Slavery & its Aftermath: Revisiting Lyceum

Review by Bill Doughty––

The shadow of Lincoln looms over some politicians who restrict certain books and the teaching of slavery. Learning about American history, both shiny and tarnished aspects, is key to a strong republic and successful self-government, as suggested in Diana Schaub’s “His Greatest Speeches: How Lincoln Moved the Nation” (St. Martin’s Press, 2021).

Schaub examines three speeches and related dates as “punctuation points”: Lincoln’s Second Inaugural, with themes tied to 1619 and the beginning of the sin of slavery of African Americans in North America; The Gettysburg Address, echoing 1776 and the Declaration of Independence; and young Lincoln's Lyceum speech, bringing forth ideals outlined in the Constitution of 1787: “American purpose and destiny” and respect for law and order.

Lincoln wanted to place slavery “in the course of ultimate extinction.” He wanted progressive perpetuation of the nation in the face of disintegration. He called for a continued pursuit of “a more perfect union.”

This book is essential to understanding the reasons for (1) the insurrection of January 6, 2021, (2) the rise of white nationalism and violent extremism, (3) threats of a potential  autocracy, and (4) the need to defend the Constitution and protect the rule of law, voting rights and personal freedoms.

In his Lyceum address, Lincoln said, “The lawless in spirit are encouraged to become lawless in practice; and having been used to no restraint, but dread punishment, they thus become absolutely restrained. Having ever regarded Government as their deadliest bane, they make a jubilee of the suspension of its operations; and pray for nothing so much as its total annihilation.”

He called such lawlessness “Mobocratic spirit,” in which anger makes restraint more difficult. Lincoln saw “increasing disregard for the law” and risk of despotic autocracy that “fits the very definition of arbitrary rule: unlimited, unrestrained, capricious,” Schaub writes. “By contrast, these constitutionally articulated parts divide and check power through their complex relation to one another.”

Master Chief Marcious Kelley and another Sailor assigned to the Nimitz-class aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln (CVN 72) visit the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial in Washington D.C., January 27, 2017. USS Lincoln organized a tour for 23 Sailors of the Lincoln Memorial, the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial and the African-American History Museum. (Matthew Herbst)

Schaub compares Martin Luther King Jr.’s nonviolence with the concept of peaceableness: “Peaceableness is a demanding standard –– more demanding than non-violence since it applies to the attitude of those gathered, not just their actions.” Schaub also analyzes Lincoln's philosophy with the thinking of Frederick Douglass and Malcolm X, more prone to condoning violence than preaching peaceableness.

The Lyceum speech ties back to another great American, President George Washington, and specifically Washington’s Farewell Address and warnings, not only of threats from other nations, but also of divisions from within. Schaub writes:

“Washington warns against sectionalism that would ‘tend to render Alien to each other those who ought to be bound together by fraternal affection’; Lincoln worries about ‘the alienation of their affections from the Government’ –– a generalized, rather than sectional, alienation felt by ‘the American People.’ Washington announces in the strongest terms that compliance with the law and the Constitution is ‘sacredly obligatory upon all’; the lesson in democratic theory is reiterated by Lincoln and supplemented with his call for a ‘political religion’ or ‘reverence’ for the Constitution and laws. Washington inveighs against the dangerous effects of ‘the strongest passions’ and the ‘cunning, ambitious and unprincipled men’ who would ‘usurp for themselves the reins of Government’; Lincoln, too, disparages passion –– calls it ‘our enemy’ –– and puts us on guard against the unbounded ambition of the republic-destroyers.”

The Founders, including Washington and especially Hamilton and Madison, were “aware of the power latent in the love of fame” so they set up a complex system of checks and balances to protect against the rise of a narcissistic ego-driven autocrat. The checks include the legislative, judicial, and executive branches as well as the balance of national/federal and state power.

Navy Recruiter PO Jasmine Allen (CPO Todd Macdonald)

“According to Lincoln,” Schaub writes, “the only restraint upon the incipient tyrant must come from the concerted resistance of … the people.”

In order to progress from slavery, insurrection, racism and discrimination toward that "more perfect union," one needs faith in reason and critical thinking, not in passion and pure emotion.

Lincoln and Washington used the word “passion” in its original meaning, that of strong feelings of a negative nature. Think: January 6th rioters and insurrectionists.

Lincoln said, perhaps presciently, “Passion has helped us [in the Revolutionary War], but it can do so no more. It will in future be our enemy.”

“Passion,” to Lincoln, meant more hate, revenge, and fear –– more divisiveness. He even eschewed compassion, choosing instead to approach issues with logic.

