Publishers From The United States

"Douglass' quest to create the hated enemy of the Union cause reflects a long-standing psychological need of his own. We must remember that he spent twenty-seven years of his life either as a slave or a fugitive slave; his sense of self-determination took its departure from his slave origins as the child of a black mother and her white master. He was both a reflection of the system into which he was born and its greatest contradiction. Slavery never received a more eloquent indictment than in Douglass' autobiographies, editorials, and speeches. He knew slavery as a system rooted in dehumanization and violence, and he knew from experience that slaves were both desired and despised. Slavery, in his view, required hatred and force in order to survive. It had taught him a great deal about the uses of violence, and it had taught him how to hate. (p. 88)"

"Abolitionists' hopes ascended to new heights in the wake of Fort Sumter; they joined the chorus of war fever and stood ready to usher slavery to an early death. After years of argument and prophecy, and after watching slavery dissolve America's political institutions, Douglass could hardly see the war in anything other than abolitionists' terms. He was fully aware that the radical implications [emancipation] of a war to save the Union were not anticipated by most northerners, but as a minority agitator, a moralist preaching an unpopular politics, and a political activist arguing for a new morality, he strove to exploit the grand opportunity now open to all abolitionists. (p. 81)"

"Fredrick Douglass was appalled at the blatant racism that lay behind refusals to accept black troops."

"in the death of Frederick Douglass we lost the greatest man that the Negro race has ever produced on the American continent."

"Frederick Douglass's life fell in the period of war, of controversy, and of fierce party strife. The task which was assigned to him was, on the whole, one of destruction and liberation, rather than construction and reconciliation. Circumstances and his own temperament made him the aggressive champion of his people, and of all the others to whom custom or law denied the privileges which he had learned to regard as the inalienable possessions of men. He was for liberty, at all times, and in all shapes. Seeking the ballot for the Negro, he was ardently in favor of granting the same privilege to woman. Holding, as he did, that there were certain rights and dignities that belong to man as man, he was opposed to discrimination in our immigration laws in favor of the white races of Europe and against the yellow races of Asia. In religion, also, he was disposed to unite himself with the extreme liberal movement. In all this he was at once an American, and a man of his time."

"Mr. Douglass eagerly assisted in the formation of the first regularly organized regiments of United States colored troops, the Fifty-fourth and Fifty-fifth Massachusetts Infantry Volunteers... Mr. Douglass rendered valuable aid in getting together enough fit men for two New England regiments. His two sons, Lewis H. and Charles R. Douglass, who are still living in Washington and are honored citizens, were among the first to enlist. Their father's influence with the colored people of the country was so great that his services were almost indispensable. He was distressed by the restrictions placed on these soldiers, but said: "While I, of course, was deeply pained and saddened at the slowness of heart which marked the conduct of the loyal government, I was not discouraged, and urged every man who could enlist to get an eagle on his button, a musket on his shoulder, and the star and spangle over his head.""

"It required time and the cumulation of events to bring about a state of feeling that would tolerate the suggestion of using colored men in the Union army. Mr. Douglass more than any other one man, helped to bring about this change. It finally became evident that if the Negroes were good enough to be employed in the Confederate ranks, as laborers, they ought to be good enough for like service in the Union lines."

"In spite of the seeming pro-slavery policy of the national administration, Frederick Douglass was earnestly consecrating every energy of his being to the President's support. He was wise enough to understand that if Lincoln in the beginning, had stated his policy to be, not only to save the Union, but also to free the slaves, all would have been lost. While other Abolitionists were impatient and doubtful of Mr. Lincoln's course, Douglass declared himself convinced that the war, even though it be called a "white man's war," was nevertheless the beginning of the end of the nation's great evil. He still believed, and so declared in his public speeches, that "the mission of the war was the liberation of the slaves as well as the salvation of the Union." "I reproached the North," he said, "that they fought with one hand, while they might strike more effectively with two; that they fought with the soft white hand, while they kept the black iron hand chained and helpless behind them; that they fought the effect, while they protected the cause; and said that the Union cause would never prosper until the war assumed an anti-slavery attitude and the Negro was enlisted on the side of the Union.""

