Frederick Douglass Quotes
Everybody has asked the question, and they learned to ask it early of the abolitionists, 'What shall we do with the Negro?' I have had but one answer from the beginning. Do nothing with us! Your doing with us has already played the mischief with us.
Douglass, Frederick. "What the Black Man Wants." The Equality of All Men Before the Law Claimed and Defended, Rand & Avery, 1865, p. 38.
He was the Russian Reformer who ended serfdom and gave land to the peasants and then was assassinated. Ironically, both Alexander II and Lincoln were assassinated—because of their reform efforts—Lincoln for going too far; the Czar for not going far enough. See the Nickname that was given to the Czar: {622809}.
The first sentence is inscribed on the Jefferson Memorial in Washington DC. The last two sentences are rarely quoted.
Lincoln, just before the Civil War, quoted Jefferson that if slavery were not ended in America the results would be disastrous. But Lincoln at the time probably did not imagine how right Jefferson was, and Jefferson himself probably 1 how terrible the Civil War would be.
As the slavery debate in America became more bitter abolitionists were physically attacked and sometimes killed for their views, 1840 & 1844.
The organization was one of the first organized to agitate against the slave trade. He had organized many of the intellectual leaders of France to join in this effort.
The issue of slavery which had been suppressed in Congress for the first decades of the nation broke out when Missouri statehood was considered. By previous agreement, slavery was not even discussed in Congress but the time period elapsed. Tallmadge not only proposed that no more slaves could come into Missouri {613176} but most shocking to the Southerners was that every person born in the new state would be free at the age of 25. In a generation, there would be no more slavery in Missouri and there would be no economic compensation for slave owners at all. The House of Representatives accepted the amendment, but it failed in the Senate. At that time, Senators were not elected by voters but were appointed by the state legislators and the Southern slave states had a disproportionate share of the senate from a population point of view. But what this quotation shows clearly that a majority of the country in 1819 were opposed to slavery and were willing to end it without compensation.
The letter was written in the supposed style of a Black after Emancipation and includes most of the ugly false stereotypes of the worst of the racists of the present and the slaveowners of past times. Williams stated that he was not a racist and was trying to make a point about freedom required risk and responsibility. However, the effort was interpreted by many people, Black and white, to be insulting and a put down of African Americans. At the same time, although most of the Tea Party members were not racists, most of the racists in America were supporters of the Tea Party. Those people interpreted the quotation as "telling it like it is" about Blacks who do not want the responsiblities and risks of freedom and are not yet developed sufficiently to be equal citizens in a democracy.
Supervisors of black soldiers reminded them that
This is an incredibly important political and historical quotation. One of the leading white ministers of Boston, advises all Blacks (and implicitly whites as well) not to cooperate with the Boston Police. Under the Dred Scott and other legal doctrines, the law enforcement mechanism of even Northern, anti Slavery states, would arrest and hold those suspected of being runaway slaves. This included many ex slaves but also many freemen who were then enslaved by the system. Law enforcement was no better than the slave owners and the slave catchers as far as the welfare of Blacks was concerned. The result has been a hostility to and an antipathy to law enforcement in the North who – even in the view of many whites like Parker were not worthy of trust and cooperation. After slavery, law enforcement supported and enforced the Jim Crow discriminatory laws. The resentment and distrust remains.
This quotation is very interesting historically. Despite the fact that Washington DC was a thoroughly racially segregated city, and the Southern racists controlled much of Congress, Blacks as well as whites were welcome in the Congressional galleries, and they attended many debates. Slavery and equality were not just debated in the 1850s but the issue was in constant friction from the earliest Congress.
See {625675}, {625686}, {625684}, {625682}, {625676} for additional quotations arguing for Black emigration.
Earlier {629154} Smith was much more sympathetic with slavery. His views evolved as you can see by the comparison. He stated that he had a vision and made two prophesies {629156} that indeed came true. The last idea of slave buyouts seemed plausible to many abolitionists initially when they were not really knowledgeable about the economics of slavery. However, once they studied it, it became clear what it would not work even if the Southerners would then be willing to accept Blacks as free laborers which most were not, The two biggest problems were: 1) the international slave trade had been abolished. The only source of new slaves for growth was breeding them. Therefore, having slaves had TWO economic values—the work that they could do and the reproduction of themselves. A critical mass of owned slaves produced an income forever. And for Southerners who were culturally adverse to work (see {629169}), just having cash for their slaves was not enough. They were the servants, the farm labor, and their recreational sex. 2) and most important, the value or the slaves of the South was greater than the economic value of all the land, all the farms, all the buildings, all the factories, and all the inventory of the stores of the South all put together. The Southern slaves were the majority of the wealth of the south. There was no asset that could ever produce enough value to pay for the slaves—even over time. It would be like trying to buy all the shares of all the corporations in America today. There is no asset big enough to raise the money to ever finance it. The idea may have worked in Colonial America or even prior to the outlaw of the international slave trade, but by the time anyone took the idea seriously it was economically no longer feasible.
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.
