While Abraham Lincoln saved for you a country, he delivered us from a bondage,
He delivered some fifteen lectures in and around Dryden and McGrawville, New York. On October 1 he announced appearances in at least eleven towns in Tompkins County alone. The schedule was backbreakin...
We ought to have our government so shaped that even when in the hands of a bad man we shall be safe.
My poor mother, Douglass wrote, like many other slave women, had many children, but NO FAMILY!21
During times of peace, the sons bury their fathers, but in war it is the fathers who send their sons to the grave. —HERODOTUS, THE HISTORY
There is not beneath the sky an enemy to filial affection so destructive as slavery. It had made my brothers and sisters strangers to me; it converted my mother who bore me into a myth; it shrouded my...
Shibboleths
When the influence of office or any other influence shall soften my hatred of tyranny and violence do not spare me; let fall upon me the lash of your keenest and most withering censure. —FREDERICK DOU...
Whenever Douglass made arguments against slavery from the natural-rights tradition,
The problem of the twenty-first century is still some agonizingly enduring combination of legacies bleeding forward from slavery and color lines. Freedom in its infinite meanings remains humanity’s mo...
The best friend of a nation is he who most faithfully rebukes her for her sins—and he her worst enemy who, under the specious . . . garb of patriotism seeks to excuse, palliate or defend them.
Not only was Sunday a Sabbath, but all days were Sabbaths, and to be kept holy. All sectarianism was false and mischievous. . . . Prejudice against color was rebellion against God. Of all men beneath...
It must be admitted, truth compels me to admit, even here in the presence of the monument we have erected to his memory, Abraham Lincoln was not . . . either our man or our model. In his interests, in...
Antebellum America, especially due to the work of the Harvard biologist Louis Agassiz, who had applied the notion of zoological provinces for animal and plant life to the races of man.
I now saw, in my situation, several points of similarity with that of the oxen. They were property, so was I; they were to be broken, so was I. Covey was to break me, I was to break them; break and be...
He argued that the general had been sacrificed to appease the proslavery sentiment of the border states and because of Lincoln’s constitutional conservatism.
All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No state shall make or enforce an...
Be included among those Americans the modern theologian Donald W. Shriver Jr. has called honest patriots, those who manifest an ironic-tragic love of country by learning, narrating, and working throug...
But what man has made, man can un-make.
Douglass gave voice to the reality of social death.
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