Why might eloquence make a person like Frederick Douglass famous?

American history abounds with great orators whose eloquence roused the people and shaped events. Names like Patrick Henry, Daniel Webster, William Lloyd Garrison, Abraham Lincoln, William Jennings Bryan, Susan B. Anthony, and Martin Luther King come to mind.

The best of them spoke with passion because their words gushed forth from wellsprings of character or experience or righteous indignation—and in the case of the great 19th-century American abolitionist Frederick Douglass, all three. He could pierce the conscience of the most stubborn foe by what he said and how he said it.

In a 1997 article for FEE, “Frederick Douglass: Heroic Orator for Liberty”, historian Jim Powell cites this description of Douglass by a first-hand observer:

He was more than six feet in height, and his majestic form, as he rose to speak, straight as an arrow, muscular, yet lithe and graceful, his flashing eye, and more than all, his voice, that rivaled Webster’s in its richness, and in the depth and sonorousness of its cadences, made up such an ideal of an orator as the listeners never forgot.

It’s worth our time to reflect on the life and words of this great man born 200 years ago this year. His story is all the more remarkable considering the circumstances of his birth and early life.

Douglass was born a slave in Maryland in 1818. He never knew who his father was and his mother died when he was seven. He spoke in later life about how hard it was on him to be forbidden to see her when she was ill, to be with her when she died, or to attend her funeral.

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