Journalists From Maryland

"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."

"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."

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

"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."

"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”."

"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.""

"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."

"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.""

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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!'"

"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."

"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."

"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.""

"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."

"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."

"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.""

"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 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.""

"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."

"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.""

"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."

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

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

"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)"

"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)"

"From the very beginning of the conflict, Frederick Douglass argued for black military participation. An "abolition war" awaited only the will on the part of the northern people to destroy slavery and put blacks in uniform. As agitator, recruiter, and spokesman, Douglass gave the black soldier immense significance. The service of blacks in the Union forces came to represent both public and private meanings in Douglass' wartime thought. (p. 148)"

"At the White House, Douglass met Lincoln for the first time. The president received the ex-slave cordially, and Douglass quickly felt at ease with what he called Lincoln's "honest... countenance." Lincoln listened attentively as the black spokesman raised the issues of pay, promotion, and treatment of prisoners, responding that he understood the complaint on unequal pay but considered it a "necessary concession" in order to achieve the larger aim of getting blacks into the army. Defending his policies and his pace, Lincoln declared that "popular prejudice" had prevented an earlier retaliatory proclamation, since he had feared that too many northern whites simply would not accept the killing of southern whites to avenge the deaths of blacks. Black heroism, as Douglass recalled the interview, was Lincoln's idea of the "necessary preparation of the public mind for his proclamation" about retaliation." Douglass was most impressed, though, when Lincoln assured him that once he took a position [emancipation or black enlistment], he would not retreat from it. Douglass got a political education from his meeting with Lincoln, and he came away better informed about the complexity of the president's responsibilities. Lincoln responded frankly and respectfully to the black leader's questions. "Though I was not entirely satisfied with his views," Douglass wrote of the meeting, "I was so well satisfied with the man and with the educating tendency of the conflict that I determined to go on with the recruiting." Trust in the man fostered patience with his policies. "My whole interview with the President was gratifying," Lincoln wrote to Stearns, "and did much to assure me that slavery would not survive the war and that the country would survive both slavery and the war." (p. 168-169)"

"Most important, Douglass' meeting with Lincoln had personal meaning. He had received a hearing at the highest level of power, and whatever pangs of conscience he possessed about recruiting soldiers for a discriminatory army were largely put to rest. He gained reassurance that the "double battle" strategy was still tenable. Moreover, the meeting was a personal triumph for Douglass- the former slave who grew up across Chesapeake Bay on the Eastern Shore of Maryland- as he sat in the president's office, spokesman of his people. His determination to resume recruiting, which he probably made before the meeting in Washington, could only be firmer in the afterglow of the interview with Lincoln. Douglass reveled in opportunities to tell the story of his first meeting with the president. Describing the scene in a speech at Philadelphia several months later, he left no doubt of his pride in the occasion: "I tell you I felt big there!" he assured his audience. The black leader and the government recruiting agent could be the same person again, because the citizen and the activist had been treated as one man, causing a sense of recognition that Douglass- like all black leaders- sorely needed. (p. 169)"

"To suppress free speech is a double wrong. It violates the rights of the hearer as well as those of the speaker."

"Let me give you a word of the philosophy of reform. The whole history of the progress of human liberty shows that all concessions yet made to her august claims, have been born of earnest struggle. The conflict has been exciting, agitating, all - absorbing, and for the time being, putting all other tumults to silence. It must do this or it does nothing. If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. This struggle may be a moral one; or it may be a physical one; or it may be both moral and physical; but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to, and you have found out the exact amount of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them; and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress. [...] Men might not get all they work for in this world, but they must certainly work for all they get. If we ever get free from the oppressions and wrongs heaped upon us, we must pay for their removal. We must do this by labor, by suffering, by sacrifice, and if needs be, by our lives and the lives of others."

"I assert most unhesitatingly, that the religion of the South — as I have observed it and proved it — is a mere covering for the most horrid crimes; a justifier of the most appalling barbarity; a sanctifier of the most hateful frauds; and a dark shelter, under which the darkest, foulest, grossest, and most infernal abominations fester and flourish. Were I again to be reduced to the condition of A slave, next to that calamity, I should regard the fact of being the slave of a religious slaveholder, the greatest that could befall me."

"I learned, after my mother's death, that she could read, and that she was the only one of all the slaves and colored people in Tuckahoe who enjoyed that advantage. How she acquired this knowledge, I know not, for Tuckahoe is the last place in the world where she would be apt to find facilities for learning. I can, therefore, fondly and proudly ascribe to her an earnest love of knowledge. That a "field hand" should learn to read, in any slave state, is remarkable; but the achievement of my mother, considering the place, was very extraordinary; and, in view of that fact, I am quite willing, and even happy, to attribute any love of letters I possess, and for which I have got—despite of prejudices—only too much credit, not to my admitted Anglo - Saxon paternity, but to the native genius of my sable, unprotected, and uncultivated mother—a woman, who belonged to a race whose mental endowments it is, at present, fashionable to hold in disparagement and contempt."