"At one time Mr. Douglass was travelling in the state of Pennsylvania, and was forced, on account of his colour, to ride in the baggage-car, in spite of the fact that he had paid the same price for his passage that the other passengers had paid. When some of the white passengers went into the baggage-car to console Mr. Douglass, and one of them said to him: "I am sorry, Mr. Douglass, that you have been degraded in this manner," Mr. Douglass straightened himself up on the box upon which he was sitting, and replied: "They cannot degrade Frederick Douglass. The soul that is within me no man can degrade. I am not the one that is being degraded on account of this treatment, but those who are inflicting it upon me…""

"In late May 1861, three escaped slaves showed up at Fortress Monroe, a Union stronghold on the tip of Virginia's Peninsula, claiming they had been forced by their master to dig a Confederate battery position. It happened that the officer commanding this post- indeed, in charge of the entire Department of Virginia- was a Massachusetts lawyer and politician turned general named Benjamin Franklin Butler. Like his colonial namesake, Butler possessed a seemingly limitless stock of shrewd ingenuity. When a Confederate officer presented himself and demanded that this human property be returned under existing laws, Butler refused. He argued that because in this case the blacks had been employed against the U.S. government, they had become legitimate contraband of war and thus fair game for confiscation. Butler would later lay claim to being the first to utilize the term "contraband" in this context; in fact, the evidence is a bit murky on that point, though it is certainly true that through his act he established a precedent that other, likeminded Union officers were quick to follow. Suddenly the small Federal enclaves began to attract a growing number of male slaves and their families. Butler's fateful action was further legitimized on August 8, when the U.S. Congress authorized the seizure of all Southern property used "in aid of the rebellion"- a definition that specifically included slaves. From his editorial pulpit, Frederick Douglass issued a strident call to "Let the slaves and free colored people be called into service, and formed into a liberating army.""

"For Frederick Douglass, the bombardment of Fort Sumter launched a campaign of violence aimed squarely at the heart of the slave-owning Confederacy. "The cry now is for war, vigorous war, war to the bitter end," he told readers of the Douglass Monthly in May 1861. Douglass, himself an escaped slave, was one of the most prominent and eloquent figures in the U.S. abolitionist movement. "From the first," he would write later in his autobiographical Life and Times, "I, for one, saw in this war the end of slavery; and truth requires me to say that my interest in the success of the North was largely due to this belief." While openly advocating for the enlistment of blacks in the military, Douglass acknowledged that any Africans Americans in uniform would be assailed on two sides- by the Confederacy and its slave owners before them and by the pervasive racism of the North behind. As U.S. citizens flocked to the colors after Fort Sumter, Douglass proclaimed a key precondition for black participation: "Nothing," he said, "short of an open recognition of the Negro's manhood, his rights as such to have a country equally with others, would induce me to join the army in any capacity." Douglass' admonitions went unheard, however, amid the pounding drums and blaring trumpets of war. Hundreds of Northern free blacks joined the rush to defend the Union, giving no thought to any possible political agenda."

"While a life like Frederick Douglass's is remarkable, we must remember that not every person who lived through slavery was like Douglass. Most did not learn to read or write. Most did not engage in hand-to-hand combat with white slave breakers. Most did not live close enough to free states in the North to have any hope of escape. No one, enslaved or otherwise, was like Douglass. There were other brilliant, exceptional people who lived under slavery, and many resisted the institution in innumerable ways, but our country's teachings about slavery, painfully limited, often focus singularly on heroic slave narratives at the expense of the millions of men and women whose stories might be less sensational but are no less worthy of being told."

"Swept up in the infinite possibilities of the moment, even the abolitionist Frederick Douglass, who before the war had excoriated America for the hollowness of its ideals, dared to imagine the nation as more than a white man's republic with black men as honored guests. "I want a home here not only for the Negro, the mulatto, and the Latin races; but I want the Asiatic to find a home here in the United States, and feel at home here, both for his sake and for ours," Douglass declared in 1869. "In whatever else other nations may have been great and grand, our greatness and grandeur will be found in the faithful application of the principle of perfect civil equality to the people of all races and of all creeds, and to men of no creeds.""

"As a schoolkid in Virginia, I never received an honest accounting of slavery. Many historians have now given us a clear look at the slave trade, plantation life (that is, life on the enslaved labor farms), and slave rebellions. Every aspect of slavery was just as evil as the abolitionists and the peerlessly honest former slave Frederick Douglass described it. If anything the conditions were worse. The only way to argue for slavery, then or now, is to believe that the enslaved weren't real human beings. That the lives of those who had darker skin had less worth; that the color of skin meant the difference between human and not quite human. And that is the hideous lesson my Virginia history textbook taught schoolchildren in the Old Dominion."

