31 Quotes by David W. Blight

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.

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.

The reader as a whole reflected, as Bingham intended, New England’s long transition from seventeenth-century Calvinism to nineteenth-century evangelical, freewill doctrine, from Puritan theocracy to the Revolutionary era’s separation of church and state.

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.

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.

Well the nation may forget; it may shut its eyes to the past, but the colored people of this country are bound to keep fresh a memory of the past till justice shall be done them in the present.”39.

Douglass gave voice to the reality of social death.

He argued that the general had been sacrificed to appease the proslavery sentiment of the border states and because of Lincoln’s constitutional conservatism.

His “wickedly selfish” Americans loved to celebrate their “own heritage, and on this condition are content to see others crushed in our midst.