Frederick Douglass Speaks to Us in 2023: Part 4, Unity

Review by Bill Doughty––

After finishing the recent compilation “Douglass: Speeches & Writings” by Frederick Douglass (edited by David W. Blight, Library of America, 2022), I came away with an even deeper appreciation for the great thinker and activist. Douglass, a man who bore the scars on his back of whippings as a former slave, steered away from grievance and toward justice as promised in the Constitution, Bill of Rights, and Declaration of Independence. He authored essays, commentaries, and speeches that inspired free-thinking Americans as well as people in other nations.

“Douglass: Speeches & Writings” delivered remarks in and about Great Britain. He described the horrors of “the monster slavery.” And he spoke about the need for greater diversity, voting rights, integration, and equality.

Douglass examined American ideals, leaders, and the reality of caste over the concept of “race.” One of the best essays in this compilation is "Our Composite Nationality," which deserves this extended excerpt, as Douglass speaks to national division and the healing he hopes for even as he predicts more division along lines of race and religion.

On Unity –– What is Real American Exceptionalism?

“Without undue vanity or unjust depreciation of others, we may claim to be, in many respects, the most fortunate of nations. We stand in relation to all others, as youth to age. Other nations have had their day of greatness and glory; we are yet to have our day, and that day is coming. The dawn is already upon us. It is bright and full of promise. Other nations have reached their culminating point. We are at the beginning of our ascent. They have apparently exhausted the conditions essential to their further growth and extension, while we are abundant in all the material essential to further national growth and greatness.

The resources of European statesmanship are now sorely taxed to maintain their nationalities at their ancient height of greatness and power.

American statesmanship, worthy of the name, is now taxing its energies to frame measures to meet the demands of constantly increasing expansion of power, responsibility and duty.

Without fault or merit on either side, theirs or ours, the balance is largely in our favor. Like the grand old forests, renewed and enriched from decaying trunks once full of life and beauty, but now moss-covered, oozy and crumbling, we are destined to grow and flourish while they decline and fade.

This is one view of American position and destiny. It is proper to notice that it is not the only view. Different opinions and conflicting judgments meet us here, as elsewhere.

It is thought by many, and said by some, that this Republic has already seen its best days; that the historian may now write the story of its decline and fall.

Two classes of men are just now especially afflicted with such forebodings. The first are those who are croakers by nature—the men who have a taste for funerals, and especially National funerals. They never see the bright side of anything and probably never will. Like the raven in the lines of Edgar A. Poe they have learned two words, and these are ‘never more.’ They usually begin by telling us what we never shall see. Their little speeches are about as follows: You will never see such Statesmen in the councils of the nation as Clay, Calhoun and Webster. You will never see the South morally reconstructed and our once happy people again united. You will never see the Government harmonious and successful while in the hands of different races. You will never make the negro work without a master, or make him an intelligent voter, or a good and useful citizen. The last never is generally the parent of all the other little nevers that follow.

During the late contest for the Union, the air was full of nevers, every one of which was contradicted and put to shame by the result, and I doubt not that most of those we now hear in our troubled air, will meet the same fate.

It is probably well for us that some of our gloomy prophets are limited in their powers, to prediction. Could they command the destructive bolt, as readily as they command the destructive world, it is hard to say what might happen to the country. They might fulfill their own gloomy prophesies. Perfection is an object to be aimed at by all, but it is not an attribute of any form of Government. Neutrality is the law for all. Something different, something better, or something worse may come, but so far as respects our present system and form of Government, and the altitude we occupy, we need not shrink from comparison with any nation of our times. We are today the best fed, the best clothed, the best sheltered and the best instructed people in the world …

“There was a time when even brave men might look fearfully at the destiny of the Republic. When our country was involved in a tangled network of contradictions; when vast and irreconcilable social forces fiercely disputed for ascendancy and control; when a heavy curse rested upon our very soil, defying alike the wisdom and the virtue of the people to remove it; when our professions were loudly mocked by our practice and our name was a reproach and a by word to a mocking earth; when our good ship of state, freighted with the best hopes of the oppressed of all nations, was furiously hurled against the hard and flinty rocks of derision, and every cord, bolt, beam and bend in her body quivered beneath the shock, there was some apology for doubt and despair. But that day has happily passed away. The storm has been weathered, and portents are nearly all in our favor.