According to Schaub, “Lincoln sought always to lift the slavery debate to the level of principle and unimpassioned reason, avoiding the dangerous ground of compassion, anger, and blame.”

In Lincoln’s case, the strong passions of the mob included vigilantism and lynchings that were happening especially in the South in the aftermath of the Civil War. His description of black bodies hanging from trees like so much Spanish moss reminds people of the Billie Holiday song “Strange Fruit,” Schaub observes.

While the mob’s desire was to crack down on what they saw as crimes, they in fact emboldened the criminals. “When law is disregarded for the sake of justice, that provides license for those who would disregard law for purposes of their own.”

Lincoln believed in obeying even “bad laws” until they could be changed. That is where his and MLK’s philosophy splits. In “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” King calls for disobeying unconscionable laws but, importantly, disobeying them openly and lovingly.

Yet, Schaub presents an example of Lincoln disobeying a law when the standard for doing so was “too intolerable.” It occurred during the war when the widow of a white officer who died while commanding African American troops pleaded with President Lincoln. She asked for him to help “widows” of fallen black service members who hadn’t been able to marry before going off to war and so were ineligible for death benefits for themselves and their children. Lincoln stepped in “as if there had been a legal marriage” and arranged for help to the widows and orphans.

Schaub quotes Martin Luther King Jr. again later in “His Greatest Speeches”: “injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” Schaub writes, “Aware of the inescapable reciprocity of rights –– Lincoln always insisted that it was imperative to restore the belief in universal equality for the sake of white citizens, as well as for the sake of the enslaved people.”

Schaub notes that Lincoln and King are “often viewed as our nation’s greatest moral lights.” The two great men would probably agree on Lincoln’s recommendations for preventing mobocracy and resulting autocracy.

Lincoln’s solutions, as revealed by Schaub:

— Have “reverence for the laws,” recognizing usurpation (wrongfully seizing power) is suicide. 

— Win public sentiment: with it, everything; without it, nothing. 

— Harness personal ambition rather than try to suppress it; steer ambition to the duties of office and the public good. 

— Recognize two fundamental blessings in the United States: Nature and Government: “Both legacies must be transmitted to the next generation.” 

— Be law-abiding, not out of fear but out of reverence. 

— Engage and prove the unproven proposition of the Founders, namely “the capability of a people to govern themselves.” Vote. 

— Become an educated citizenry; more education, more books! [It was remarkable and memorable when former CNO Adm. Jon Greenert unveiled his take on the Navy’s Reading Program in 2012 by standing in front of hundreds of books –– all related to Abraham Lincoln.]

“In his first appearance on the political stage, announcing his candidacy for office in 1832, Lincoln endorsed public education so that citizens might, through the reading of history, ‘duly appreciate the values of our free institutions.’ He makes a similar linkage here, telling us that the system of political institutions serves ‘the ends of civil and religious liberty’ and that the whole elaborate arrangement requires ‘general intelligence’ on the part of the people.”

Lincoln refers to a tangible “fabric of freedom.”

A command ball cap from the Ticonderoga-class guided-missile cruiser USS Gettysburg (CG 64) rests upon on a stone wall on the battlefields of Gettysburg, Pa. The ship’s crew visited and paid honor to the ship’s longstanding ties to its namesake town, July 2, 2015. (MC3 Rachel E. Rakoff)

In “His Greatest Speeches,” Schaub dissects not only the Lyceum speech, but also the most famous American speech, The Gettysburg Address, as well as The Second Inaugural Address, where Lincoln says –– relevant to today’s controversies about what is taught in schools –– achievement of “a just and lasting peace among ourselves” requires reconciliation through what Schaub calls truth-telling and an inquiry into the cause and purpose of the war.”

In other words, we must teach the truth about slavery, the original sin, and take truth out from the shadows.

‘Second’ Thoughts: ‘Race and Guns’

Review by Bill Doughty––

“This is not a pro-gun or anti-gun book,” Carol Anderson writes.

It’s a book about disparate treatment, discrimination, and outright racism when it comes to the application of –– and even the creation of –– the Second Amendment: “The Second: Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America” (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2021).

How and why is there a “right to bear arms” in the Constitution’s Bill of Rights? What is a “well-regulated militia”? How has the United States military been part of or affected by the Second Amendment and its application? How is disparity as obvious as black and white?

Anderson explores the origins of the Second Amendment and the Constitution itself. Madison worked tirelessly to build the document that would replace the rickety Articles of Confederation and set forth the ethos and ideals of the new nation based on equality and freedom.

