Quotes from David W. Blight

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 protection of the laws.

millennialist thought was a cluster of religious and secular ideas forged into a kind of national creed. In its more hopeful mode, it held that Christ would have a Second Coming in the "new Israel" of America, or at least that the country possessed a mission as a "redeemer nation" destined to perform a special role in history. Millennialism was an outlook on history, a disposition about

all history resolves itself very easily into the biography of a few stout and earnest persons" echoes

For black Americans, Exodus is always contemporary, history always past and present.

In America Bibles and slaveholders go hand in hand. The church and the slave prison stand together, and while you hear the chanting of psalms in one, you hear the clanking of chains in the other. The man who wields the cowhide during the week, fills the pulpit on Sunday. . . . The man who whipped me in the week used to . . . show me the way of life on the Sabbath

Americans, Douglass believed, instinctively and culturally watched history and preferred not to act in it.

the sobering admission that slavery "did not die honestly." It had died in all-out war, from necessity, not from enlightenment and morality alone. It had been crushed in blood, not merely legislated out of existence

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.

Later that spring and early summer, this seismic shift in Reconstruction policy and politics led to passage of a new Freedmen's Bureau bill, the first Civil Rights Act of American history, and the Fourteenth Amendment.

Confederate secretary of war, James A. Seddon, had ordered the death penalty for black soldiers taken as prisoners, followed by the Confederate Congress's authorization for treating captured blacks and their white officers as insurrectionists, thus subject to death.

The debate over colonization always came back, as in these testimonies, to its root: the American struggle over white supremacy.

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.

Douglass much preferred to employ passages such as John 5:17, when Jesus is condemned to death because he broke the law and labored on the Sabbath: "My father worketh, said the Savior, and I also work."26

But what Lawson seems to have stressed most were the freedom from fear and the power of humility

Sorrow and desolation have their songs," wrote Douglass, "as well as joy and peace. Slaves sing more to make themselves happy, than to express their happiness.

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.

We live in deeds, not years, in thoughts not breaths, in feelings not fingers on a dial. We should count time in heartthrobs; he most lives who thinks the most, feels the noblest, acts the best.