Shibboleths
Douglass gave voice to the reality of social death.
But what man has made, man can un-make.
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...
While Abraham Lincoln saved for you a country, he delivered us from a bondage,
We ought to have our government so shaped that even when in the hands of a bad man we shall be safe.
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...
Whenever Douglass made arguments against slavery from the natural-rights tradition,
My poor mother, Douglass wrote, like many other slave women, had many children, but NO FAMILY!21
It is not well to forget the past, Douglass warned in a speech later in the 1880s. Memory was given to man for some wise purpose. The past is . . . the mirror in which we may discern the dim outlines...
For a former slave and then an orator and an editor whose political consciousness had awakened with the Mexican War and the Compromise of 1850, who had seen the fate of the slaves bandied about in one...
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...
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.
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...
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...
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...
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...
I am no minister of malice, he said, I would not repel the repentant, but . . . may my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth if I forget the difference between the parties to that . . . bloody conflic...
He argued that the general had been sacrificed to appease the proslavery sentiment of the border states and because of Lincoln’s constitutional conservatism.
His wickedly selfish Americans loved to celebrate their own heritage, and on this condition are content to see others crushed in our midst.