“But those intentions of creating a strong, viable republic committed to its lofty ideas crashed headlong into the unspoken reality of America: ‘Slavery was the largely unmentioned monster in the basement of the new nation.’ It was so fearsome that its name, like a dreaded demon, was never to be mentioned in the Constitution lest it erupt out from its darkened and dank lair and tear the fragile nation apart. There was something else besides fear, though, that required slavery to remain like a terrifying wrath haunting the nation’s founding document: guilt. John Dickinson, a delegate from Pennsylvania who drafted the original Articles of Confederation, noted that the very omission of ‘the WORD slavery…[from the Constitution was to] conceal a principle of which we are ashamed.’”

As many Northern states were eliminating slavery from within their borders, southern states, especially South Carolina, was doubling down on the institution, threatening no support for the Constitution if the Atlantic slave trade were curtailed by legislation. Politicians from the Deep South showed extreme hypocrisy: on one hand forbidding enslaved people from citizenship, and on the other hand demanding they be counted in a census so the South would have more representation in Congress (leading to the cursed Three-Fifths Compromise by the Supreme Court).

Anderson shows how the Second Amendment was also a compromise under the shadow of States’ Rights: the resistance to pay for a standing army and the fear, not just of government tyranny, but also primarily of slave revolts.

An armed “well-regulated militia” was a whites-only concept meant to protect landowners from their chattel slaves who might seek freedom by any means necessary.

Wealthy landowners two hundred years ago had every right to be afraid, considering violent slave rebellions in Haiti, Richmond, and New Orleans. Anderson describes the horrors associated with the revolts and what happened to captured insurgents: torture, mutilation, heads on poles.

In the South in the 1800s homes of black people were routinely searched. Guns and books along with other educational material were confiscated. Anderson writes, “Gun control laws, to be clear, were everywhere in antebellum America. Indeed, ‘the South was the gun control center of the United States…’”

The “bravado” of a well-regulated militia was revealed in the War of 1812 against Great Britain. The British captured and burned the White House and U.S. Capitol, including the Library of Congress, in 1814. The young nation, under attack, in fact needed a standing army and navy.

As the British did in the Revolutionary War, they promised freedom to enslaved people in the War of 1812. Nevertheless, the American military recruited African Americans who fought and helped win the war. Of the three thousand soldiers and sailors who fought in the Battle of New Orleans, for example, six hundred were black.

Immediately after the war, General Andrew Jackson ordered blacks to be “summarily dismissed.” People of color were again banned from owning guns or ammunition. If found with a firearm, they were whipped. Endemic racism prevailed and was exacerbated by the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which “was supposed to be part of a sectional compromise that would keep the United States actually united. Instead, it was a law that was so hated that the seams in the American fabric began to visibly tear apart.”

The Civil War, which should have been a turning point for African Americans and their freedoms –– including the right to bear arms –– was largely a met with “nearly impenetrable barriers” of racism: Jim Crow laws, disparate treatment, and bigotry. “Andrew Johnson, who ascended the presidency after Lincoln’s assassination, was instrumental in sabotaging efforts to craft a political and legal environment in which the formerly enslaved and free blacks could live fully.” Johnson pardoned many Confederacy leaders and supported States’ Rights to restrict citizenship, gun ownership, and other rights of African Americans.

Using carefully sourced documentation, Anderson presents the history of lynchings, massacres, and other violences committed against blacks, including black soldiers in the early 1900s. “The United States was a nation locked into a prison of anti-blackness absolutely unsafe for democracy and also for African Americans.

Many Americans who lived through the Civil War were still alive when the United States entered World War I. As the United States prepared to fight in Europe, the military had trouble filling its ranks so opened recruitment to black American men via the 1917 Selective Service Act, still ensuring units were segregated but led only by white officers. Even then, some politicians from former Confederate states opposed the initiative, which allowed blacks to carry, train, and use weapons.

Imagine the tension in Houston, Texas (the last state to acknowledge in 1865 the emancipation of enslaved people) when black soldiers were ordered to be stationed there in 1917 during WWI. Troops of the Army’s Third Battalion, Twenty-Fourth Infantry Regiment –– who had fought for the United States in Cuba, the Philippines, and Mexico –– were assigned to guard duty at a Houston army base. 

The soldiers faced intense racism and discrimination by the local population, including the police, who referred to them in derogatory terms and dehumanizing disrespect. Clashes were frequent with law enforcement and white contract workers, who refused to show I.D.s to or “obey” black soldiers.

After civilian police officers beat two soldiers, shooting at one, dozens of members of the Twenty-Fourth armed themselves and marched to confront the police. The resulting confrontation resulted in the deaths of four soldiers and more than a dozen whites, including some police.

