In its report on Douglass's speech at the Cathcart Street Church on 24 March 1846, the Ayr Advertiser remarked on his skills as an orator:

It is the ‘recitals of blood’ I want to dwell on here, for ‘blood’, both literally and metaphorically, signifies many things of importance to Douglass. The word blood and its cognates occur over fifty times in his Narrative, mostly in the course of his accounts of acts of brutality towards slaves. The pattern continues in his speeches, but while he occasionally recites the kinds of verbal description he has already committed to print, he amplifies them in ways that are only possible on the lecture platform.

The Dundee Courier reported how, alongside his ‘pathetic, earnest, and impressive’ descriptions of ‘the horrid scenes he had witnessed, the sufferings of the slaves’, Douglass held up in his hands ‘instruments of torture’, including ‘a collar to prevent repose, handcuffs and anklets, with the lash, all commonly in use.’ Such displays were a common feature of his – and Buffum's – lectures. On some occasions, he strove for more dramatic effect by explaining that the instruments they brought with them were not mere theatrical props, but items that bore traces of their former use. In Limerick, for instance, Douglass produced ‘an iron collar taken from the neck of a young woman who had escaped from Mobile. It had so worn into her neck that her blood and flesh were found on it.’ Some of them had been used on people he knew well, even in his presence. When Buffum displayed some implements at a church in Edinburgh, it elicited ‘a most painful sensation in the immense congregation’. Even more sensational were the moments when Douglass declared that his own body still bore the marks of the slave-driver's whip.