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Douglbad began to be deeply dissatisfied with Lincoln in 1860, calling him an "excellent slave dog" because of Honest Abe's support for the Fugitive Slave Act which required the authorities of non-slave states to hand over fugues to their owners – or rather, most often to bounty hunters. Once caught, the fugitives would come back from where they came or sell often "down river", where a short, hard life of overwork and savage brutality in the coastal cane fields or elsewhere typically awaited them.
After the election, Douglbad and Lincoln engaged in a public and private political election not two until the second election of the president
. The inaugural address of Lincoln in 1861 sparked a fierce criticism of Douglbad, who reiterated the accusation of "slave dog". He was disgusted that the President had spent several paragraphs of this speech defending the practice of returning slaves, even repeating the phrase "must be delivered" from the Constitution with respect to the human property that the South has enshrined as their right to be part of the union in the first place
According to Douglbad, the effect of Lincoln who was trying to hang on to border slavery states to save the Union by returning fugues was tantamount to kill them. Some owners have murdered returning fugitives immediately. Others tortured them and worked them to a quick death.
Lincoln was, said Douglbad with this slave label, as different as the hunting dogs sent to sniff and pinch a runaway until the captain came to fetch him. Things strong enough to characterize the guy who would become known as the great emancipator.
But Douglbad wanted action in 1861. It was the moment one of those rare crises that a politician much later would say should never be wasted. This nascent rebellion should not be peacefully appeased, Douglbad said. For him and many other abolitionists of the time, it was time to stop waiting. But the delay was exactly what Lincoln was proposing from the first day of his term.
As James Oakes writes in The Radical and the Republican: Frederick Douglbad, Abraham Lincoln and the Triumph of Anti-Legal Policy (2007). Douglbad wanted:
His inaugural response was far from Douglbad's only criticism. But over time, as Paul Kendrick and Stephen Kendrick Douglbad and Lincoln tell: how a revolutionary black leader and a reluctant liberator struggled to end slavery and save the Union (2007), the vessel born in Maryland's caulking bondage encountered the Illinois-born rail splitter and their collision and subsequent collusion had a huge impact on the course of the war, on slavery and, although Lincoln was dead at that time, on the amendments after the civil war. Both men were improbable and uncomfortable partners, but without this partnership, the immediate post-war landscape would probably have been very different.
Shortly after the war and until his death 30 years later, Douglbad praised Lincoln. For example, on April 14, 1876, in a commemoration speech delivered the day before the 11th anniversary of the president's badbadination, Douglbad says:
Nearly a decade before the two men begin their shock of Ideas and Tactical Synthesis, Douglbad An Independence Day Speech (July 5) in Rochester, New York, which tells the dark truth of the time in which he was born and clearly shows where all this anger in the early years of the Lincoln presidency comes from. As historian Eric Foner wrote in 2004:
Here are excerpts from Douglbad's speech in Rochester, where he founded the abolitionist newspaper The North Star . By the time the speech was given the Fugitive Slave Act allowed human owners to hunt down or send their agents and bounty hunters in any US state or territory, to capture any slave (or black person considered slave) and ship them back from where they had escaped or from even less pleasant place.
[To make these excerpts more readable, I have added numerous paragraph breaks that do not appear at the linked site.]
Citizens, forgive me, let me ask why am I called to speak here today? What do I, or those I represent, have to do with your national independence? Are the great principles of political freedom and natural justice, embodied in this declaration of independence, extended to us? and am I therefore called to bring our humble offering to the national altar, and to confess the benefits and to express the devout gratitude for the blessings of your independence?
To God, both for you and for us, that an affirmative answer could be faithfully referred to these questions! Then my task would be light and my burden easy and delicious. For who is it so cold that the sympathy of a nation can not warm it up? Who is so stubborn and dead to the claims of gratitude that fortunately would not recognize such invaluable advantages? Who was so selfish and selfish that it would not give his voice to inflate the hallelujah of a nation's jubilee, when the chains of servitude had been torn from its limbs? I am not that man. In a case like this, the mute could speak eloquently and "the lame man leaps like a deer".
But such is not the state of affairs. I say it with a sad feeling of the disparity between us. I'm not included in the pale of this glorious birthday! Your high independence only reveals the immeasurable distance between us. The blessings you enjoy today are not shared in common. The rich legacy of justice, freedom, prosperity, and independence left by your fathers is shared by you, not me. The sunlight that brought you light and healing brought me rays and death.
This 4th of July is yours, not mine. You can rejoice, I have to cry. Coaching a man in chains in the great illuminated temple of freedom, and inviting him to join you in merry hymns, was an inhuman mockery and sacrilegious irony. Do you mean, citizens, make fun of me by asking me to talk today? If so, there is a parallel to your conduct. And let me warn you that it is dangerous to copy the example of a nation whose crimes, rising to heaven, were overthrown by the breath of the Almighty, burying this nation irrevocably ruined! I can today take the plaintive complaint of a peeled and unhappy people.
