10/6/2023 0 Comments David blight fredrick douglass![]() Joy and sorrow speak alike in all nations, and they above all the confusion of tongues proclaim the brotherhood of man.”įrom December 1866: Frederick Douglass’s ‘Reconstruction’ĭouglass, like many other former abolitionists, watched with high hopes as Radical Reconstruction gained traction in Washington, D.C., placing the ex–Confederate states under military rule and establishing civil and political rights for the formerly enslaved. This nation would hold true to universal values and to the recognition that “a smile or a tear has no nationality. What the war-weary nation needed, he felt, was a powerful tribute to a cosmopolitan America-not just a repudiation of a divided and oppressive past but a commitment to a future union forged in emancipation and the Civil War. He kept it in his oratorical repertoire at least through 1870. The Thirteenth Amendment (ending slavery) had been ratified, Congress had approved the Fourteenth Amendment (introducing birthright citizenship and the equal-protection clause), and Douglass was anticipating the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment (granting black men the right to vote) when he began delivering a speech titled “Our Composite Nationality” in 1869. ![]() It is a vision worth revisiting at a time when the country seems once again to be a house divided over ethnicity and race, and over how to interpret our foundational creeds. I n the late 1860s, Frederick Douglass, the fugitive slave turned prose poet of American democracy, toured the country spreading his most sanguine vision of a pluralist future of human equality in the recently re-United States. Now there’s a way to directly enable these efforts. Support the Independent by making a direct contribution or with a subscription to Indy+.“We are a country of all extremes, ends and opposites the most conspicuous example of composite nationality in the world … In races we range all the way from black to white, with intermediate shades which, as in the apocalyptic vision, no man can name or number.” The extraordinary life Frederick Douglass lived, from its origin in bondage to its culmination as one of the most recognizable Americans of his era, was rooted in the soil of a progressive humanity, sustained by the ideals of freedom, dignity, and the rule of law.Įvery day, the staff of the Santa Barbara Independent works hard to sort out truth from rumor and keep you informed of what’s happening across the entire Santa Barbara community. Douglass’s fierce intelligence and moral courage were only one side of the man for nearly half a century he shouldered burdens as the representative man of his race, and as the patriarch of a large extended family that was a source of joy, consternation, and heartbreak.Īs a biographer and scholar, Blight is equal to the complexity and stature of his subject. ![]() Writing to a friend in 1874 Douglass described the moral atmosphere in Washington, D.C., as “rotten, full of avarice, duplicity, corruption, fawning and trickery of all kinds.” Blight’s work sharpens our understanding of Douglass’s life and influence on the nation, not only as a fiery abolitionist, but as a staunch defender of Reconstruction. Blight’s Pulitzer Prize–winning biography, Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom, will recognize the similarities and hear the echoes of the past in the present. Prophet of Freedom by Frederick Douglass | Credit: CourtesyĪny reader of Yale historian David W.
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