American Immortals
Frederick Douglass was the most searing critic of American slavery. After freeing himself from a Maryland plantation — an event he movingly recounted in his — Douglass committed himself to freeing his people from bondage. He became one of the nineteenth century’s most famous orators and most photographed men, a symbol of liberty on both sides of the Atlantic. His speeches held up a mirror to the Republic’s moral hypocrisy. How could a nation founded on the promise of liberty and equality, Douglass asked American audiences, allow millions to languish under abject tyranny?
Unlike other abolitionists, though, Douglass never lost his faith in the American Founding. Indeed, he believed that the fundamental premises of our republic were the very principles that could save her from this moral crisis. Douglass shared that belief with the other great voice of antislavery, Abraham Lincoln. In their new collection , Lucas E. Morel and Jonathan W. White gather together for the first time in a single volume all of Douglass’s reflections, public and private, on Lincoln — including previously unpublished letters that may reshape how historians think about the relationship between the two men. Morel and White rightly contend that these writings “present a civic education of the highest order,” an important teaching about the American Republic itself.
Aside from the inherent spectacle of one great man reflecting on another, understanding the historical context revealed by the documents Morel and White collected can help explain why Douglass’s assessments matter so much. While most Americans today justly revere Lincoln as the Great Emancipator, the man who actually won the Civil War and ended American slavery was not always popular among his abolitionist contemporaries. Before his assassination, Radical Republicans in Congress, for example, constantly hamstrung his war effort to push him toward more extreme antislavery policies. Activists in the press and on the campaign trail lampooned him as a waffler and a squish. Other antislavery voices were more measured but nonetheless questioned the Rail-Splitter’s decisions and motives.
Read more in Civitas Outlook.