"The abolitionists, not just Frederick Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison but the countless thousands who supported their cause, fought to abolish slavery and grant the rights of citizenship to all Americans, regardless of their race."

"When police tried to prevent former slave Frederick Douglass from attending the inaugural reception in 1865, President Lincoln went to the door and said, 'Here comes my friend Douglass!'"

"Many northern African Americans saw the war not only as a means of striking down the institution of slavery but as an opportunity to press their demands for full citizenship in a reunited nation. Even in the slavery-free North, African American rights were neither consistent nor secure. Suffrage was restricted to a few New England states, African Americans could not testify in court against a white defendant, and economic rights were not ensured. The justification for such restrictions in the North was that these rights were reserved for citizens of the United States, which free African Americans, not to mention slaves, were not. The conflict with the South, therefore, became a venue where African Americans, by demonstrating their loyalty and willingness to sacrifice for the benefit of the federal government, could improve their social status or even gain citizenship. Many African American leaders believed blacks should deny their services to the government until offered the reward of citizenship. Frederick Douglass told a Boston crowd, "Nothing short of open recognition of the Negro's manhood, his rights as such to have a country equally with others, would induce me to join the army in any capacity. Many other African Americans, however, eagerly volunteered their services to the federal government after the assault on Fort Sumter."

"Frederick Douglass was one of the foremost leaders of the abolitionist movement which fought to end slavery within the United States in the decades prior to the Civil War. He eagerly attended the founding meeting of the Republican Party in 1854 and campaigned for its nominees. A brilliant speaker, Douglass was asked by the American Anti-Slavery Society to engage in a tour of lectures, and so became recognized as one of America's first great black speakers. He won world fame when his autobiography The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, in which he gave specific details of his bondage, was publicized in 1845. Two years later, he began publishing an anti-slavery paper called the North Star. He was appointed Minister Resident and Consul General to Haiti by President Benjamin Harrison on July 1, 1889, the first black citizen to hold high rank in the U.S. government. Douglass served as an adviser to President Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War and fought for the adoption of constitutional amendments that guaranteed voting rights and other civil liberties for blacks. After the Civil War, Douglass realized that the war for citizenship had just begun when Democrat President Andrew Johnson proved to be a determined opponent of land redistribution and civil and political rights for former slaves. Douglass began the postwar era relying on the same themes that he preached in the antebellum years: economic self-reliance, political agitation, and coalition building. Douglass provided a powerful voice for human rights during this period of American history and is still revered today for his contributions against racial injustice."

"In contrast to the contemporary black Americans, the black Americans, in that era, were in solid support of the Republican Party. This was the party that fought the northern and southern Democrats to pass the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution. Although President Andrew Johnson tried to bamboozle Frederick Douglass to the Democrat side by making false or empty promises, he did not succeed. Douglass was no fool and was not going to let Johnson use him to gain the support of the Negroes in his effort to be 'elected' president. Frederick Douglass and other prominent Blacks threw their support to Ulysses S. Grant for president."

"Many Negroes responded enthusiastically to such appeals [as those by Douglass]. But others still held back. This was especially true in New York City, where Douglass, Henry Highland Garnet, and other speakers urged colored men to enlist at a meeting in Shiloh Church on April 27. In spite of their eloquence, only one recruit came forward. Douglass was appalled, and told the audience that he was ashamed of them. A Mr. Robert Johnson arose and defended the Negroes of New York, and, according to the report of the affair, "by a few well-spoken words, [he] convinced the meeting that it was not cowardice which made the young men hesitate to enlist, but a proper respect for their own manhood. If the Government wanted their services, let it guarantee to them all the rights of citizens and soldiers, and, instead of one man, he would insure them 5,000 men in twenty days. Mr. J's remarks were received with tremendous and long-continued applause.""

