succumbed to the marvelous nor the supernatural; a sacred thirst for liberty and for learning, first as a means of attaining liberty, then as an end in itself most desirable; a will; an unfaltering energy and determination to obtain what his soul pronounced desirable; a majestic self-hood; determined courage; a deep and agonizing sympathy with his embruted, crushed and bleeding fellow slaves, and an extraordinary depth of passion, together with that rare alliance between passion and intellect, which enables the former, when deeply roused, to excite, develop and sustain the latter.
With these original gifts in view, let us look at his schooling;
the fearful discipline through which it pleased God to prepare him
for the high calling on which he has since entered — the advocacy
of emancipation by the people who are not slaves. And for this
special mission, his plantation education was better than any he
could have acquired in any lettered school. What he needed, was
facts and experiences, welded to acutely wrought up sympathies,
and these he could not elsewhere have obtained, in a manner so
peculiarly adapted to his nature. His physical being was well
trained, also, running wild until advanced into boyhood; hard
work and light diet, thereafter, and a skill in handicraft in youth.
For his special mission, then, this was, considered in connection
with his natural gifts, a good schooling; and, for his special mission,
he doubtless "left school" just at the proper moment. Had he remained longer in slavery — had he fretted under bonds until the
ripening of manhood and its passions, until the drear agony of
slave-wife and slave-children had been piled upon his already bitter
experiences — then, not only would his own history have had another
termination, but the drama of American slavery would have been
essentially varied; for I cannot resist the belief, that the boy who
learned to read and write as he did, who taught his fellow slaves
these precious acquirements as he did, who plotted for their mutual escape as he did, would, when a man at bay, strike a blow
which would make slavery reel and stagger. Furthermore, blows
and insults he bore, at the moment, without resentment; deep but
suppressed emotion rendered him insensible to their sting; but it
was afterward, when the memory of them went seething through
his brain breeding a fiery indignation at his injured self-hood, that
the re(illegible text) came to resist, and the time fixed when to resist, and
