Page:Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1892).djvu/298

290 to have their rough democratic manners softened by contact with English aristocratic refinement.

My friend James N. Buffum of Lynn, Mass., who was to accompany me, applied on board the steamer Cambria of the Cunard line for tickets, and was told that I could not be received as a cabin passenger. American prejudice against color had triumphed over British liberality and civilization, and had erected a color test as a condition for crossing the sea in the cabin of a British vessel.

The insult was keenly felt by my white friends, but to me such insults were so frequent and expected that it was of no great consequence whether I went in the cabin or in the steerage. Moreover, I felt that if I could not go in the first cabin, first cabin passengers could come in the second cabin, and in this thought I was not mistaken, as I soon found myself an object of more general interest than I wished to be, and, so far from being degraded by being placed in the second cabin, that part of the ship became the scene of as much pleasure and refinement as the cabin itself. The Hutchinson family from New Hampshire—the sweet singers of anti-slavery and the "good time coming"—were fellow-passengers, and often came to my rude forecastle-deck and sang their sweetest songs, making the place eloquent with music and alive with spirited conversation. They not only visited me, but invited me to visit them, and in two or three days after leaving Boston one part of the ship was about as free to me as another. My visits there, however, were but seldom. I preferred to live within my privileges and keep upon my own premises. This course was quite as much in accord with good policy as with my own feelings. The effect was that with the majority of the passengers all color distinctions were flung to the winds, and I found myself treated with every mark of respect from the beginning to the end of the voyage, except in one single