Well the nation may forget; it may shut its eyes to the past, but the colored people of this country are bound to keep fresh a memory of the past till justice shall be done them in the present.39
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 reader as a whole reflected, as Bingham intended, New England’s long transition from seventeenth-century Calvinism to nineteenth-century evangelical, freewill doctrine, from Puritan theocracy to t...
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
He [Lincoln] was preeminently the white man’s president, Douglass continued in his forceful baritone, entirely devoted to the welfare of the white man. He was ready and willing at any time during the...
All great autobiography is about loss, about the hopeless but necessary quest to retrieve and control a past that forever slips away. Memory is both inspiration and burden, method and subject, the thi...
It caused one of Douglass’s most challenging psychic dilemmas. He repeatedly faced the question of how uncompromising radicalism could mix with a learned pragmatism to try to influence real power, to...
We can only guess at the thrill in Douglass’s heart, knowing that the cause he had so long pleaded—a sanctioned war to destroy slavery and potentially to reinvent the American republic around the prin...
The cynic in Douglass left him saying, Heaven help the poor slave, whose only hope for freedom is in the selfish hearts of such a people. 32
Our government may at some time be in the hands of a bad man. When in the hands of a good man it is all well enough. . . . We ought to have our government so shaped that even when in the hands of a ba...
No African American speaker had ever faced this kind of captive audience, composed of all the leadership of the federal government in one place; and no such speaker would ever again until Barack Obama...
Genealogical trees do not flourish among slaves. —FREDERICK DOUGLASS, 1855
Douglass was the only black person attending the Seneca Falls convention, and it remained a matter of lifetime pride that he was among the thirty-two men and sixty-eight women who signed the Declarati...
As he told of it over and over in public forums later, he portrayed his victory over Covey as the demonstration of the physical force necessary for male dignity and power.
People came in wagons and on horseback from many miles around to festival-like meetings from Ashtabula to Youngstown, Massillon to Leesburg, Salem to Munson. They had tapped into the grass roots of th...
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, au...