"Douglass was born a slave, he won his liberty. He is of negro extraction, and consequently was despised and outraged. He has by his own energy and force of character commanded the respect of the nation. He was ignorant, he has, against law and by stealth and entirely unaided, educated himself He was poor, he has by honest toil and industry become rich and independent, so to speak. He, a chattel slave of a hated and cruelly wronged race, in the teeth of American prejudice and in face of nearly every kind of hindrance and drawback, has come to be one of the foremost orators of the age, with a reputation established on both sides of the Atlantic; a writer of power and elegance of expression. A thinker whose views are potent in controlling and shaping public opinion; a high officer in the national government. A cultivated gentleman whose virtues as a husband, father, and citizen are the highest honor a man can have."

"As Frederick Douglass observed in his autobiography, under this system of modified serfdom, the Black sharecropper was "free from the individual master," but was now "the slave of society.""

"It was the great Frederick Douglass, who had a price on his head, who said “Without struggle, there is no progress.” And echoing his words was the answer of the great abolitionist poet, James Russell Lowell: “The limits of tyranny is proscribed by the measure of our resistance to it”."

"Those damned sons of bitches thought they had me in a trap! I know that damned Douglass; he's just like any nigger, and he would sooner cut a white man's throat than not."

"I’ve been inspired by the profound and timeless writings of James Baldwin, Frederick Douglass, Toni Morrison, and Nina Simone."

"We helped plow the fields, build the dams, write the poems and sing the music of America. Are not all Americans proud, of Doree Miller, of Frederick Douglass, of Paul Robeson, of Joe Louis, of Marian Anderson."

"Our Douglass, too, with his massive brain,/Who plead our cause with his broken chain,/And helped to hurl from his bloody seat/The curse that writhed and died at his feet."

"As a public speaker, he excels in pathos, wit, comparison, imitation, strength of reasoning, and fluency of language. There is in him that union of head and heart, which is indispensable to an enlightenment of the heads and a winning of the hearts of others."

"The struggle for the right of women to vote was nationwide and growing. It had started with the first Equal Rights Convention, at Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848, led by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, which was addressed by Frederick Douglass, the great Negro leader. The suffragists had been ridiculed, assaulted by mobs, refused halls, arrested for attempting to vote, disowned by their families."

"Under Roman law as well as in the United States, slaves were deprived of legally recognized spouses or families and of genuine property ownership. As with most domestic animals, their lowly status was enforced by the threat of almost unlimited physical punishment. As Frederick Douglass put it, after describing the ways that the “slave breaker” Mr. Covey had “tamed” him: “I was broken in body, soul, and spirit. My natural elasticity was crushed, my intellect languished, the disposition to read departed, the cheerful spark that lingered about my eye died; the dark night of slavery closed in upon me; and behold a man transformed into a brute!” In an earlier essay on this subject, I have theorized that, given the repeated comparisons of slaves to domestic animals throughout history (and Aristotle wrote that the ox was “a poor man’s slave”), the initial enslavement and “bestialization” of prisoners of war may well have been modeled on the successful techniques of taming and domesticating wild animals. But some animals could never be domesticated, and even those slaves who at times felt themselves transformed, like Douglass, into “brutes” did not lose their essential humanity, a fact that repeatedly underscored the preeminent contradiction of “inhuman bondage.” Indeed, one of the central and inspiring truths of African American history, a truth dramatized by fugitives like Frederick Douglass, was the way slaves succeeded in asserting their humanity and reinventing their diverse cultures, despite being torn away from their natal African families and societies, despite being continuously humiliated, bought and sold, and often subjected to torture and the threat of death. Thus the word “inhuman,” in this book’s title, refers to the unconscionable and unsuccessful goal of bestializing (in the form of pets as well as beasts of burden) a class of human beings. This is not meant to deny, as much slave testimony indicates, that some slaves suffered recurrent psychological as well as physical damage."

"There's a long tradition of music as education and of situating education at the center of our social struggles. Frederick Douglass, for example, talked about how important it was for enslaved Black people to educate themselves. Because once they began to educate themselves, they would no longer be slaves."

"During the July 18, 1863 evening assault on Fort Wagner, Confederate artillery took a frightful toll on the ranks of the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts Infantry, massed at the base of the parapet, while the sounds of exploding shells and hissing lead fragments mingled with the screams and shouts of men. Above the din, the powerful voice of the regiment's sergeant major, Lewis Douglass, urged the men forward. "Come on boys," Douglass bellowed, "we are on review today before Governor Andrew." His reference to the state executive who authorized the regiment drew cheers from the men as they rallied and stormed the fortification. Douglass might have summoned another name to inspire the troops- his father, Frederick Douglass. The elder Douglass played an important role in the formation of the Fifty-fourth, with the publication of "Men of Color, to Arms!" a few months before the battle at Fort Wagner."