"I say nothing of father, for he is shrouded in a mystery I have never been able to penetrate. Slavery does away with fathers, as it does away with families. Slavery has no use for either fathers or families, and its laws do not recognize their existence in the social arrangements of the plantation."

"You cannot write the bloody laws of slavery on those restless billows. The ocean, if not the land, is free."

"The lonely billows of the Atlantic, where every breeze speaks of courage and liberty."

"What a world of inconsistency, as well as of wickedness, is suggested by the smooth and gliding phrase, AMERICAN SLAVE TRADE; and how strange and perverse is that moral sentiment which loathes, execrates, and brands as piracy and as deserving of death the carrying away into captivity men, women, and children from the African coast; but which is neither shocked nor disturbed by a similar traffic, carried on with the same motives and purposes, and characterized by even more odious peculiarities on the coast of our MODEL REPUBLIC. We execrate and hang the wretch guilty of this crime on the coast of , while we respect and applaud the guilty participators in this murderous business on enlightened shores of the Chesapeake. The inconsistency is so flagrant and glaring, that it would seem to cast a doubt on the doctrine of the innate moral sense of mankind."

"The man who prays in secret is far more likely to be sincere than he who loves to pray standing in the street, or in the great congregation."

"The gnawings of hunger conquers by degrees, till all that a man has he would give in exchange for a single crust of bread."

"Where there is seeming contentment with slavery, there is certain treachery to freedom."

"Liberty I will have, or die in the attempt to gain it."

"The State of Virginia is famous in American annals for the multitudinous array of her statesmen and heroes. She has been dignified by some the mother of statesmen. History has not been sparing in recording their names, or in blazoning their deeds. Her high position in this respect, has given her an enviable distinction among her sister States. With Virginia for his birth - place, even a man of ordinary parts, on account of the general partiality for her sons, easily rises to eminent stations. Men, not great enough to attract special attention in their native States, have, like a certain distinguished citizen in the State of New York, sighed and repined that they were not born in Virginia."

"You profess to believe "that, of one blood, God made all nations of men to dwell on the face of all the earth," and hath commanded all men, everywhere to love one another; yet you notoriously hate, (and glory in your hatred), all men whose skins are not colored like your own. You declare, before the world, and are understood by the world to declare, that you "hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal; and are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; and that, among these are, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness;" and yet, you hold securely, in a bondage which, according to your own Thomas Jefferson, "is worse than ages of that which your fathers rose in rebellion to oppose," a seventh part of the inhabitants of your country."

"What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciations of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade, and solemnity, are, to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy — a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices, more shocking and bloody, than are the people of these United States, at this very hour."

"At a time like this, scorching irony, not convincing argument, is needed. O! had I the ability, and could reach the nation's ear, I would, to - day, pour out a fiery stream of biting ridicule, blasting reproach, withering sarcasm, and stern rebuke. For it is not light that is needed, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake. The feeling of the nation must be quickened; the conscience of the nation must be roused; the propriety of the nation must be startled; the hypocrisy of the nation must be exposed; and its crimes against God and man must be proclaimed and denounced."

"I shall see, this day, and its popular characteristics, from the slave's point of view. Standing, there, identified with the American bondman, making his wrongs mine, I do not hesitate to declare, with all my soul, that the character and conduct of this nation never looked blacker to me than on this 4th of July! Whether we turn to the declarations of the past, or to the professions of the present, the conduct of the nation seems equally hideous and revolting. America is false to the past, false to the present, and solemnly binds herself to be false to the future. Standing with God and the crushed and bleeding slave on this occasion, I will, in the name of humanity which is outraged, in the name of liberty which is fettered, in the name of the constitution and the Bible, which are disregarded and trampled upon, dare to call in question and to denounce, with all the emphasis I can command, everything that serves to perpetuate slavery — the great sin and shame of America! "I will not equivocate; I will not excuse;" I will use the severest language I can command; and yet not one word shall escape me that any man, whose judgement is not blinded by prejudice, or who is not at heart a slaveholder, shall not confess to be right and just."

"This Fourth of July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn. To drag a man in fetters into the grand illuminated temple of liberty, and call upon him to join you in joyous anthems, were inhuman mockery and sacrilegious irony."

"The 4th of July is the first great fact in your nation's history — the very ring - bolt in the chain of your yet undeveloped destiny. Pride and patriotism, not less than gratitude, prompt you to celebrate and to hold it in perpetual remembrance. I have said that the Declaration of Independence is the ring - bolt to the chain of your nation's destiny; so, indeed, I regard it. The principles contained in that instrument are saving principles. Stand by those principles, be true to them on all occasions, in all places, against all foes, and at whatever cost."

"The days of Black Power are numbered. Its course, indeed is onward. But with the swiftness of an arrow, it rushes to the tomb. While crushing its millions, it is also crushing itself. The sword of Retribution, suspended by a single hair, hangs over it. That sword must fall. Liberty must triumph."