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[00:00:04] sound of birds chirping

[00:00:14] footsteps in the grass are heard, bird sounds continue in the background

[00:00:36] bird trilling; footsteps and chirps continue in the background

[00:00:40] trilling stops; footsteps and chirping continue

[00:00:43] woodpecker pecking; footsteps and chirping continue

[00:00:47] woodpecker fades into the background; footsteps and chirping continue

[00:01:11] crow cawing; footsteps and chirping continue

[00:01:18] footsteps stop; chirping continues

[00:01:28] (Male actor) Frederick Douglass: Several old logs and stumps imposed upon me, and got themselves taken for wild beasts. [sound of a whip snapping] I can see their legs, eyes, and ears, or I could see something like eyes, legs, and ears till I got close enough to them to see that the eyes were knots, washed white with rain; and the legs were broken limbs [wooden tapping]; and the ears only ears owing to the point from which they were seen. [walking sounds continue] Thus early, I learned that the point from which a thing is viewed is of some importance.

[00:02:27] creaking sounds, birds chirping, walking continues

[00:02:30] walking and chirping stop; creaking sounds continue, music plays

[00:03:04] crow cawing

[00:03:15] cello music gets louder, wings flapping, creaking sounds continue

[00:03:58] everything stops; a clock begins ticking in the background

[00:04:04] loud piano note

[00:04:25] loud piano note

[00:04:35] piano fades, sounds of silverware and dishes clinking

[00:04:40] violin begins playing

[00:04:47] violin stops; loud piano note

[00:04:50] piano fades, violin begins again, rhythmic ticking begins

[00:05:06] piano begins loudly

[00:05:22] rhythmic ticking continues

[00:05:37] ticking fades, piano continues. Sewing machine sounds begin

[00:06:14] piano stops, sewing machine continues

[00:06:31] train whistle, train chugging begins and gets louder

[00:06:40] train chugging continues, music begins quietly in the background

[00:06:58] (Male actor) Frederick Douglass: Eleven days and a half gone and I have crossed 3000 miles of the perilous deep. Instead of the bright blue sky of America, I am covered with soft grey fog. I breathe (inhale), and lo, the chattel becomes a man. I gaze around in vain for one who will question my equal humanity, claim me as his slave or offer me an insult. I am seated beside white people. I reach the hotel, I enter the same door. I am shown into the same parlor, I dine at the same table, and no one is offended.  

[00:07:46] piano begins loudly. The sound of the train continues. Sewing machine sound begins.

[00:07:59] train whistle

[00:08:13] Sewing machine stops, music quiets, train slows

[00:08:17] (Male actor) Frederick Douglass: I am now, as you will perceive by the date of this letter, in Old Scotland. Almost every hill, river, mountain, and lake, of which has been made classic by the heroic deeds of her noble sons. Scarcely a stream or a hill that is not associated with some fierce and bloody conflict between liberty and slavery.

[00:08:44] music, sounds of audience members taking their seats

[00:09:02] Audience applause

[00:09:15] (Male actor) Frederick Douglass: Good day everybody. You know, I take it as a compliment to my enslaved race that while summoning men here from the high seats of learning, philosophy, and statesmanship, you have also summoned one from the slave plantation. On this, the committee of management have in one act labeled their course both philanthropic and cosmopolitan. [music] Daguerre, by that simple and all-abounding sunlight has converted the planet into a picture gallery. Daguerreotypes, ambrotypes, photographs, and electrotypes, good and bad, now adorn or disfigure all our dwellings. Man of all conditions may now see themselves as others see them. What was once the exclusive luxury of the rich and great, is now within reach of all. The old commercial maxim that demand regulates supply is reversed here. Supply regulates demand. The facilities for travel have sent the world abroad, and the ease and cheapness with which we get our pictures has brought us all within range of the Daguerreian apparatus.

[00:10:54] music begins to play louder

[00:11:01] (Male actor) Frederick Douglass: As to the moral and social influence of pictures, it would hardly be extravagant to say of it what Moore has said of ballads, ‘give me the making of a nation’s ballads and I care not who has the makings of its laws’. The picture and the ballad are alike, if not equally social forces. One reaching and swaying the heart by the eye, the other by the ear. Next to bad manuscripts, pictures can be made the greatest bores. Authors, editors, and printers suffer from the former whilst almost everybody has suffered by the latter. They are pushed at you in every house you enter. What is worse, you are required to give an opinion of them. Pictures, like songs, should be left to make their own way into the world. All they can reasonably ask of us is that we place them on the wall, in the best possible light, and for the rest, allow them to speak for themselves. [sound of water] If rightly viewed, the whole soul of man is a sort of picture gallery, grand panorama, in which the great facts of the universe in tracing things of time and things of eternity are painted. The love of pictures stands first among our passional inclinations and is among the last to forsake us in our pilgrimage here.

[00:13:00] [sound of water continues] (Male actor) Frederick Douglass: It is said that the best gifts are the most abused, and this among the rest, conscience itself is misdirected, shocked by delightful sounds, beautiful colors, and graceful movements. It sleeps amid the ten thousand agonies of war and slavery. [whip sounds over music]

[00:14:40] [whipping stops, bugs sound] (Male actor) Frederick Douglass: I never saw my mother to know her as such more than four or five times in my life. And each of these times were very short in duration and at night. She was with me in the night, long before I waked, she was gone. She was a field hand, and a whipping was the penalty for not being in the field at sunrise. [sound of waves lapping]

[00:15:28] Female singer (excerpt from “Send Back the Money”):

Send back the money! Send it back!

Tempt not the Negro’s God

To blast and wither Scotland’s Church

With his avenging rod.

There’s not a mite in all the sum

But cries to Heav’n aloud

For wrath on all who shield the men

That trade in Negro’s blood.

[piano, seagulls] 

[00:16:11] Female speaker: Yesterday, Eliza and I rose at four, and armed with string and staves and with Douglass quite laden down with all the tools we could muster, without alarming the household we set out to climb a fair way up Arthur’s Seat. [string music, piano]. Eliza chose the place, and wasting not one minute we began to mark out our slogan. [loud strings]

[00:16:50] Male singer (excerpt from “The Free Church and Her Boy Tammy”):

Waes me! ye’re getting warm, warm.,

My kind Mammy;

Ye’re foamin’ like a keg o’ barm,

My kind Mammy.

[00:17:00] Female singer (excerpt from “The Free Church and Her Boy Tammy”):

Shall I, as free as ocean waves,

Shake hands wi’ women’shippin’ knaves,

And build Kirks wi’ the bluid o’ slaves? –

Send back – send back the money.

[00:17:13] music grows louder, rain/storm, train in the background grows louder

[00:17:56] only the train is heard

[00:18:35] intense music begins alongside the train sounds

[00:18:52] (Male actor) Frederick Douglass: My back is scarred by the lash. That I could show you. I would, I could make visible the wounds of the system upon my soul. [music continues]

[00:19:32] footsteps, music continues

[00:19:58] (Male actor) Frederick Douglass: I would at times feel the learning to read had been a curse rather than a blessing. It had given me a view of my wretched condition without the remedy. It opened my eyes to the horrible pit but to no ladder upon which to get out. In moments of agony, I envied my fellow slaves for their stupidity. I have often wished myself a beast. I prefer the condition of the meanest reptile to my own. Anything, no matter what, to get rid of thinking. [music begins again]

[00:21:03] (Male actor) Frederick Douglass: Ladies and gentlemen, a distance between this platform and the slave plantation from which I escaped is considerable. And the difficulties to overcome getting from the latter to the former are by no means slight. That I am here today to me is a matter of astonishment as well as of gratitude. The American slave trade is a terrible reality. I was born amid such hellish sights and scenes. As a child my soul was often pierced with a sense of its horrors. I lived on Philpot Street, Fells Point Baltimore. And I have watched from the wharves as slave ships, in the basin, anchored from the shore, their cargo full of human flesh waiting for favorable winds to waft it down the Chesapeake.

[00:22:32] (Male actor) Frederick Douglass: And in the still darkness of midnight I have often been aroused by the dead heavy footsteps and the piteous cries of the chain gangs that passed our door. What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July? I answer; a day that reveals to him, more than all the other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham. Your boasting liberty, an unholy license; your nation’s greatness, swelling vanity. Your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless.

[00:23:59] (Male actor) Frederick Douglass: Your denunciation of tyrants, brass fronted impudence. Your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery. Prayers and your hymns, and your sermons and your thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity are to him mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy. A thin veil, to cover up crimes which would disgust a nation of savages. There is not a nation on earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than all the people in these United States, in this very hour.

[00:25:19] [applause]

[00:26:03] (Male actor) Frederick Douglass: I have now my manumission papers in my possession. There is nothing that will steam the Americans more than the fact I left Republican America a slave, I returned from monarchical England a free man. [ship horn]

[00:26:35] music begins

[00:28:17] silence

Credits
Isaac Julian Studio
Lessons of the Hour - Frederick Douglass