Frederick Douglass had to teach himself how to read before standing up to defeat slavery.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
There is a reason it used to be a crime in the Confederate states to teach a slave to read: Literacy is power.
In every era going back to Lincoln with Frederick Douglass, presidents talk to those that were leading at that time.
Hold those things that tell your history and protect them. During slavery, who was able to read or write or keep anything? The ability to have somebody to tell your story to is so important. It says: 'I was here. I may be sold tomorrow. But you know I was here.'
I'm hopeful that at the end of my life, someone like Frederick Douglass would look at my life and say, 'Well done: you've proven yourself to be worthy of the legacy we left you.'
No trace of slavery ought to mix with the studies of the freeborn man. No study, pursued under compulsion, remains rooted in the memory.
Many slaves on this continent are oppressed, and their cries have reached the ears of the Most High. Such are the purity and certainty of his judgments, that he cannot be partial in our favor.
The abolition of slavery was driven by the King James Bible. It gave slaves a common language and purpose.
Lincoln was the spokesman of the rising capitalist class of the North, who viewed the emancipation of Negro slaves as indispensable to the development and triumph of the manufacturers and bankers of the industrial North, East and West over the slave-holder of the South.
William Lloyd Garrison was up there with Frederick Douglass being thrown off trains and going through what happened in the 1960s in 1840 in Boston.
When a good man lends himself to the advocacy of slavery, he must, at least for a time, feel himself to be any where but at home, amongst his new thoughts, doctrines, and modes of reasoning.