Quotes from David W. Blight

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Douglass gave voice to the reality of social death.

His "wickedly selfish" Americans loved to celebrate their "own heritage, and on this condition are content to see others crushed in our midst.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

He argued that the general had been sacrificed to appease the proslavery sentiment of the border states and because of Lincoln's constitutional conservatism.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

Genealogical trees do not flourish among slaves. —FREDERICK DOUGLASS, 1855

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

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.