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But what man has made, man can un-make.
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David W. Blight |
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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 his associations, in his habits of thought, and in his prejudices, he was a white man.
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David W. Blight |
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c0c1817
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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 father in mystery, and left me without an intelligible beginning in the world.
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David W. Blight |
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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 first years of his administration to deny, postpone, and sacrifice the rights of humanity in the colored people to promote the welfare of the white people of the country."12"
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David W. Blight |
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My poor mother," Douglass wrote, "like many other slave women, had many children, but NO FAMILY!"21"
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David W. Blight |
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Everybody in the south," wrote Douglass, "wants the privilege of whipping somebody else."
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David W. Blight |
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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, palliate or defend them."
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David W. Blight |
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1b5b0a0
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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 determine how to condemn the princes and their laws but also influence and eventually join them.
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David W. Blight |
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ab5e3f8
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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 humanity.
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David W. Blight |
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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 bad man we shall be safe.
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David W. Blight |
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His "wickedly selfish" Americans loved to celebrate their "own heritage, and on this condition are content to see others crushed in our midst."
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David W. Blight |
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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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David W. Blight |
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Grafton, Massachusetts, in early 1842, while working solo, Douglass was met by mob hostility in addition to an unwelcoming clergy. So he went to a hotel and borrowed a "dinner-bell, with which in hand I passed through the principal streets," he recalled, "ringing the bell and crying out, 'Notice! Frederick Douglass, recently a slave, will lecture on American Slavery, on Grafton Common, this evening at 7 o'clock."13"
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David W. Blight |
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f37c3f8
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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 broken--such is life.
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David W. Blight |
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c9115de
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Douglass played the prophetic role of the "suffering servant" with zeal. His famous statement about agitation, delivered in a speech in 1857, has stood the test of time and numerous protest ideologies: "If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to"
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David W. Blight |
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7bdb4c4
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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."
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David W. Blight |
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33b8220
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that
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David W. Blight |
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Slavery does away with fathers as it does away with families," he wrote. "The order of civilization is reversed here." --
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David W. Blight |
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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 the free-labor militancy and Christian idealism of the Western Reserve.
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David W. Blight |
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59a0dc7
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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 us a song; and they who wasted us required of us mirth, saying, Sing us one of the songs of Zion. How can we sing the Lord's song in a strange land? If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning. If I do not remember thee,..
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David W. Blight |
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afa7fab
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shibboleths
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David W. Blight |
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139b7a7
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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.
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David W. Blight |
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feminist Abby Kelley to the executive committee by a tally of 557 to 451.
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David W. Blight |
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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 the Revolutionary era's separation of church and state.
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David W. Blight |
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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 liberation."
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David W. Blight |
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Whenever Douglass made arguments against slavery from the natural-rights tradition,
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David W. Blight |
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Douglass gave voice to the reality of social death.
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David W. Blight |
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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 the sky, the slaves . . . were nearest and dearest to His great heart. Those ministers who defended slavery from the Bible were of their 'father the devil,' and those churches which fellowshipped slaveholders as Christians, were synagogues of S..
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David W. Blight |
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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"
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David W. Blight |
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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.
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David W. Blight |
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e538bbe
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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 "Declaration of Sentiments." He would always be delighted to be called "a women's rights man." The motto on the masthead of the North Star, "Right is of No Color and No Sex," had been no mere sentiment. 38"
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David W. Blight |
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b13c5ad
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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 was inaugurated president in January 2009. Douglass, a master ironist about America,
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David W. Blight |
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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
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David W. Blight |
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5b48146
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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 individuals and for the nation, and then captured the multiple meanings of freedom--as idea and reality, of mind and body--as perhaps no one else ever has in America.
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David W. Blight |
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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 thing one cannot live with or without.
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David W. Blight |
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Genealogical trees do not flourish among slaves. --FREDERICK DOUGLASS, 1855
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David W. Blight |
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while Abraham Lincoln saved for you a country, he delivered us from a bondage,
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David W. Blight |
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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 through its past of contradiction and evil, and not by evading it." --
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David W. Blight |
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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 with the threat of disunion in the air, hostility to antislavery agitators rose to new levels of violence. By December 1860, Northern workingmen, along with merchants, shipowners, and cotton manufacturers, were deeply worried about the impact of ..
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David W. Blight |
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e4e4d73
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We ought to have our government so shaped that even when in the hands of a bad man we shall be safe.
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David W. Blight |
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08608bd
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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 political crisis after another, and who had struggled to sustain hope in the face of the Dred Scott decision's egregious denials, a resolute stand by the North against secession and the Slave Power was hardly a sure thing.
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David W. Blight |
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f045a3d
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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 of the future and by which we may make them more symmetrical."
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David W. Blight |
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541e1b8
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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 conflict. . . . I may say if this war is to be forgotten, I ask in the name of all things sacred what shall men remember?"
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David W. Blight |
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ea3a7e6
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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 DOUGLASS, 1879
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David W. Blight |