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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 principle of racial equality--might now come to fruition.
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David W. Blight |
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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 any law which shall abridge the privileges and immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law, nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal..
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David W. Blight |
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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"
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David W. Blight |
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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."
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David W. Blight |
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He argued that the general had been sacrificed to appease the proslavery sentiment of the border states and because of Lincoln's constitutional conservatism.
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David W. Blight |
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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, and future black equality be discussed as a single question, to be settled on American soil within American institutions.
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David W. Blight |
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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 . . . vices, nursed into power . . . at the poisoned breast of slavery, it will come at last . . . purified in its spirit freed from slavery, vastly greater . . . than it ever was before in all the elements of advancing civilization.
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David W. Blight |
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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
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David W. Blight |
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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 most universal aspiration. Douglass's life, and especially his words, may forever serve as our watch-warnings in our unending search for the beautiful, needful thing.
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David W. Blight |
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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. Some in the mob eventually climbed to the tower and rang the courthouse bell to break up the meeting. Sometimes, when they"
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David W. Blight |
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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 backbreaking, but on an earlier stop in Ithaca in late July, Douglass described a little break before the evening speech. He hiked a "mile or two" along the east bank of Cayuga Lake until he found "a suitable place to renew my acquaintance with the art of..
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David W. Blight |
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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
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David W. Blight |
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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 nation." The republic was undergoing a second founding, and Douglass felt more than ready to be one of its fathers. An amazing change was under way, argued Douglass, not only for blacks and for the nation, but for "justice throughout the world."
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David W. Blight |