There are clouds, wind, smoke and dust and noise, over head and around, and there always will be; but no genuine thunder, with destructive bolt, menaces from any quarter of the sky.

The real trouble with us was never our system or form of Government, or the principles underlying it; but the peculiar composition of our people, the relations existing between them and the compromising spirit which controlled the ruling power of the country.

We have for along time hesitated to adopt and may yet refuse to adopt, and carry out, the only principle which can solve that difficulty and give peace, strength and security to the Republic, and that is the principle of absolute equality.

We are a country of all extremes—, ends and opposites; the most conspicuous example of composite nationality in the world. Our people defy all the ethnological and logical classifications. In races we range all the way from black to white, with intermediate shades which, as in the apocalyptic vision, no man can name a number.

In regard to creeds and faiths, the condition is no better, and no worse. Differences both as to race and to religion are evidently more likely to increase than to diminish.” (12/07/1869)

Douglass’s speech, excerpted above, was delivered just four years after the end of the Civil War and 73 years to the day before the attack on Pearl Harbor and Oahu. During the Pearl Harbor attack, as every Sailor knows, African American Mess Attendant Doris “Dorie” Miller of USS West Virginia (BB-48) took charge of a machine gun and fired back at attacking planes. That was nearly 83 years ago.

The future USS Doris Miller (CVN 81) –– the first aircraft carrier named for an enlisted Sailor and the first named for an African American –– is expected to be launched 8 years from now in 2036, 90 years after Miller’s heroic action at Pearl Harbor.

Two hundred years prior to CVN 81’s expected launch, Frederick Douglass was still enslaved in Maryland but would soon escape in 1838 to the North in a sailor’s uniform.

Today, men and women of many ethnicities and backgrounds serve in the U.S. military, ready to defend the United States. Today, former President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama are among the most respected people in America. Former Senator Kamala Harris, a woman of African and Asian descent, is the Vice President of the United States, Retired General Lloyd Austin leads the Department of Defense, Hakeem Jeffries is Minority Leader in the House of Representatives, and there are two African American Justices on the Supreme Court. The advances of African Americans, especially since President Truman integrated the military and LBJ championed the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act, would be nearly unimaginable to Frederick Douglass and his contemporaries.

This series of Frederick Douglass Speaks to Us is dedicated to the celebration of African American History Month, the commitment to greater national unity, and the ongoing commitment to study the past in order to understand the present and predict the future.

In 2023 some people attempt to ban books and sanitize history, including Black History. The history of the United States is filled with promise, struggle, and progress. Book-banning autocrats who try to white-wash history have an opposite effect: They highlight the ongoing struggle for civil rights, right to a full education, and need for civility. And, ironically, they dilute the fact that the United States has made great positive strides to live up to its ideals.

Frederick Douglass Speaks to Us in 2023: Part 3, Accountability

By Bill Doughty––

The “Big Lie” of Frederick Douglass’s time on earth was slavery. Generally, white people in the South (and many in the North) not only accepted enslavement of people with dark skin, they embraced the idea, justifying it with Bible passages such as Genesis 9, 18–27, Leviticus 25:44–46, and Paul’s Epistles to the Ephesians and Colossians.

Douglass wrote about his experience as a slave, free man, and abolitionist in “Narrative of a Slave.” In “Narrative” and decades later in “My Escape from Slavery,” Douglass recounted how the sea called to him, how he was helped to learn to read in a shipyard, and how he escaped enslavement in a sailor’s uniform. We presented excerpts in our Navy Reads, “The Naval Inspiration of Frederick Douglass,” in June 2020.

The Library of America offers more of Douglass’s brilliant writing in “Douglass: Speeches & Writings” (2022, edited by David W. Blight).

Douglass confronted the Big Lie of his time with frustrated passion, a strong moral compass, and a call to arms on behalf of the truth, justice, and the ideals of the American Dream. He called for responsibility, accountability, and (as inspired by Thomas Paine) “common sense.”

His often acerbic insights reached new heights during the Civil War, during Reconstruction, and as African Americans gained more power and influence in the face of voting suppression, discrimination, and hate crimes, including lynchings. Douglass called for responsibility and accountability of the nation's leaders.

