David W. Blight > Quotes

“But what man has made, man can un-make.”
― David W. Blight, Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom

“Our government may at some time be in the hands of a bad man. When in the hands of a good man it is all well enough. . . . We ought to have our government so shaped that even when in the hands of a bad man we shall be safe.”
― David W. Blight, Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom

“It must be admitted, truth compels me to admit, even here in the presence of the monument we have erected to his memory, Abraham Lincoln was not . . . either our man or our model. In his interests, in his associations, in his habits of thought, and in his prejudices, he was a white man.”
― David W. Blight, Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom

“Then he defined patriotism: “The best friend of a nation is he who most faithfully rebukes her for her sins—and he her worst enemy who, under the specious . . . garb of patriotism seeks to excuse, palliate or defend them.”
― David W. Blight, Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom

“We ought to have our government so shaped that even when in the hands of a bad man we shall be safe.”
― David W. Blight, Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom

“If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightning. This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, and it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.”
― David W. Blight, Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom

“There is not beneath the sky an enemy to filial affection so destructive as slavery. It had made my brothers and sisters strangers to me; it converted my mother who bore me into a myth; it shrouded my father in mystery, and left me without an intelligible beginning in the world.”
― David W. Blight, Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom

“Douglass was the only black person attending the Seneca Falls convention, and it remained a matter of lifetime pride that he was among the thirty-two men and sixty-eight women who signed the “Declaration of Sentiments.” He would always be delighted to be called “a women’s rights man.” The motto on the masthead of the North Star, “Right is of No Color and No Sex,” had been no mere sentiment. 38”
― David W. Blight, Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom

“All memory is prelude.”
― David W. Blight

“Sorrow and desolation have their songs as well as joy and peace. Slaves sing more to make themselves happy than to express their happiness”
― David W. Blight, Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom

“The greatest enthusiasts for Civil War history and memory often displace complicated consequences by endlessly focusing on the contest itself. We sometimes lift ourselves out of historical time, above the details, and render the war safe in a kind of national Passover offering as we view a photograph of the Blue and Gray veterans shaking hands across the stone walls at Gettysburg. Deeply embedded in an American mythology of mission, and serving as a mother lode of nostalgia for antimodernists and military history buffs, the Civil War remains very difficult to shuck from its shell of sentimentalism.”
― David W. Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory

“He [Lincoln] was preeminently the white man’s president,” Douglass continued in his forceful baritone, “entirely devoted to the welfare of the white man. He was ready and willing at any time during the first years of his administration to deny, postpone, and sacrifice the rights of humanity in the colored people to promote the welfare of the white people of the country.”12”
― David W. Blight, Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom

“Grafton, Massachusetts, in early 1842, while working solo, Douglass was met by mob hostility in addition to an unwelcoming clergy. So he went to a hotel and borrowed a “dinner-bell, with which in hand I passed through the principal streets,” he recalled, “ringing the bell and crying out, ‘Notice! Frederick Douglass, recently a slave, will lecture on American Slavery, on Grafton Common, this evening at 7 o’clock.”13”
― David W. Blight, Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom

“Douglass told white northern voters that 'The blood of the slave is on your garments. You have said that slavery is better than freedom. That war is better than peace. And that cruelty is better than humanity.”
― David W. Blight, Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom

“The best friend of a nation is he who most faithfully rebukes her for her sins—and he her worst enemy who, under the specious . . . garb of patriotism seeks to excuse, palliate or defend them.”
― David W. Blight, Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom

“Douglass found little encouragement in the behavior of the Northern public during the secession crisis. The bulk of white Northerners had always viewed abolitionists with suspicion or contempt, and with the threat of disunion in the air, hostility to antislavery agitators rose to new levels of violence. By December 1860, Northern workingmen, along with merchants, shipowners, and cotton manufacturers, were deeply worried about the impact of potential disunion, while bankers and industrialists squirmed as the prices of stocks declined markedly.”
― David W. Blight, Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom

“No African American speaker had ever faced this kind of captive audience, composed of all the leadership of the federal government in one place; and no such speaker would ever again until Barack Obama was inaugurated president in January 2009. Douglass, a master ironist about America,”
― David W. Blight, Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom

“Everybody in the south,” wrote Douglass, “wants the privilege of whipping somebody else.”
― David W. Blight, Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom

“I am no minister of malice,” he said, “I would not repel the repentant, but . . . may my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth if I forget the difference between the parties to that . . . bloody conflict. . . . I may say if this war is to be forgotten, I ask in the name of all things sacred what shall men remember?”
― David W. Blight, Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom

“And a Northerner who had just returned from six months in South Carolina and Georgia informed Thaddeus Stevens in February 1866 that “the spirit which actuated the traitors . . . during the late rebellion is only subdued and allows itself to be nourished by leniency.”
― David W. Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory

“I now saw, in my situation, several points of similarity with that of the oxen. They were property, so was I; they were to be broken, so was I. Covey was to break me, I was to break them; break and be broken—such is life.”
― David W. Blight, Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom

“People came in wagons and on horseback from many miles around to festival-like meetings from Ashtabula to Youngstown, Massillon to Leesburg, Salem to Munson. They had tapped into the grass roots of the free-labor militancy and Christian idealism of the Western Reserve.”
― David W. Blight, Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom

“Though I am not rich, I am not absolutely poor. . . . I am working now less for myself than for those around me. —FREDERICK DOUGLASS, MAY 6, 1868”
― David W. Blight, Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom

“Douglass keenly grasped the plight of the white poor. In their “craftiness,” wrote Douglass, urban slaveholders and shipyard owners forged an “enmity of the poor, laboring white man against the blacks,” forcing an embittered scramble for diminished wages, and rendering the white worker “as much a slave as the black slave himself.” Both were “plundered, and by the same plunderer.” The “white slave” and the “black slave” were both robbed, one by a single master, and the other by the entire slave system. The slaveholding class exploited the lethal tools of racism to convince the burgeoning immigrant poor, said Douglass, that “slavery is the only power that can prevent the laboring white man from falling to the level of the slave’s poverty and degradation.”
― David W. Blight, Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom

“By the Rivers of Babylon, there we sat down. Yea! we wept when we remembered Zion. We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof. For there, they that carried us away captive, required of us a song; and they who wasted us required of us mirth, saying, Sing us one of the songs of Zion. How can we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land? If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning. If I do not remember thee, let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth.”
― David W. Blight, Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom

“When the Baptist meetinghouse in Ithaca threw the band of lecturers out of its evening session, they “adjourned into God’s house—the open air”—and held their impromptu meeting in the courthouse square. Some in the mob eventually climbed to the tower and rang the courthouse bell to break up the meeting. Sometimes, when they”
― David W. Blight, Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom

“As he told of it over and over in public forums later, he portrayed his victory over Covey as the demonstration of the physical force necessary for male dignity and power.”
― David W. Blight, Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom

“As a final objection to Blair’s entreaty, Douglass once again addressed the pernicious effects of colonization, which he saw as proslavery theory in disguise. Douglass insisted that slavery, racism, and future black equality be discussed as a single question, to be settled on American soil within American institutions.”
― David W. Blight, Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom

“The problem of the twenty-first century is still some agonizingly enduring combination of legacies bleeding forward from slavery and color lines. Freedom in its infinite meanings remains humanity’s most universal aspiration. Douglass’s life, and especially his words, may forever serve as our watch-warnings in our unending search for the beautiful, needful thing.”
― David W. Blight, Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom

“For a former slave and then an orator and an editor whose political consciousness had awakened with the Mexican War and the Compromise of 1850, who had seen the fate of the slaves bandied about in one political crisis after another, and who had struggled to sustain hope in the face of the Dred Scott decision’s egregious denials, a resolute stand by the North against secession and the Slave Power was hardly a sure thing.”
― David W. Blight, Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom