In 1829, 12-year-old slave Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey secretly bought and read Caleb Bingham’s “Columbian Orator.” From it he learned that words could be weapons, that oratory had power. And it is his eloquent oratory that eventually made this slave boy into one of his era’s foremost leaders, known to history as Frederick Douglass. He said in 1857:
“The whole history of the progress of human liberty shows that … if there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation are men who want crops without plowing up the ground; they want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did, and it never will.….”