On Accountability –– For the President; For the Union; By Government of the People:

• “The President of the United States seems to possess an ever increasing passion for making himself appear silly and ridiculous, if nothing worse. Since the publication of our last number he has been unusually garrulous, characteristically foggy, remarkably illogical and untimely in his utterances, often saying that which nobody wanted to hear, and studiously leaving unsaid about the only things which the country and the times imperatively demand of him.” (09/1862)

• “Experience demonstrates that our safety as a nation depends upon our holding every officer of the nation strictly responsible to the people for the faithful performance of duty. This war has developed among other bad tendencies, a tendency to shut our eyes to the mistakes and blunders of those in power … Our rulers are the agents of the people. They are fallible men. They need instruction from the people, and it is no evidence of a factions disposition that any man presumes to condemn a public measure if in his judgment that measure is opposed to the public good.” (07/04/1862)

• “The structure of the American Constitution and Government imply the existence among the whole people of a fraternal good will, an earnest spirit of co-operation for the common good, a mutual dependence of all upon each and of each upon all. The Government is not enthroned above the people but is of, by and through the people. A despotic form of Government with its standing armies, holds its existence in large measure independently of the people and in some sort against the people, looking at them very much as a slave-holder regards his slaves, to be worked and fed when obedient, and to be flogged and otherwise punished when they disobey. When such people raise an insurrection and are put down, the path before them is plain and simple: It is submission. To obey is the fulfillment of the whole law of despotism.—But our form of Government contemplates in such a case something more than mere cold obedience. It not only requires this, but a cordial co-operation. Its whole machinery is deranged when one of its parts fail to perform its functions. The rebellion has paralyzed the Federal Government in all the rebel States, but putting down the rebels in arms does not necessarily cure this paralysis. The benumbed or dead state must be called into life, and for this the highest wisdom must be employed. The State Senate, the State Legislature, the State Courts, the State Governors, and officers generally have to be gathered in under the fold of the Constitution and Union, and brought to co-operate in good faith with the National Government. How all this shall be done, is one of the great questions of the future.” (11/1862)

• “A man sets out in life with honest principles and with high purposes inspired at the family hearthstone, and for a time steadily and scrupulously keeps them in view. But at last under the influence of some powerful temptation he is induced to violate his principles and push aside his sense of right. The water from the first moment is smooth about him, but soon he finds himself in the rapids. He has lost his footing. The broad flood, resistless as the power of fate, sweeps him onward, from bad to worse, he becomes more hardened, blind and shameless in his crimes till he is overtaken by dire calamity, and at last sinks to ruin. Precisely this has been the case with the American people. No people ever entered upon the pathway of nations, with higher and grader ideas of justice, liberty and humanity than ourselves. There are principles in the Declaration of Independence which would release every slave in the world and prepare the earth for a millennium of righteousness and peace. But alas! We have seen that declaration intended to be viewed like some colossal statue at the loftiest altitude, by the broad eye of the whole world, meanly subjected to a microscopic examination and its glorious universal truths craftily perverted into seeming falsehoods. Instead of treating it, as it was intended to be treated, as a full and comprehensive declaration of the equal and sacred rights of mankind, our contemptible negro-hating and slaveholding critics, have endeavored to turn it into absurdity by treating it as a declaration of the equality of man in his physical proportions and mental endowments. This gross and scandalous perversion of the true intents of meaning of the declaration did not long stand alone. It was soon followed by the heartless dogma, that the rights declared in that instrument did not apply to any but white men. The slave power at last succeeded, in getting this doctrine proclaimed from the bench of the Supreme Court of the United States.” (07/04/1862)

• “Do not ask me what will be the final result of the so-called negro problem. I cannot tell you. I have sometimes thought that the American people are too great to be small, too just and magnanimous to oppress the weak, too brave to yield up the right to the strong, and too grateful for public services ever to forget them or fail to reward them. I have fondly hoped that this estimate of American character would soon cease to be contradicted or put in doubt. But the favor with which this cowardly proposition of disfranchisement has been received by public men, white and black, by Republicans as well as Democrats, has shaken my faith in the nobility of the nation. I hope and trust all will come out right in the end, but the immediate future looks dark and troubled. I cannot shut my eyes to the ugly facts before me. Strange things have happened of late and are still happening. Some of these tend to dim the lustre of the American name, and chill the hopes once entertained for the cause of American liberty. He is a wiser man than I am, who can tell how low the moral sentiment of this republic may yet fall. When the moral sense of a nation begins to decline and the wheel of progress to roll backward, there is no telling how low the one will fall or hear the other may stop. The downward tendency already manifest has swept away some of the most important safeguards. The Supreme Court has surrendered. State sovereignty is restored. It has destroyed the civil rights Bill, and converted the Republican party into a party of money rather than a party of morals, a party of things rather than a party of humanity and justice. We may well ask what next? The pit of hell is said to be bottomless. Principles which we all thought to have been firmly and permanently settled by the late war, have been boldly assaulted and overthrown by the defeated party.” (01/09/1894)

