In Holland’s biography of Douglass extracts are given from letters of distinguished contemporaries who knew the orator.  Colonel T.W.  Higginson writes thus:  “I have hardly heard his equal, in grasp upon an audience, in dramatic presentation, in striking at the pith of an ethical question, and in single [signal] illustrations and examples.”  Another writes, in reference to the impromptu speech delivered at the meeting at Rochester on the death of Lincoln:  “I have heard Webster and Clay in their best moments, Channing and Beecher in their highest inspirations.  I never heard truer eloquence.  I never saw profounder impression.”

The published speeches of Douglass, of which examples may be found scattered throughout his various autobiographies, reveal something of the powers thus characterized, though, like other printed speeches, they lose by being put in type.  But one can easily imagine their effect upon a sympathetic or receptive audience, when delivered with flashing eye and deep-toned resonant voice by a man whose complexion and past history gave him the highest right to describe and denounce the iniquities of slavery and contend for the rights of a race.  In later years, when brighter days had dawned for his people, and age had dimmed the recollection of his sufferings and tempered his animosities, he became more charitable to his old enemies; but in the vigor of his manhood, with the memory of his wrongs and those of his race fresh upon him, he possessed that indispensable quality of the true reformer:  he went straight to the root of the evil, and made no admissions and no compromises.  Slavery for him was conceived in greed, born in sin, cradled in shame, and worthy of utter and relentless condemnation.  He had the quality of directness and simplicity.  When Collins would have turned the abolition influence to the support of a communistic scheme, Douglass opposed it vehemently.  Slavery was the evil they were fighting, and their cause would be rendered still more unpopular if they ran after strange gods.

When Garrison pleaded for the rights of man, when Phillips with golden eloquence preached the doctrine of humanity and progress, men approved and applauded.  When Parker painted the moral baseness of the times, men acquiesced shamefacedly.  When Channing preached the gospel of love, they wished the dream might become a reality.  But, when Douglass told the story of his wrongs and those of his brethren in bondage, they felt that here indeed was slavery embodied, here was an argument for freedom that could not be gainsaid, that the race that could produce in slavery such a man as Frederick Douglass must surely be worthy of freedom.

What Douglass’s platform utterances in later years lacked of the vehemence and fire of his earlier speeches, they made up in wisdom and mature judgment.  There is a note of exultation in his speeches just after the war.  Jehovah had triumphed, his people were free.  He had seen the Red Sea of blood open and let them pass, and engulf the enemy who pursued them.