"We sat near the rivers of Babylon. Yes! We cried when we remembered Zion. We hung our harps on the willows in the middle of them. Because there, those who took us captive, asked us for a song; and those who have lost us have asked us to rejoice, saying: Sing us one of the songs of Zion. How can we sing the song of the Lord in a foreign land? If I forget, O Jerusalem, that my right hand forgets its cunning. If I do not remember you, my tongue is attached to the roof of my mouth. "
THE THOUSAND WAR OF MILLIONS
Citizen citizens, over your tumultuous national joy, I hear the lamentable lament of millions! Of which the chains, heavy and cruel yesterday, are, today. now, made more intolerable by the cries of jubilee that reach them.If I forget, if I do not faithfully remember those who are bleeding sorry children today, "that my right hand will be safe. attach them to the roof of my mouth! "To forget them, to lightly cross their wrongs and to reject the popular theme would be a scandalous and shocking betrayal, and would make me a reproach before God and before the world.Is American slavery. will see this day and its popular characteristics from the perspective of the slave.Still there identified with the American servant, doing his wrongs mine.I do not hesitate to declare with all my soul that the character and the conduct of this nation never seemed more noi That July 4th!
Whether one turns to the statements of the past or to the professions of the present, the conduct of the nation seems as hideous and revolting. America is false in the past, false in the present, and solemnly binds itself to be false in the future. Standing with God and the slave crushed and bleeding on this occasion, I will do it, in the name of indignant humanity, in the name of the freedom that is chained, in the name of the Constitution and the Bible that are neglected and trampled, dare to question and denounce, with all the emphasis that I can command, all that serves to perpetuate slavery, the great sin and shame of America! "I will not equivocate, I will not excuse"; I will use the most severe language that I can order. and yet no word will escape me so that no man, whose judgment is blinded by prejudices, confesses to being right and just […]
For the moment, it is enough to to affirm the equal virility of the black race. Is not it as amazing as, while we were plowing, planting and reaping, using all kinds of mechanical tools, erecting houses, building bridges, building ships, working in brbad metals? , copper, silver and gold; that while we read, write, and cipher, we act as clerks, merchants, and secretaries, having among us physicians, ministers, poets, authors, editors, speakers, and professors; and that, while we are engaged in all kinds of businesses common to other men, dig gold in California, capture the whale in the Pacific, feed the sheep and cattle on the hill , live, move, act, think, plan, live with your family as husbands, wives and children, and most importantly, by confessing and worshiping the God of the Christian, and hoping for life and immortality beyond from the grave, we are called to prove that we are men! […]
THE COUP, THE DOGS AND THE AUCTION BLOCK
What, I claim that it is unfair to make men brutes, to rob them of their freedom, to work them without pay, to ignore them? their relationships with their peers, beat them with sticks, flay their flesh with the bad, load their members with irons, hunt them with dogs, sell them at auction, break their families, to knock out their teeth, to burn their flesh, to starve them into obedience and submission to their masters? Do I have to argue that a system marked with blood and stained with pollution is fake? No! I'm not going to. I have a better job for my time and strength than such arguments would imply. […]
What, for the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all the other days of the year, the gross injustice and the cruelty of which he is the constant victim. For him, your celebration is an imposture; your vaunted liberty, an impious license; your national grandeur, swelling vanity; your rejoicing sounds are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants, impudence on embers; your cries of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and your hymns, your sermons and your thanksgiving, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are for him only a chimera, a deception, a deception, an impiety and a hypocrisy, a thin veil to cover crimes that would dishonor a nation of savages. There is not a nation of savages. There is not a nation on earth guilty of more shocking and bloody practices than the people of the United States at this very hour.
Go where you can, search where you want, go through all the monarchies and all the despotisms of the world. Old World, travel through South America, look for all the abuses, and when you find the last one, put your facts next to the daily practices of this nation, and you will say with me that for barbarism revolt and shameless hypocrisy, America reigns unchallenged. […]
Here is the practical operation of this internal trafficking, the American slave trade, supported by American politics and American religion. Here you will see men and women raised as pigs for the market. You know what is a pig? I'm going to show you a man-drover. They live in all our southern states. They roam the country and tread the roads of the nation with human flocks. You will see one of these merchants of human flesh, armed with pistols, bads and Bowie knives, driving a company of about a hundred men, women and children, from the Potomac to the marketplace. slaves in New Orleans. people must be sold separately, or in batches, to suit the buyers. They are the food for the cotton field and the deadly sugar mill. Mark the sadness of the procession as it moves slowly, and the inhuman wretch who leads them. Listen to his wild screams and bloody oaths, as he hurry on his frightened captives! There, see the old man with locks lightened and gray. Take a look, please, about this young mother whose shoulders are naked under the hot sun, her brackish tears falling on the forehead of the baby in her arms
See also this girl Thirteen years crying, Yes! crying, as she thinks of the mother from whom she was torn! The driving moves slowly. Heat and sorrow have almost consumed their strength; suddenly you hear a quick snap, like the discharge of a rifle; the strings collide, and the string clashes at the same time; your ears are greeted with a cry that seems to have torn the center of your soul. The crack you heard was the sound of the bad; the cry you heard was from the woman you saw with the baby. His speed had wavered under the weight of his child and his chains! this notch on his shoulder tells him to go from the front.
