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 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
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.
Above all, Douglass is remembered most for telling his personal story—the slave who willed his own freedom, mastered the master’s language, saw to the core of the meaning of slavery, both for individu...
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...
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
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.
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
Genealogical trees do not flourish among slaves. —FREDERICK DOUGLASS, 1855
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...
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