Seattle Packs a Theater to Mourn Frederick Douglass

The memorial service in honor of Frederick Douglass was held at the Seattle Theater, and the house was filled. The interior of the theater was in mourning; the Stars and Stripes hung above the stage, and the audience was hushed as the services began.

The services opened with music by the Seattle orchestra and a choir led by Mrs. Harrington. Rev. S. J. Calline offered up a prayer, and Rev. Whaley was then introduced as the first speaker.

Rev. Whaley said that twenty-eight years ago, before he came to this city, a train of thought was born in him. The blood of the slave flowed in Douglass's veins. As he was born, so he lived for eighteen years of his life — in slavery. No mother, no father tenderly reared him for freedom's work. He knew not his father, and but a recollection of his mother.

The speaker reviewed Douglass's life: his work in favor of the abolition of slavery, the wonderful path he accomplished while associated with the anti-slavery movement, the ridicule which followed the publishing of his own life, and his being forced to go to England to escape it. It was believed he would have been mobbed in Boston at one time.

When the war broke out, it was he who saw to it that the Fifty-fourth and Fifty-fifth Massachusetts regiments were organized, and his two sons were among the first to enlist in those regiments. He stood by them until his death. During his last days he was working to better the people of his race.

In his public life, the speaker said, Douglass never looked out for his own interests, but to the interests of his country and of humanity. He had an extraordinary brain power. He had no ambition as a politician, and was a loyal and philanthropic statesman. "He has filled history with an influence," said the speaker. "He was not an infidel; he did not believe in a God who would sanction slavery. He believed in the precepts which Jesus Christ laid down on earth."

A letter from Douglass to the Washington State building at the World's Columbian Exposition was read. "It was my fault," he wrote, "to have left Pacific Park sooner; I did not remember my appellation, and I am regardless of the splendid showing made by the state of Washington at the World's Columbian Exposition. The action of your governor and your building itself, as well as your residents, attracted large attention and awakened a high interest in your great state, and I am sure the people of Washington may feel that no visitor to the fair could have been more welcome than is yours. In all that I have read of the state of Washington I have found nothing that has impressed me so favorably of its character and resources as that exhibited in your building at the fair."

Resolutions were adopted lamenting the loss of the race's great leader, and the services closed with song.

A telegram from New York reported that St. Mark's Methodist Church there had been crowded by colored people attending memorial services in Douglass's honor, where Dr. J. E. Rankin, of Howard University, referred to Douglass as being to the Afro-American what Washington and Lincoln were to the Anglo-American race.