David W. Blight Quote

In August, Douglass righteously claimed that everyone knows that this is the slaveholders’ rebellion and nothing else. The war, he said, was the work of a privileged class of irresponsible despots, authorized tyrants and blood-suckers, who fasten upon the Negro’s flesh, and draw political power and consequence from their legalized crimes.

David W. Blight

In August, Douglass righteously claimed that everyone knows that this is the slaveholders’ rebellion and nothing else. The war, he said, was the work of a privileged class of irresponsible despots, authorized tyrants and blood-suckers, who fasten upon the Negro’s flesh, and draw political power and consequence from their legalized crimes.

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About David W. Blight

David William Blight (born 1949) is the Sterling Professor of History, of African American Studies, and of American Studies and Director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at Yale University. Previously, Blight was a professor of History at Amherst College, where he taught for 13 years. He has won several awards, including the Bancroft Prize and Frederick Douglass Prize for Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory, and the Pulitzer Prize and Lincoln Prize for Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom. In 2021, he was elected to the American Philosophical Society.