Cleveland daily leader. [volume] ([Cleveland, Ohio]) 1865-1873, 1865-11-06
The Cleveland Herald and Fred Doug
lass.

lass.
The Summit County Journal, in an edi-
torial with the above title, comments as
follows upon the character and position
of the Cleveland Herald:
So much for the acolored orator" Now
for the Cleveland Herald. 1t tcharges Mr..
Douglass with uttering billingsgate. Our
readers have read the extract. Billings
gate is foul language-low, vulgar epi-
thets such as common scolds," worth
less ours" and the like. Is there anything
of this in the extract from Mr.. DIS speech
1t is ofthe spirit of billingsgate to use offen-
sive epithets regardless of their meaning.
How practically the Herald has drunk in
this spirit, let this Characteristic word illus
trate We believe the Cleveland Herald
has, every year of the last fifteen, pub
lished more billingsgate of its own than
can be found in the printed language of
Frederick Douglass, Wendell Phillips and
William Lloyd Garrison, put together.
President johnson may have permitted
facts to misrepresent him. Mr.. Douglass,
therefore, may have misjudged his inten-
tions. His suspicious may have been too
much aroused. But, Ii, language is not
dirty. The Herald is. And yet it is but
its usual language when writing of those
three men. But veteran ribald as it Is in
this direction, the Herald can hardly af-
ford to call Mr.. Douglass a worthless cur;
for, when it cries upon his track in such
a strain, it makes him mastiff by con-
trast
But here the temper of the Herald is
too infuriate to end in a spasm of ribaldry.
1t has pretty clear recollection of times
when obloquy, high and low, was the lesser
penalty meted out to such men
as Mr.. Douglass. It remembers the
larger penalties of stoning, scourging,
killing. 1t has not yet forgotten its own
keen relish of the tidings that William
Lloyd Garrison had been led through BOs-
ton with rope about his neck. It re-
members, too, that these were the offspring
of precisely such appeals to the mob as
the Herald was making when it invoked
the "brank and the ducking stool" The
Herald is not unmindful Of the violence
and crime that are filling the land with
alarm. Nobody knows better than the
Herald the inhammable state of the mob
and nobody, we venture to say, since aeer-
tain Governor addressed his friends in
New York, has more shamefully piled it
with the torch Of outrage.
The Herald insinuates that Mr.. D., in
not acting the soldier, acted the coward.
Dropping that sword with two edges, the
HeraIds courage may be indisputable;
but to teach the mob that man is an out
law, and then hiss the mob upon him, is no
evidence of courage.
Yet to adapt its fiery charges TO the ir-
ritable temper Of the hour with surer effect,
the Herald falsely accuses Mr.. Douglass of
having been an avowed disunionist at the
outbreak Of the war, and closes by putting
him on level with an open secessionists
Douglass, a patriot Of blameless life
whose rise through opposing prejudice and
brutality and crime has outstripped the
imaginings of romance, whose character,
moral and intellectual, has digni6ed hu-
man nature
But what is all this to the Cleveland
Herald? What business has Frederick
Douglass to be black?