Life & Wisdom Quote by Frederick Douglass

There is bite in the understatement. Douglass frames his early lecturing career as if it were a quaint market condition: fugitive slaves were "rare", so he had the advantage of being "the first one out". The phrasing borrows the language of novelty and competition, a cool, almost businesslike register that makes the reality underneath it feel even more brutal. Human catastrophe becomes a scarcity problem only because the nation has made escape so dangerous that surviving to tell the story is unusual.

The specific intent is strategic self-positioning. Douglass is acknowledging a grim kind of first-mover advantage: abolitionist audiences, especially in the North, were hungry for testimony they could treat as proof. Being one of the first widely visible fugitives on the lecture circuit gave him authority, attention, and leverage inside a movement that often preferred Black suffering as spectacle but distrusted Black intellect as leadership. He is also quietly indicting that demand. The "advantage" is not talent rewarded; it is the perverse benefit conferred by an economy of violence.

Subtextually, Douglass is exposing how movements, like markets, can turn lived experience into a commodity. His fame is tethered to the rarity of his survival and the novelty of his presence on stage: a man the law defined as property speaking in public, narrating himself into personhood.

Context matters: in the 1840s, fugitive slave narratives and lectures were central abolitionist tools, and Douglass himself was at constant risk of recapture. The line compresses that danger into a dry aside, letting irony do the work of accusation.