Frederick Douglass Quotes
Did John Brown fail? John Brown began the war that ended American slavery and made this a free Republic.
Douglass, Frederick. John Brown: An Address by Frederick Douglass, at the Fourteenth Anniversary of Storer College, Harper's Ferry, West Virginia, May 30, 1881. Morning Star Job Printing House, 1881, p. 24.
Although escaped slaves could not fight for the North, they could be very useful on road building and other military engineering projects needing labor. Every time a slave escaped, it diminished the military engineering labor of the Confederates by one but added to that of the Union. Pinkerton and others however engaged many escaped slaves who volunteered for an incredibly dangerous mission. They returned back to the Southern lines into the slave work gangs, and organized slave escapes of groups of Blacks. In addition, many of them, by observing and overhearing the Confederate soldiers gained information regarding supply and troop levels and movements, and this they brought back to the Union officers. Those that were caught were executed as spies. Escaped slaves were espionage and covert operations agents before they were allowed to be soldiers.
There indeed were although the Southerners tended to exaggerate the numbers. However, the more slavery was debated, the more many of the abolitionists came to believe that insurrection and slave rebellion was not only morally justified but was the only recourse that was left by the racist intransigence of the Southern slave holders and politicians.
This prophecy written in the later years of Jefferson’s life turned out to be all too true. St. Domingo was an Island in the Caribbean where slavery produced a bloody war. The American Civil War would be far worse.
Marx followed the American Civil War very closely. The freeing of the slaves caused an immediate social, moral and economic revolution, the results of which we live with today.
“Captain Brown” referred to the radical abolitionist, John Brown, 1800-1859, who was then about to be executed for his violent abolitionist activities in attacking the military arsenal at Harper’s Ferry and planning to arm slaves for a slave revolt. His view of revenge was to eliminate slavery. Note that he was a moral sympathizer of Brown. See {633849}.
She was one of the early abolitionists. Despite the Southern attempted repression of information of slave resistance, some of the facts emerged and were well known in the North. The South tried to suppress these incidents lest other slaves get ideas from it. Also the Southerners often maintained that Africa was so primitive and underdeveloped, that the slaves were better off in America; these actions of rebellion belied this notion.
Frederick Douglass was an American social reformer, abolitionist, orator, writer, and statesman. After escaping from slavery in Maryland, he became a national leader of the abolitionist movement in Massachusetts and New York, becoming famous for his oratory and incisive antislavery writings. Accordingly, he was described by abolitionists in his time as a living counterexample to slaveholders' arguments that slaves lacked the intellectual capacity to function as independent American citizens. Likewise, Northerners at the time found it hard to believe that such a great orator had once been a slave.
