frederick douglas. with dualshower you images of extraordinary people. here they are in the 1840's. people have a tendency to think of lincoln as a bearded statesman. frederick douglass as an old man. he was not always an old man and lincoln did not always have a beard. i want to start with the origins. douglass once said that lincoln never treated him as an inferior and he believed that even though he came from a slave state, it was because they both rose from humble origins and worked hard. douglass called lincoln the king of american self-made men. tell us about the different origins and how you think may have contributed to the relationship that they ultimately developed. edna: we can start with slavery. douglass was born into slavery on the eastern shore of maryland. did not know his mother very well. his mother died when he was about six or seven years old and he lived with his grandmother even before that. by the time he learned his mother was dead, she had been dead for some time. he had not had the opportunity to establish a relationship with her the way of parent and child would. his earliest years, up until he was 20, those years were shaped by his experiences under slavery. as slavery went, douglass was at -- better off than the average enslaved person for a few years. he had the opportunity to experience freedom in baltimore, in a setting that was different from a plantation setting. he had the opportunity to learn, read and write during that period, so he had very humble beginnings. david, i believe it to you to talk about his humble beginnings. david: keep going. this is good. well, first of all, louise, thank you. all the magnificent staff had new york historical and let crazy people who came up this early on a saturday. it is always an honor to be on anything with edna. we go back many years ago, many. sitting on the front lawn of cedar hill. chairs for c-span or somebody. and harold -- do you know how daunting it is to sit across from harold with that stack of note cards? [laughter] you always had 112 note cards. harold: most of them are blank. i just use them to intimidate you. [laughter] david: that is vicious. harold knows everything about lincoln. even the things -- he even knows facts that do not exist about lincoln. sorry. they do both have humble origins. that is actually one of the interesting ways to think about their later evolving relationship. some of the mutual respect that they did have, even from the very first meeting is due to that. douglass later called lincoln and the friedman memorial speech the plebeian. that's an interesting choice of word. a one ever called douglass plea be in -- plebeian. edna nailed it. douglass' youth is privileged to a degree because he went to baltimore. he spent nine of his 20 years as a slave in baltimore. without baltimore, he would have never escaped without that. that experience in an urban slave society was actually community ofthe baltimore. there were 17,000 free blacks in baltimore in 1838 when he escaped. there are about 3000 slaves. he mingles and he learns from them. he attends church. he gets involved in a debating society. as a slave teenager. he meets anna murray, his first wife, who was free. worked as a domestic in a white person's home. on the other hand he also experienced just about every kind of savagery that slavery could work upon people. from the daily humiliations to physical, brutal treatment. he was not beaten himself, so far as we can tell, until he was a teenager. but his own owner. -- then by anr overseer. but he knew slavery inside and out. he knew it's mental humiliation, psychic traumas and physical traumas. but he also, as he said, had his baltimore dreams. port onitime city, a the ocean. one of the greatest ports in america at the time. and it was his place where he gained literacy. again and again gained literacy, which was his most prized possessions. one other quick thing about their youths, both of them. lincoln, we know about about lincoln's reading from various works. what he read is a very young man, as a kid. among the books lincoln cherished this book called "the was this book called "the colombian orator." the school reader that douglas discovered among his white playmates when he was 11 and begged, bartered and finally got his own copy when he was 12 years old. an amazing book published first in 1797, which was a huge -- it was a collection of oratory over the ages, from antiquity and the indictment but most importantly, , the introduction to it was a manual on oratory, how to position your body, your shoulders, your neck in your hands, had a -- how to modulate your voice. an aristotelian guide to oratory. i do not know that douglas ever read aristotle. he read caleb bingham's "colombian order. so did lincoln. that book was among the cherished books when he was a teenager. 20, 21. so it is interesting. they both had read that and used that, and other kinds of moralistic literature they may have early on a red. -- read. there are other things that we could say. harold: we will skip to when we get closer to the ultimate moment. my next set of images shows lincoln and douglass in the 1850's. speaking of parallel oratory, i found using edna and david as my guides, it is easy to find these wonderful parallels. lincoln says in 1858, "a house divided against both cannot stand." douglass said liberty and slavery cannot exist in the united states with peaceful relation. i do not know if lincoln knew about douglass at this point. probably. he will in the debates. douglass says it is pretty settled that one or the other of these, freedom or slavery, must go to the wall. the south must give up slavery or the north must give up liberty. lincoln said it would become all one thing i the other, meeting the country. meaning the opponents of slavery will arrest further spread of it or its advocates will push it forward until it becomes a like. and then in the lincoln-douglas debates, stephen douglas, the sitting democratic senator who is running for a third term and ill advised of the allowed lincoln to challenge him for debates gave lincoln a , reputation. national reputation. -- a national reputation. stephen douglas, who by scholarly conjecture dropped the second 's' in his name because he did not want it to be like frederick douglass's. it has never been proven but it is an interesting story. david: douglass would have loved to claim that. douglass?ich david: frederick. harold douglass becomes a : subject in these debates. let's talk about that. edna: they are debating throughout seven cities in illinois. cities where they had not done joint speeches before. they are trying to win over the crowd, so they are giving their perspective on slavery. it's connection and development of the country, and where the country is going. so -- stephen a., someone who was pro-south, if not proslavery. very much anti-black. whenever he was throughout illinois he made a point, consistently to say things that , would get his audience to come side by saying negative things about black people. to talk about douglass in relation to an alleged relationship with lincoln -- the two had not met at the time. but to suggest that they were friends, he brought those things up to get the audience to see lincoln as someone who was pro-b
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