantucket in August 1841, "It seemed almost miraculous, how he had been prepared to tell his story with so much power." In fact, Douglass did nothing to discourage the view that his performance was miraculous. He declared in his second autobiography that he "had had no preparation" for his speech at Nantucket or for his succeeding work as a lecturer for the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society. This view has become the standard lore of Douglass scholars, most of whom uncritically repeat what he said in his autobiography...