Frederick Douglass, George L. Ruffin wrote in his introduction to the orator and abolitionist’s third biography, “seems to have realized the fact that to one who is anxious to become educated and is really in earnest, it is not positively necessary to go to college, and that information may be had outside of college walks; books may be obtained and read elsewhere.” Douglass, he added, “never made the mistake (a common one) of considering that his education was finished. He has continued to study, he studies now, and is a growing man, and at this present moment he is a stronger man intellectually than ever before.”Below is a list of books and authors that he mentioned most during his lifelong education.
The Columbian Orator
The story of how Frederick Douglass learned to read is one of the most memorable in his Narrative of the Life, a crucial moment upon which the narrative’s existence depends. “The plan which I adopted, and the one by which I was most successful, was that of making friends of all the little white boys whom I met in the street,” he begins. “As many of these as I could, I converted into teachers.” These boys lived on Philpot Street in Baltimore, not far from a shipyard, and Douglass gave them bread in exchange for words. With this gift, he lingered on one book in particular.
I was now about twelve years old, and the thought of being a slave for life began to bear heavily upon my heart. Just about this time, I got hold of a book entitled The Columbian Orator. Every opportunity I got, I used to read this book.
He paid fifty cents—money he had saved from polishing boots—for it at a local bookstore. Dickson J. Preston calls it “possibly the best investment of his life” in his book Young Frederick Douglass.
The subtitle of the book reads, “A Variety of Original and Selected Pieces; Together with Rules; Calculated to Improve Youth and Others in the Ornamental and Useful Art of Eloquence.” The textbook’s author, Caleb Bingham, included speeches from George Washington, Socrates, Benjamin Franklin, and Cato, sometimes in rhetoric wholly imagined by Bingham, designed to showcase what he believed to be the most elevated forms of oratory, or what Douglass later called “eloquent orations and spicy dialogues denouncing oppression and slavery—telling what had been dared, done, and suffered by men, to obtain the inestimable boon of liberty.” The book began with a guide to how to become an effective orator, including advice such as “All exclamations should be violent. When we address inanimate things, the voice should be higher than when animated beings; and appeals to Heaven must be made in a loftier tone than those to men.”