The Portable Frederick Douglass by Frederick Douglass

Author:Frederick Douglass
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2016-09-13T10:02:25+00:00

“THE TRIALS AND TRIUMPHS OF SELF-MADE MEN” (1860)

Douglass’s self-made men speeches were immensely popular from 1860 until his death in 1895. Over time he altered the speech as he remade himself. Here he defines “self-made men” (and women) as radicals who wage war on injustice as they improve themselves.

SOURCE: Halifax Courier (UK), January 7, 1860

The LECTURER on rising was received with immense cheering. He said: I appear before you this evening in an unaccustomed position. I usually speak in public on the subject of American slavery, and it is supposed by some in my country that a coloured man has not thoughts worth listening to on any other subject. Partly with a view to show the fallacy of this notion, and partly to give expression to what I think sound and important views of life, I have prepared this lecture.

The various uses to which men put the brief space of human existence, and the proportion which their success in the world bears to their several opportunities, are subjects worthy of the attention and study of all men, and especially of those who have something of life still in prospect. It may not be of very serious consequence, what views of life are presented and urged upon the attention of those who have grown old and hardened in the violent and long continued abuse of life’s best privileges. Under the whole heavens there is not a sadder sight—a more affecting and melancholy spectacle—than such men present to the eye of a thoughtful man. Standing upon the very verge of misspent time, and looking back only upon wasted opportunities, a whole life wantonly flung away, such men stud the field of human existence only as warnings. And sad warnings they are. The chance to redeem the time for themselves has come and gone, never to return. The past is covered with regrets, the present is without the life and inspirations of hope, and the future is mantled in gloom.

But to the young, with all the bright world before them where to choose, the case is widely and cheeringly different. By wisdom, by firmness, and by a manly and heroic self-denial, these may wholly escape the sharp and flinty rocks, the false lights, and the treacherous shores, the tempest, and the whirlwinds of passion and sin which have sent other voyagers to the bottom wrecked and ruined. Life is the world’s greatest and most significant fact. It is the grand reality that realizes all other realities. All that man can know of the dim and shadowy past, and of the solemn and mysterious future have their explanation mainly in this one great fact. It is the now that makes the then, and the here that makes the hereafter to us all. Death itself is only predicated of life, and itself can only comprehend death.

Without trenching upon the forbidden domains of theology, I may venture to say, that if this life shall only be regarded as an individual fact, standing alone, having no relations

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