Everybody in the south, wrote Douglass, wants the privilege of whipping somebody else.
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
Douglass told white northern voters that 'The blood of the slave is on your garments. You have said that slavery is better than freedom. That war is better than peace. And that cruelty is better than...
Douglass found little encouragement in the behavior of the Northern public during the secession crisis. The bulk of white Northerners had always viewed abolitionists with suspicion or contempt, and wi...
By the Rivers of Babylon, there we sat down. Yea! we wept when we remembered Zion. We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof. For there, they that carried us away captive, required of...
He would have repeatedly encountered irresistible words such as freedom, liberty, tyranny, and the rights of man. 19 Well before he read any serious history, he garnered and cherished a vocabulary of...
Feminist Abby Kelley to the executive committee by a tally of 557 to 451.
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...
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 Baptist meetinghouse in Ithaca threw the band of lecturers out of its evening session, they adjourned into God’s house—the open air—and held their impromptu meeting in the courthouse square....
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.
The Proclamation, even with its limitations (freeing slaves only in the Confederate states or in occupied areas), brought about a world-historical moment, a complete revolution in the position of a na...
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...
As a final objection to Blair’s entreaty, Douglass once again addressed the pernicious effects of colonization, which he saw as proslavery theory in disguise. Douglass insisted that slavery, racism, a...
This terrible baptism of blood and fire through which our nation is passing . . . not as has been most cruelly affirmed, because of the presence of men of color in the land, but by malignant . . . vic...
Immigrant poor, said Douglass, that slavery is the only power that can prevent the laboring white man from falling to the level of the slave’s poverty and degradation.
Though I am not rich, I am not absolutely poor. . . . I am working now less for myself than for those around me. —FREDERICK DOUGLASS, MAY 6, 1868
Then he defined patriotism: 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, pall...
The AASS had established a fledgling newspaper in Salem, Ohio, the Bugle, and the indefatigable Abby Kelley, along with her husband, Stephen Foster, and others, had laid the moral-suasionist
Slavery does away with fathers as it does away with families, he wrote. The order of civilization is reversed here.