these original gifts in view, let us look at his schooling; the
fearful discipline through which it pleased God to prepare him for the
high calling on which he has since entered--the advocacy of emancipation
by the people who are not slaves. And for this special mission, his
plantation education was better than any he could have acquired in any
lettered school. What he needed, was facts and experiences, welded to
acutely wrought up sympathies, and these he could not elsewhere have
obtained, in a manner so peculiarly adapted to his nature. His physical
being was well trained, also, running wild until advanced into boyhood;
hard work and light diet, thereafter, and a skill in handicraft in
youth.{7}

For his special mission, then, this was, considered in connection with
his natural gifts, a good schooling; and, for his special mission,
he doubtless "left school" just at the proper moment. Had he remained
longer in slavery--had he fretted under bonds until the ripening of
manhood and its passions, until the drear agony of slave-wife and
slave-children had been piled upon his already bitter experiences--then,
not only would his own history have had another termination, but the
drama of American slavery would have been essentially varied; for I
cannot resist the belief, that the boy who learned to read and write as
he did, who taught his fellow slaves these precious acquirements as he
did, who plotted for their mutual escape as he did, would, when a man
at bay, strike a blow which would make slavery reel and stagger.
Furthermore, blows and insults he bore, at the moment, without
resentment; deep but suppressed emotion rendered him insensible to
their sting; but it was afterward, when the memory of them went
seething through his brain, breeding a fiery indignation at his injured
self-hood, that the resolve came to resist, and the time fixed when
to resist, and the plot laid, how to resist; and he always kept his
self-pledged word. In what he undertook, in this line, he looked fate
in the face, and had a cool, keen look at the relation of means to ends.
Henry Bibb, to avoid chastisement, strewed his master's bed with charmed
leaves and _was whipped_. Frederick Douglass quietly pocketed a like
_fetiche_, compared his muscles with those of Covey--and _whipped him_.

In the history of his life in bondage, we find, well developed, that
inherent and continuous energy of character which will ever render him
distinguished. What his