Douglass recognized the corrosive aspects of fear. He called for hope and optimism in an era of negativity and hypocrisy, personified in the Big Lie of slavery. He called for integration of the military, expanded rights for women, respect for the rule of law, and diversity in society. And he demanded a government of the people, by the people, for the people.

We hope this series of Navy Reads reviews of Douglass’s “Speeches & Writings” will pique readers’ interest in the full works of the great abolitionist. Some leaders who seek power would prefer to ban books about African American history, including the Big Lie of slavery and the ongoing struggle for civil rights. The words of Frederick Douglass remain alive and relevant more than a century later. His words inspired great American presidents, including Abraham Lincoln, Barack Obama, Harry S. Truman John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson –– and Jimmy Carter.

Frederick Douglass Speaks to Us in 2023: Part 2, Equality

By Bill Doughty––

Based on his writings from the 1800s, Frederick Douglass inspired universal rights of men and women. His thoughts resonate today, especially his opinions about service in the military, immigration, voting rights, education, and equality.

Some of Douglass’s impassioned words are curated in “Speeches and Writings” (Library of America, 2022, edited by David W. Blight). Douglass illuminates history before, during, and after the American Civil War fought over the abolition of slavery.

On Equality –– In Military Service, Immigration, Suffrage, and Access to Books:

• “We are prepared to hear all sides, and to give the arguments of our opponents a candid consideration. Where an honest expression of views is allowed, Truth has nothing to fear.” (03/16/1849)

• “Why does the Government reject the Negro? Is he not a man? Can he not wield a sword, fire a gun, march and countermarch, and obey orders like any other? Is there the least reason to believe that a regiment of well-drilled Negroes would deport themselves less soldier-like on the battlefield than the raw troops gathered up generally from the towns and cities of the State of New York? We do believe that such soldiers, if allowed to take up arms in defence of the Government, and made to feel that they are hereafter to be recognized as persons having rights, would set the highest example of order and general good behavior to their fellow soldiers, and in every way add to the national power.”  (09/1861)

• “The conflict between liberty and slavery, between civilization ad barbarism, between enlightened progress and stolid indifference and inactivity is the same in all countries, in all ages, and among all peoples. Your fathers drew the sword for free and independent Government, Republican in its form, Democratic in its spirit, to be administered by officers duly elected by the free and unbought suffrages of the people; and the war of to-day on the part of the loyal north, the east and the west, is waged for the same grand and all commanding objects. We are only continuing the tremendous struggle, which your fathers, and my fathers began eighty-six years ago. Thus identifying the present with the past, I propose to consider the great present question, uppermost and all absorbing in all minds and hearts throughout the land." (07/04/1862)

• “We want a country which shall not brand the Declaration of Independence as a lie. We want a country whose fundamental institutions we can proudly defend before the highest intelligence and civilization of the age. Hitherto we have opposed European scorn of our slavery with a blush of shame as our best defense. We now want a country in which the obligations of patriotism shall not conflict with fidelity to justice and liberty. We want a country, and are fighting for a country, which shall be free from sectional political parties—free from sectional religious dominations—free from sectional benevolent associations—free from every kind and description of sect, party, and combination of a sectional character. We want a country where men may assemble from any part of it, without prejudice to their interests or peril to their persons. We are in fact, and from absolute necessity, transplanting the whole South with the higher civilization of the North. The New England schoolhouse is bound to take the place of the Southern whipping post. Not because we love the Negro, but the nation; not because we prefer to do this, because we must or give up the contest and give up the country. We want a country, and are fighting for a country, where social intercourse and commercial relations shall neither be embarrassed nor embittered by the imperious exactions of an insolent slaveholding oligarchy which required Northern merchants to sell their souls as a condition precedent to selling their goods. We want a country, and are fighting for a country, through the length and breadth of which the literature and learning of any section of it may float to its extremities unimpaired, and thus become the common property of all the people—a country in which no man shall be fined for reading a book, or imprisoned for selling a book—a country where no man may be imprisoned or flogged or sold for learning to read, or teaching a fellow mortal how to read."  (01/13/1864)