Follow this road to New Orleans. Attend the auction; see the men examined as horses; see the forms of women exposed brutally and brutally to the shocking look of American slave buyers. See this disc sold and separated forever; and never forget the deep, sad sobs that burst forth from this scattered multitude. Tell me, citizens, where, under the sun, you can witness a more diabolical and shocking show. Yet it is only at a glance at the American trade, as it currently exists in the US ruling party. […]
GARDE-BODY FOR THE TYRANTS OF VIRGINIA AND CAROLINE
Americans! your republican policy, no less than your republican religion, is manifestly incoherent. You boast of your love of freedom, of your higher civilization and of your pure Christianity, while all the political power of the nation (incarnated in the two great political parties) is solemnly promised to support and perpetuate the life of the people. enslavement of three million of your compatriots. You throw your anathemas on the crowned tyrants of Russia and Austria and you boast of your democratic institutions, while you agree to be the only tools and bodyguards of the tyrants of Virginia and Carolina.
You invite to your fugitive banks of oppression from abroad, honor them with banquets, greet them with ovations, applaud them, drink them, salute them, protect them them, and pour them your money like water; but the fugitives of oppression in your country are advertising you, hunt, arrest, shoot and kill. You boast of your refinement and universal education; but you maintain a system as barbarous and dreadful as ever that stains the character of a nation – a system begun in avarice, born in pride and perpetuated in cruelty.
You shed tears on fallen Hungary, and make the sad story deceive the theme of your poets, your statesmen and your speakers, until your valiant sons are ready to fly to defend their cause against the oppressor; but, with regard to the ten thousand wrongs of the American slave, you would impose the most rigorous silence and salute it as an enemy of the nation who would dare to make these wrongs the subject of public discourse! You are all on fire at the mention of freedom for France or for Ireland; but are as cold as an iceberg at the thought of freedom for the slaves of America.
You speak eloquently about the dignity of work; however, you support a system that in its very essence throws a stigma on work. You can wear your bad to the British artillery storm to get rid of a three penny tax on tea; and yet pull the last hard-earned farthing from the hold of black workers of your country. You claim to believe "that, from one blood, God made all nations inhabit men on the face of all the earth," and commanded all men everywhere to love one another. others; Yet you hate notoriously (and glorify in your hatred) all men whose skins are not colored like yours. You declare before the world and you are understood by the world to declare that you "hold these truths to be obvious, that all men are created equal; and are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights; and among these, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; and yet, you hold fast, in a bondage which, according to your own Thomas Jefferson, "is worse than the ages of what your fathers stood up in rebellion to oppose," a seventh part of the inhabitants of your country .
SLAVERY BRANDS YOUR HUMANITY A BASIC PRETENSE
Citizens, I will not further expand your national inconsistencies. The existence of slavery in this country marks your republicanism as a sham, your humanity as a low pretense, and your Christianity as a lie. It destroys your moral power abroad: it corrupts your politicians at home. It undermines the foundations of religion; it makes your name a whistle and a word of farewell to a mocking earth. It's the antagonistic force in your government, the only thing that seriously disturbs and endangers your Union. it hinders your progress; it's the enemy of improvement; the deadly enemy of education; it promotes pride; it breeds insolence; he favors vice; it shelters the crime; it's a curse to the earth that supports it; and yet you attach it as if it was the anchor of all your hopes.
Oh! be warned! be warned! a horrible reptile winds up in the bosom of your nation; the venomous creature feeds the tender bads of your young republic; for the sake of God, tear yourself away, and cast from you the hideous monster, and let the weight of twenty millions crush and destroy it forever! […]
Let me say, in conclusion, despite the dark image that I present today, of the state of the nation, I do not despair of this country. There are forces in operation that must inevitably lead to the fall of slavery. "The Lord's arm is not shortened", and the condemnation of slavery is certain. So I leave where I started, with hope. While drawing encouragement from the "Declaration of Independence", the great principles it contains and the genius of American institutions, my mind is also encouraged by the obvious trends of the time.
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