Frederick Douglass Quotes
In a composite nation like ours, as before the law, there should be no rich, no poor, no high, no low, no white, no black, but common country, common citizenship, equal rights and a common destiny.
Douglass, Frederick. "Our Composite Nationality." The Frederick Douglass Papers: Series One--Speeches, Debates, and Interviews, edited by John W. Blassingame, vol. 4, Yale University Press, 1991, p. 240.
Douglas was appealing to the racist crowd in Galesburg by showing that Lincoln actually believed in Racial Equality. This technique was used be racist politicians—since then and in a few places of the South even into the 21st century.
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.
