eminently the personal representative of his
people for a generation.

In 1841 the Massachusetts Anti-slavery Society, which had been for
some little time weakened by faction, arranged its differences, and
entered upon a campaign of unusual activity, which found expression in
numerous meetings throughout the free States, mainly in New
England. On August 15 of that year a meeting was held at Nantucket,
Massachusetts. The meeting was conducted by John A. Collins, at that
time general agent of the society, and was addressed by William Lloyd
Garrison and other leading abolitionists. Douglass had taken a holiday
and come from New Bedford to attend this convention, without the
remotest thought of taking part except as a spectator. The proceedings
were interesting, and aroused the audience to a high state of feeling.
There was present in the meeting a certain abolitionist, by name
William C. Coffin, who had heard Douglass speak in the little negro
Sunday-school at New Bedford, and who knew of his recent escape from
slavery. To him came the happy inspiration to ask Douglass to speak
a few words to the convention by way of personal testimony. Collins
introduced the speaker as "a graduate from slavery, with his diploma
written upon his back."

Douglass himself speaks very modestly about this, his first public
appearance. He seems, from his own account, to have suffered somewhat
from stage fright, which was apparently his chief memory concerning
it. The impressions of others, however, allowing a little for the
enthusiasm of the moment, are a safer guide as to the effect of
Douglass's first speech. Parker Pillsbury reported that, "though it
was late in the evening when the young man closed his remarks, none
seemed to know or care for the hour.... The crowded congregation had
been wrought up almost to enchantment during the whole long evening,
particularly by some of the utterances of the last speaker [Douglass],
as he turned over the terrible apocalypse of his experience in
slavery." Mr. Garrison bore testimony to "the extraordinary emotion it
exerted on his own mind and to the powerful impression it exerted upon
a crowded auditory." "Patrick Henry," he declared, "had never made a
more eloquent speech than the one they had just listened to from the
lips of the hunted fugitive." Upon Douglass and his speech as a text
Mr. Garrison delivered one of the sublimest and most masterly efforts
of his life; and then and there began the fri