Fredrick douglass
Fredrick douglassTurning Point Reaction
In August 1841, at an abolitionist meeting in New Bedford, the 23-year-old Douglass saw his hero and his “true friend”, William Lloyd Garrison, for the first time. A few days later, Douglass spoke before the crowd attending the annual meeting of the Massachusetts branch of the American Anti-Slavery Society. Garrison immediately recognized Douglass's potential as a speaker, and hired him to be an agent for the society. As a traveling lecturer accompanying other abolitionist agents on tours of the northern states, his job was to talk about his life and to sell subscriptions of the Liberator and another newspaper, the Anti-Slavery Standard (Douglass, 366). In Frederick Douglass, William S McFeely writes that Douglass sees what he is to become in Garrison. For most of the next 10 years, Douglass was associated with the Garrisonian school of the antislavery movement. Garrison was a pacifist who believed that only through moral persuasion could slavery end, he attempted through his writings to educate slaveholders about the evils of the system they supported. He was opposed to slave uprisings and other violent resistance, but he was firm in his belief that slavery must be totally abolished. In the first issue of the Liberator in 1831, he had proclaimed “I WILL BE HEARD” (32).
Ever controversial, Garrison made many enemies throughout the country. As described by Douglass in his autobiography Life and Times, Garrison made sweeping attacks on organized religion because the churches refused to take a stand against slavery. He also believed that the U.S. Constitution upheld slavery. Garrison said that...
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