"The political and military events that gradually turned the Union army into an army of liberation, aided by the Emancipation Proclamation as the predictable next step. How could the war have continued much longer without turning it into a war for emancipation and not merely to preserve the Union? And how could the Union cause have triumphed without the arming of black men? But in truth, Lincoln's decision was a huge break with the past. Shortly before the proclamation was to take effect, Frederick Douglass, who had pushed hard for emancipation, celebrated with these words: "This is scarcely a day for prose. It is a day for poetry and song, a new song." Douglass rightly celebrated the day as a major step towards emancipation, and that is how we recall this crucial turning point, but he also recognized that it was a milestone in the relationship between the federal government and black men, both free and soon to be freed. When the Lincoln administration finally agreed to let black men take up arms against the Confederacy, an important door opened that would be very difficult to close. By arming black men, the Union was acknowledging something about black humanity and specifically about the manhood of these new soldiers. The administration was also implicitly acknowledging that they needed these new recruits to help win the war and restore the Union. Although celebrated as an immense moral step, the Emancipation Proclamation and the subsequent recruitment of soldiers into the regiments of the United States Colored Troops represented decisions born out of explicit military necessity, and they were presented to Northern voters on those terms."

"As an orator, writer and editor, Douglass holds an honored place among the gifted men of his day. As a man of business and a public officer he has been preeminently successful; honest and upright in all his dealings, he bears an enviable reputation. As a husband, father, neighbor and friend, in all social relations, he has been faithful and steadfast to the end. He was the only man I ever knew who understood the degradation of disfranchisement for women. !!!!! Through all the long years of our struggle he has been a familiar figure on our platform, with always an inspiring word to say. In the very first convention he helped me to carry the resolution I had penned, demanding woman suffrage. Frederick Douglass is not dead! His grand character will long be an object lesson in our national history; his lofty sentiments of liberty, justice and equality, echoed on every platform over our broad land, must influence and inspire many coming generations!"

"To Douglass it was a war of liberation, pure and simple. In the May issue of his paper he let himself go. Amid sprawling drawings of the American flag and eagle he exulted, "Freedom for all, or chains for all." A few lines further on he added sardonically that his assurance could be traced "less to the virtue of the North than to the villainy of the South." But since it was a war of emancipation, as he felt, he had a suggestion for the new president as to how it should be waged. "Let the slaves and free colored people be called into service and formed into a liberating army, to march into the South and raise the banner of Emancipation among the slaves." To his surprise, however, Lincoln failed to jump at the suggestion. Negro enlistments in the navy were accepted without question, in view of practice long established, but the president wanted to think about this army thing. What Douglass did not know at the time, of course, the extent to which Lincoln's efforts to hold the border states in line and his behind-the-scenes struggles with other Republicans in the government accounted for his reluctance to change the Negro's status."

"If things are allowed to go on as they are, it is certain that slavery is to be abolished. By the time the north shall have attained the power, the black race will be in a large majority, and then we will have black governors, black legislatures, black juries, black everything. Is it to be supposed that the white race will stand for that? It is not a supposable case. War will break out everywhere like hidden fire from the earth. We will be overpowered and our men will be compelled to wander like vagabonds all over the earth, and as for our women, the horrors of their state we cannot contemplate in imagination. We will be completely exterminated, and the land will be left in the possession of the blacks, and then it will go back to a wilderness and become another Africa or Saint Domingo. Join the north and what will become of you? They will hate you and your institutions as much as they do now, and treat you accordingly. Suppose they elevated Charles Sumner to the presidency? Suppose they elevated Fred Douglass, your escaped slave, to the presidency? What would be your position in such an event? I say give me pestilence and famine sooner than that."

"Frederick Douglass would rejoice, for he fought not only slavery but the oppression of women."

"(What direction do you see the movement in the U.S. taking at this time?) I think it has become less domestic and more international. Marcus Garvey tried to articulate, after all, quite a long time ago, and even Frederick Douglass, that the situation of the black American slave was tied to the situation of the slaves all over the world."

