The story of freed slave Frederick Douglass’ time in ‘beautiful’ Scotland

On 14 April 1876, the eleventh anniversary of the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, an aging but still remarkably robust Frederick Douglass delivered the main speech at the unveiling of the Freedmen’s Memorial Monument in Washington, DC. “He delivered us from bondage,” Douglass said of the great leader the memorial commemorated and whom he had befriended during the American Civil War. The crowd gathered around him included President Ulysses S. Grant, Supreme Court judges, congressmen and diplomats. The former slave was used to such illustrious company; the once-frightened youth whose back had been ripped open by the whip having long-since transformed himself into a writer and orator of world renown.