In 1841 Douglass entered upon that epoch of his life which brought the hitherto obscure refugee prominently before the public, and in which his services as anti-slavery orator and reformer constitute his chief claim to enduring recollection.  Millions of negroes whose lives had been far less bright than Douglass’s had lived and died in slavery.  Thousands of fugitives under assumed names were winning a precarious livelihood in the free States and trembling in constant fear of the slave-catcher.  Some of these were doing noble work in assisting others to escape from bondage.  Mr. Siebert, in his Underground Railroad, mentions one fugitive slave, John Mason by name, who assisted thirteen hundred others to escape from Kentucky.  Another picturesque fugitive was Harriet Tubman, who devoted her life to this work with a courage, skill, and success that won her a wide reputation among the friends of freedom.  A number of free colored men in the North, a few of them wealthy and cultivated, lent their time and their means to this cause.  But it was reserved for Douglass, by virtue of his marvellous gift of oratory, to become pre-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