Frederick Douglass
& the Movement for Liberation
“Thus we see the fate of
millions unborn hanging on the
tongue of one man, and heaven
was silent in that awful
moment.”
Thomas Jefferson
His slavery here relieves him from a far
more cruel slavery in Africa, from idolatry
and cannibalism, and every brutal vice and
crime that can disgrace humanity; it
christianizes, protects, supports and
civilizes him; it governs him far better than
free laborers at the North are governed.
There, wife-murder has become a mere holiday pastime….
Negroes never kill their wives…. Our negroes are not only
better off as to physical comfort than free laborers, but their
moral condition is better. The negro slaves of the South are the
happiest, and, in some sense, the freest people in the world….
The master labors for the slave, they exchange industrial value.
But the capitalist, living on his income, gives nothing to his
subjects. He lives by mere exploitations. George Fitzhugh, 1850
“Slavery is a form, and the very
best form, of socialism.”
George Fitzhugh, Sociology for the South, or, The
Failure of Free Society, 1854
“Every Fourth of July, our Declaration of Independence is
produced, with a sublime indignation, to set forth the tyranny
of the mother country, and to challenge the admiration of the
world. But what a pitiful detail of grievances does this
document present, in comparison with the wrongs which our
slaves endure! …. In view of it, I am ashamed of my country.
I am sick of our unmeaning declamation in praise of liberty
and equality; of our hypocritical cant about the
unalienable rights of man.”
William Lloyd Garrison, July 4, 1829
“This Fourth of July is yours, not
mine. You may rejoice, I must
mourn…. Do you mean, citizens,
to mock me, by asking me to
speak today?” July 5, 1852
“What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer;
a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the
year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the
constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your
boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness,
swelling vanity; your sound of rejoicing is empty and
heartless; your denunciation of tyrants brass-fronted
impudence; your shout of liberty and equality, hollow
mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and
thanks-givings, with all your religious parade and solemnity,
are to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and
hypocrisy -- a thin veil to cover up crimes which would
disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the
earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are
the people of the United States, at this very hour.”
“I hold that this cause is not altogether
and exclusively a woman’s cause. It is
the cause of human brotherhood as well
as the cause of human sisterhood, and
both must rise and fall together. Woman
cannot be elevated without elevating
man, and man cannot be depressed
without depressing woman also.”
Its “true remedy” was a “good
revolver, a steady hand and a
determination to shoot down any
man attempting to kidnap” a
fugitive slave.
“Every soldier knows he is
fighting not only for his own
liberty but [even] more for the
liberty of the whole human race
for all time to come.”
Captain Henry Howell, USA, 1864
The American people have always been anxious to
know what they shall do with us…. I have had but
one answer from the beginning. Do nothing with us!
Your doing with us has already played the mischief
with us. Do nothing with us! If the apples will not
remain on the tree of their own strength, if they are
worm-eaten at the core, if they are early ripe and
disposed to fall, let them fall! I am not for tying or
fastening them on the tree in any way, except by
nature's plan, and if they will not stay there, let them
fall. And if the Negro cannot stand on his own legs,
let him fall also. All I ask is, give him a chance to
stand on his own legs! Let him alone!
If you see him on his way to school, let him alone,
don't disturb him! If you see him going to the dinner
table at a hotel, let him go! If you see him going to the
ballot- box, let him alone, don't disturb him! If you see
him going into a work-shop, just let him alone,--your
interference is doing him a positive injury. [Don’t]
attempt to prop up the Negro. Let him fall if he cannot
stand alone! ….Let him live or die by that. If you will
only untie his hands, and give him a chance, I think he
will live. He will work as readily for himself as the
white man. Frederick Douglass, April 1865