usage as to provoke surprise and comment all over the country.  On the way to Philadelphia he was waited upon by a committee of other delegates, who came to his seat on the train and urged upon him the impropriety of his taking a seat as a delegate.  Douglass listened patiently, but declined to be moved by their arguments.  He replied that he had been duly elected a delegate from Rochester, and he would represent that city in the convention.  A procession of the members and friends of the convention was to take place on its opening day.  Douglass was solemnly warned that, if he walked in the procession, he would probably be mobbed.  But he had been mobbed before, more than once, and had lived through it; and he promptly presented himself at the place of assembly.  His reception by his fellow-delegates was not cordial, and he seemed condemned to march alone in the procession, when Theodore Tilton, at that time editor of the Independent, paired off with him, and marched by his side through the streets of the Quaker City.  The result was gratifying alike to Douglass and the friends of liberty and progress.  He was cheered enthusiastically all along the line of march, and became as popular in the convention as he had hitherto been neglected.

A romantic incident of this march was a pleasant meeting, on the street, with a daughter of Mrs. Lucretia Auld, the mistress who had treated him kindly during his childhood on the Lloyd plantation.  The Aulds had always taken an interest in Douglass’s career,—­he had, indeed, given the family a wide though not altogether enviable reputation in his books and lectures,—­and this good lady had followed the procession for miles, that she might have the opportunity to speak to her grandfather’s former slave and see him walk in the procession.

In the convention “the ever-ready and imperial Douglass,” as Colonel Higginson describes him, spoke in behalf of his race.  The convention, however, divided upon the question of negro suffrage, and adjourned without decisive action.  But under President Grant’s administration the Fourteenth Amendment was passed, and by the solemn sanction of the Constitution the ballot was conferred upon the black men upon the same terms as those upon which it was enjoyed by the whites.

XI.

It is perhaps fitting, before we take leave of Douglass, to give some estimate of the remarkable oratory which gave him his hold upon the past generation.  For, while his labors as editor and in other directions were of great value to the cause of freedom, it is upon his genius as an orator that his fame must ultimately rest.

While Douglass’s color put him in a class by himself among great orators, and although his slave past threw around him an element of romance that added charm to his eloquence, these were mere incidental elements of distinction.  The North was full of fugitive slaves, and more than one had passionately proclaimed his wrongs.  There were several colored orators who stood high in the councils of the abolitionists and did good service for the cause of humanity.