"As I see it today, all the struggles are one. The armaments we and the battle arenas for black women and white women are different. The struggle, I hope, is to make this country a better place for everybody. And one has to start at home, like charity. You know, make it better for your own self and, once you do that, automatically life is better for everyone-in a very oblique way. But once one's own struggle is enjoined-and maybe overcome-then one can get about the business of struggling other people's struggles. Frederick Douglass says, "He who is struck must himself cry out.'"

"I would invite Frederick Douglass for his grandiose grandeur and magnificent generosity."

"But the broader reason why there weren't more slave rebellions is simpler: most slaves didn't want to rebel. This depressing fact is not limited to African slaves in America, but rather is a product of human nature and our ability to adapt, to be conditioned out of fear, and to serve. Frederick Douglass explained that slaves chose not to rebel out of fear of the unknown, which, he wrote, quoting Hamlet, had made slaves "rather bear those ills we had/than fly to others, that we knew not of.""

"Knowing the hardships of the laborer, Douglass became one of his pioneer champions. While fighting fiercely for the rights of his own people, he pointed the way to the organization and unity of all working people. Douglass, a Maryland-born slave, once worked as a ship's caulker, only a short distance from the site where a liberty ship bearing his name was launched. With the firm conviction that free men should have the right to defend their freedom, Douglass convinced Lincoln of the wisdom of enlisting negro troops in the Union armies. He himself helped organize the 54th Massachusetts Regiment, of Fort Wagner fame."

"I am a Republican, a black, dyed in the wool Republican, and I never intend to belong to any other party than the party of freedom and progress."

"Let the nation try justice and the problem will be solved."

"To make a contented slave it is necessary to make a thoughtless one. It is necessary to darken the moral and mental vision and, as far as possible, to annihilate the power of reason."

"Can any colored man, or any white man friendly to the freedom of all men, ever forget the night which followed the first day of January 1863, when the world was to see if Abraham Lincoln would prove to be as good as his word? I shall never forget that memorable night, when in a distant city I waited and watched at a public meeting, with three thousand others not less anxious than myself, for the word of deliverance which we have heard read today. Nor shall I ever forget the outburst of joy and thanksgiving that rent the air when the lightning brought to us the emancipation proclamation. In that happy hour we forgot all delay, and forgot all tardiness, forgot that the President had bribed the rebels to lay down their arms by a promise to withhold the bolt which would smite the slave - system with destruction; and we were thenceforward willing to allow the President all the latitude of time, phraseology, and every honorable device that statesmanship might require for the achievement of a great and beneficent measure of liberty and progress."

"Under his rule, assisted by the greatest captain of our age, and his inspiration, we saw the Confederate States, based upon the idea that our race must be slaves, and slaves forever, battered to pieces and scattered to the four winds; under his rule, and in the fullness of time, we saw Abraham Lincoln, after giving the slave - holders three months' grace in which to save their hateful slave system, penning the immortal paper, which, though special in its language, was general in its principles and effect, making slavery forever impossible in the United States. Though we waited long, we saw all this and more."

"When, therefore, it shall be asked what we have to do with the memory of Abraham Lincoln, or what Abraham Lincoln had to do with us, the answer is ready, full, and complete. Though he loved Caesar less than Rome, though the Union was more to him than our freedom or our future, under his wise and beneficent rule we saw ourselves gradually lifted from the depths of slavery to the heights of liberty and manhood; under his wise and beneficent rule, and by measures approved and vigorously pressed by him, we saw that the handwriting of ages, in the form of prejudice and proscription, was rapidly fading away from the face of our whole country; under his rule, and in due time, about as soon after all as the country could tolerate the strange spectacle, we saw our brave sons and brothers laying off the rags of bondage, and being clothed all over in the blue uniforms of the soldiers of the United States; under his rule we saw two hundred thousand of our dark and dusky people responding to the call of Abraham Lincoln, and with muskets on their shoulders, and eagles on their buttons, timing their high footsteps to liberty and union under the national flag; under his rule we saw the independence of the black republic of Haiti, the special object of slave - holding aversion and horror, fully recognized, and her minister, a colored gentleman, duly received here in the city of Washington; under his rule we saw the internal slave - trade, which so long disgraced the nation, abolished, and slavery abolished in the District of Columbia; under his rule we saw for the first time the law enforced against the foreign slave trade, and the first slave - trader hanged like any other pirate or murderer."

