Page:Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1892).djvu/559



N escaping from the South, the reader will have observed that I did not escape from its widespread influence in the North. That influence met me almost everywhere outside of pronounced anti-slavery circles, and sometimes even within them. It was in the air, and men breathed it and were permeated by it often when they were quite unconscious of its presence.

I might recount many occasions when I have encountered this feeling, some painful and melancholy, some ridiculous and amusing. It has been a part of my mission to expose the absurdity of this spirit of caste and in some measure help to emancipate men from its control.

Invited to accompany Hon. Gerrit Smith to dine with Mr. E. C. Delevan at Albany many years ago, I expressed to Mr. Smith my awkwardness and embarrassment in the society I was likely to meet there. "Ah!" said that good man, "you must go, Douglass; it is your mission to break down the walls of separation between the two races." I went with Mr. Smith, and was soon made at ease by Mr. Delevan and the ladies and gentlemen there. They were among the most refined and brilliant people I had ever met. I felt somewhat surprised that I could be so much at ease in such company, but I found it then, as I have since, that the higher the gradation in (551)