Frederick Douglass delivered Lincoln reality check at Emancipation Memorial

[David Lockmiller]

(06-29-2020 05:40 PM)Steve Whitlock Wrote:  Roger,

Perhaps the attached articles can provide a broader perspective for the views, and relationship, of Frederick Douglas and Abraham Lincoln. There is one more article that is too big for me to add, so I'm sending it to you for addition as I find it of particular significance.

In the next to last of the attached articles, Frederick Douglass refers to his return to Baltimore, Maryland in a speech. Douglass departed as a runaway slave from a slave state and was talking about therein returning to a "free" state as a free man. He said that he was looking forward to seeing his former owner:

"[H]e will be there for he is on the right side. I made a convert of him years ago! [Laughter and applause.] He was a very good man with a high sense of honor, and I have no malice to overcome in going back among those former slave holders, for I used to think that we were all parts of one great social system, only we were at the bottom and they at the top! If the shackles were around our ankles, they were also on their necks.