"Fellow citizens, ours is no new - born zeal and devotion — merely a thing of this moment. The name of Abraham Lincoln was near and dear to our hearts in the darkest and most perilous hours of the republic. We were no more ashamed of him when shrouded in clouds of darkness, of doubt, and defeat than when we saw him crowned with victory, honor, and glory. Our faith in him was often taxed and strained to the uttermost, but it never failed. When he tarried long in the mountain; when he strangely told us that we were the cause of the war; when he still more strangely told us that we were to leave the land in which we were born; when he refused to employ our arms in defense of the Union; when, after accepting our services as colored soldiers, he refused to retaliate our murder and torture as colored prisoners; when he told us he would save the Union if he could with slavery; when he revoked the Proclamation of Emancipation of General Fremont; when he refused to remove the popular commander of the Army of the Potomac, in the days of its inaction and defeat, who was more zealous in his efforts to protect slavery than to suppress rebellion; when we saw all this, and more, we were at times grieved, stunned, and greatly bewildered; but our hearts believed while they ached and bled. Nor was this, even at that time, a blind and unreasoning superstition. Despite the mist and haze that surrounded him; despite the tumult, the hurry, and confusion of the hour, we were able to take a comprehensive view of Abraham Lincoln, and to make reasonable allowance for the circumstances of his position. We saw him, measured him, and estimated him; not by stray utterances to injudicious and tedious delegations, who often tried his patience; not by isolated facts torn from their connection; not by any partial and imperfect glimpses, caught at inopportune moments; but by a broad survey, in the light of the stern logic of great events, and in view of that divinity which shapes our ends, rough hew them how we will, we came to the conclusion that the hour and the man of our redemption had somehow met in the person of Abraham Lincoln. It mattered little to us what language he might employ on special occasions; it mattered little to us, when we fully knew him, whether he was swift or slow in his movements; it was enough for us that Abraham Lincoln was at the head of a great movement, and was in living and earnest sympathy with that movement, which, in the nature of things, must go on until slavery should be utterly and forever abolished in the United States."

"Fellow citizens, in what we have said and done today, and in what we may say and do hereafter, we disclaim everything like arrogance and assumption. We claim for ourselves no superior devotion to the character, history, and memory of the illustrious name whose monument we have here dedicated today. We fully comprehend the relation of Abraham Lincoln both to ourselves and to the white people of the United States. Truth is proper and beautiful at all times and in all places, and it is never more proper and beautiful in any case than when speaking of a great public man whose example is likely to be commended for honor and imitation long after his departure to the solemn shades, the silent continents of eternity. 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, in the fullest sense of the word, 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. He was preeminently the white man’s President, entirely devoted to the welfare of white men. 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 this country. In all his education and feeling he was an American of the Americans. He came into the Presidential chair upon one principle alone, namely, opposition to the extension of slavery. His arguments in furtherance of this policy had their motive and main - spring in his patriotic devotion to the interests of his own race. To protect, defend, and perpetuate slavery in the states where it existed Abraham Lincoln was not less ready than any other President to draw the sword of the nation. He was ready to execute all the supposed guarantees of the United States Constitution in favor of the slave system anywhere inside the slave states. He was willing to pursue, recapture, and send back the fugitive slave to his master, and to suppress a slave rising for liberty, though his guilty master were already in arms against the government. The race to which we belong were not the special objects of his consideration. Knowing this, I concede to you, my white fellow - citizens, a pre - eminence in this worship at once full and supreme. First, midst, and last, you and yours were the objects of his deepest affection and his most earnest solicitude. You are the children of Abraham Lincoln. We are at best only his step - children; children by adoption, children by forces of circumstances and necessity. To you it especially belongs to sound his praises, to preserve and perpetuate his memory, to multiply his statues, to hang his pictures high upon your walls, and commend his example, for to you he was a great and glorious friend and benefactor. Instead of supplanting you at his altar, we would exhort you to build high his monuments; let them be of the most costly material, of the most cunning workmanship; let their forms be symmetrical, beautiful, and perfect, let their bases be upon solid rocks, and their summits lean against the unchanging blue, overhanging sky, and let them endure forever! But while in the abundance of your wealth, and in the fullness of your just and patriotic devotion, you do all this, we entreat you to despise not the humble offering we this day unveil to view; for while Abraham Lincoln saved for you a country, he delivered us from a bondage, according to Jefferson, one hour of which was worse than ages of the oppression your fathers rose in rebellion to oppose."