• “I know of no rights of race superior to the rights of humanity, and when there is a supposed conflict between human and national rights, it is safe to go to the side of humanity. I have great respect for the blue eyed and light haired races of America. They are a mighty people. In any struggle for the good things of this world they need have no fear. They have no need to doubt that they will get their full share.   But I reject the arrogant and scornful theory by which they would limit migratory rights, or any other essential human rights to themselves, and which would make them the owners of this great continent to the exclusion of all other races of men.   I want a home here not only for the negro, the mulatto and the Latin races; but I want the Asiatic to find a home here in the United States, and feel at home here, both for his sake and for ours. Right wrongs no man. If respect is had to majorities, the fact that only one fifth of the population of the globe is white, the other four fifths are colored, ought to have some weight and influence in disposing of this and similar questions. It would be a sad reflection upon the laws of nature and upon the idea of justice, to say nothing of a common Creator, if four fifths of mankind were deprived of the rights of migration to make room for the one fifth. If the white race may exclude all other races from this continent, it may rightfully do the same in respect to all other lands, islands, capes and continents, and thus have all the world to itself. Thus what would seem to belong to the whole, would become the property only of a part. So much for what is right, now let us see what is wise.   And here I hold that a liberal and brotherly welcome to all who are likely to come to the United states, is the only wise policy which this nation can adopt.   It has been thoughtfully observed, that every nation, owing to its peculiar character and composition, has a definite mission in the world. What that mission is, and what policy is best adapted to assist in its fulfillment, is the business of its people and its statesmen to know, and knowing, to make a noble use of said knowledge.   I need to stop here to name or describe the missions of other and more ancient nationalities. Ours seems plain and unmistakable. Our geographical position, our relation to the outside world, our fundamental principles of Government, world embracing in their scope and character, our vast resources, requiring all manner of labor to develop them, and our already existing composite population, all conspire to one grand end, and that is to make us the make perfect national illustration of the unit and dignity of the human family, that the world has ever seen.  In whatever else other nations may have been great and grand, our greatness and grandeur will be found in the faithful application of the principle of perfect civil equality to the people of all races and of all creeds, and to men of no creeds. We are not only bound to this position by our organic structure and by our revolutionary antecedents, but by the genius of our people. Gathered here, from all quarters of the globe by a common aspiration for rational liberty as against caste, divine right Governments and privileged classes, it would be unwise to be found fighting against ourselves and among ourselves; it would be madness to set up any one race above another, or one religion above another, or proscribe any on account of race color or creed. The apprehension that we shall be swamped or swallowed up by Mongolian civilization; that the Caucasian race may not be able to hold their own against that vast incoming population, does not seem entitled to much respect. Though they come as the waves come, we shall be stronger if we receive them as friends and give them a reason for loving our country and our institutions.” (12/07/1881)

• “When a great truth once gets abroad in the world, no power on earth can imprison it, or prescribe its limits, or suppress it. It is bound to go on till it becomes the thought of the world. Such a truth is woman’s right to equal liberty with man. She was born with it. It was hers before she comprehended it. It is inscribed upon all the powers and faculties of her soul, and no custom, law nor usage can ever destroy it.” (03/31/1888)

Douglass struggled to understand the inhumanity of slaveholders. His writings before the end of the Civil War show he was beyond frustrated on the unwillingness of the privileged caste to fully embrace abolition, emancipation, and full military service for African Americans. He challenged people to live up to the ideals written in the Declaration of Independence and the amended U.S. Constitution.

How would Douglass look upon continued "replacement" fears, denial of paths to citizenship for children of immigrants, and ongoing book-banning initiatives and other restrictions on education?

We can only imagine how Douglass –– a champion of liberty and equality –– would perceive attacks on voting rights, women's health choices, and the insurrection of January 6, 2021, when a Trump supporter and white supremacist marched a Confederate flag into the U.S. Capitol, achieving what even Gen. Robert E. Lee could not.

On the other hand, we must also consider how he would be amazed to see African Americans at the pinnacle of power, including a former president, current vice president, Supreme Court justices, senators and representatives. He most certainly would be pleased at efforts by the government, a government of the people, to continue to bend the arc of history toward justice.

Frederick Douglass Speaks to Us in 2023: Part 1, Liberty

By Bill Doughty––

As a former slave, Frederick Douglass stood on a righteous stage when he observed, documented, and commented on history in the mid-to-late 1800s. Nearly two centuries later, his voice is still relevant in addressing our own controversial issues.

Here are some examples of that relevance from Douglass’s “Speeches and Writings” (Library of America, 2022, edited by David W. Blight.

On Liberty –– Consider why Ukraine fights for freedom and why we support their fight:

• “The existence of this right is self evident. It is written upon all the powers and faculties of man. The desire for it  is the deepest and strongest of all the powers of the human soul. Earth, sea and air –– great nature, with her thousand voices proclaims it.” (12/08/1850)

• “I have said that the right to liberty is self evident No argument, no researches into mould records, no learned disquisition, are necessary to establish it. To assert it, is to call forth a sympathetic response from every human heart, and to send a thrill of joy and gladness round the world. Tyrants, oppressors and slaveholders are stunned by its utterance; while the oppressed and enslaved of all lands hail it as an angel of deliverance. Its assertion in Russia, in Austria, in Egypt, in fifteen states of the American Union, is a crime. In the harems of Turkey, and on the Southern plantations of Carolina, it is alike prohibited; for the guilty oppressors of every clime understand its truth, and appreciate its electric power.” (12/08/1850)

• “Americans! your republican politics, not less than your republican religion, are flagrantly inconsistent. You boast of your love of liberty, your superior civilization, and your pure Christianity, while the whole political power of the nation (as embodied in the two great political parties) is solemnly pledged to support and perpetuate the enslavement of three millions of your countrymen. You hurl your anathemas at the crowned headed tyrants of Russia and Austria, and pride yourselves on your Democratic institutions, while you yourselves consent to be the mere tools and bodyguards of the tyrants of Virginia and Carolina …You glory in your refinement and your universal education yet you maintain a system as barbarous and dreadful as ever stained the character of a nation—a system begun in avarice, supported in pride, and perpetuated in cruelty. (07/05/1852)

• “Those who have undertaken to suppress and crush out this agitation for Liberty and humanity, have been most woefully disappointed. Many who have engaged to put it down, have found themselves put down. The agitation has pursued them in all their meanderings, broken in upon their seclusion, and, at the very moment of fancied security, it has settled down upon them like a mantle of unquenchable fire.” (05/1857)

• “Man is man, the world over. This fact is affirmed and admitted in any effort to deny it. The sentiments we exhibit, whether love or hate, confidence or fear, respect or contempt, will always imply a like humanity A smile or a tear has not nationality; joy and sorrow speak alike to all nations, and they, above all the confusion of tongues, proclaim the brotherhood of man.” (12/07/1869)

• “I, therefore, leave off where I began, with hope. While drawing encouragement from the Declaration of Independence, the great principles it contains, and the genius of American Institutions, my spirit is cheered by the obvious tendencies of the age. Nations do not now stand in the same relation to each other that they did ages ago. No nation can now shut itself up from the surrounding world, and trot round in the same old path of its fathers without interference. The time was when such could be done. But a change has now come over the affairs of mankind. Walled cities and empires have become unfashionable. The arm of commerce has borne away the gates of the strong city. Intelligence is penetrating the darkest corners of the globe. Wind, steam, and lightning are its chartered agents. Oceans no longer divide, but link nations together. From Boston to London is now a holiday excursion. Space is comparatively annihilated. Thoughts expressed on one side of the Atlantic are, distinctly heard on the other.” (07/051852)

Think about that line above: “Oceans no longer divide, but link nations together.”

That concept is at the heart of the U.S. Navy’s Maritime Strategy for generations, protecting liberty and ensuring freedom on the global commons. Douglass delivered the line in one of his quintessential speeches, Our Composite Nationality: An Address, in Boston, Massachusetts on December 7, 1869. On that date, the great naval strategist Alfred Thayer Mahan was a 29-year-old lieutenant commander. Mahan’s influential books on the influence of sea power and the need for a strong American Navy on the world’s oceans would be written more than two decades later.

Mahan and Douglass came from wildly different origins toward a common point of view about the moral imperative of liberty for all humanity.

For nearly 14 years Navy Reads has offered many reviews and commentary about both Mahan and Frederick Douglass, including Douglass’s ties to the Navy and the sea.