“Military justice was swift,” Anderson writes. “Nineteen of the soldiers were executed immediately after the trial and fifty-four were sentenced to prison.”

Anderson’s book is rich in history of the Second Amendment –– especially related to the Constitutional Convention, events in the divisive 19th century, and milestones in the turbulent early 20th century.

“The Second” loses steam, though, by the time the chronology reaches the Second World War and Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 60s, with a comparative dearth of discussion about that era. Nevertheless, Anderson finishes strong in bringing the issue to the 21st century: no-knock warrants, stand-your-ground laws, open-carry and concealed weapon legislation –– and how they impact African Americans today.

Readers are left to contemplate: How does freedom to own, carry, and use firearms balance with the freedom from being shot? Who is responsible for a tyranny of gun violence in the United States?

This may not be “a pro-gun or anti-gun book,” but it is a fascinating, disturbing, and enlightening examination of the origins of the Second Amendment and its surprising relevance to the military and American wars as well as the meaning of true freedom.

[Anderson capitalizes “Black” but lower-cases “white” when writing about people. While I understand the rationale for that style choice, I but don’t agree with the premise and prefer lower-case for both, in the spirit of Adam Serwer and Isabel Wilkerson.]

‘Caste’ for Young Einsteins –– Awake or Woke

Review by Bill Doughty––

When Albert Einstein, a Jew, escaped persecution in Germany –– just a month before Adolf Hitler became chancellor –– he arrived on America’s shore and was shocked to see institutionalized prejudice, discrimination, and often outright abuse of African Americans.

Albert Einstein

After establishing himself as a professor at Princeton University, New Jersey, Einstein took a personal stance against bigotry: For example, when black opera singer Marian Anderson performed in his new hometown she was shunned at Princeton’s Nassau Inn because of the color of her skin, Einstein invited her to stay in his home. He frequently used his growing fame and prestige to speak out on behalf of equality, justice, and humanity.

Referring to the racism he witnessed, he said, “The more I feel an American, the more this situation pains me. I can escape the feelings of complicity in it only by speaking out.

“Here was one of the most brilliant men who ever lived,” Isabel Wilkerson writes, “refusing to see himself as superior to people he was being told were beneath him.”

Alexander Wilkerson

In “Caste: The Origins of our Discontents” adapted for young readers (Delacorte Press, 2022) Wilkerson weaves the conclusions of critical thinkers and philosophers into her discourse as she examines the arbitrary concept of race, the power of hate and hierarchy, and the proliferation of Confederate monuments across American during the civil rights movement.

Isabel Wilkerson is the proud daughter of a Tuskegee Airman in World War II. After the war her father worked as an engineer building bridges. 

She sees patriotism as defending the ideals in the Constitution and standing up to authoritarianism in whatever shade or color.

Last year Wilkerson spoke at the University of Richmond and received a standing ovation.

“My father would be so proud to see this moment,” Wilkerson said, responding to the ovation. 

Her father was born in nearby Petersburg, Virginia. “In everything that I do, I think about my ancestors. It was against the law for my ancestors to read and write, and here I stand with a Pulitzer Prize.”

In 'Caste,' she recounts Einstein’s gentle but powerful heroism: first to escape Fascism and Nazism in Germany and then to stand up to racism and casteism in his adopted new country.

Wilkerson writes:

“To imagine an end to caste in America, we need only look at the history of Germany. It is living proof that if a caste system –– the twelve-year reign of the Nazis –– can be created, it can be dismantled. We make a serious error when we fail to see the overlap between our country and others, the common vulnerability in human programming, what the political theorist Hannah Arendt called ‘the banality of evil.’

‘It’s all too easy to imagine that the Third Reich was a bizarre aberration,’ wrote the philosopher David Livingstone Smith, who has studied cultures of dehumanization. ‘It’s tempting to imagine that the Germans were (or are) a uniquely cruel and bloodthirsty people. But these diagnoses are dangerously wrong. What’s most disturbing about the Nazi phenomenon is not that the Nazis were madmen or monsters. It’s that they were ordinary human beings.’

It is also temping to vilify a single despot at the sight of injustice when, in fact, it is the actions, or more commonly inactions, of ordinary people that keep the mechanism of caste running, the people who shrug their shoulders at the latest police killing, the people who laugh off the coded put-downs of marginalized people shared at the dinner table and say nothing for fear of alienating an otherwise beloved uncle. The people who are willing to pay higher property taxes for their own children’s schools but who balk at taxes to educate the children society devalues. Or the people who sit in silence as a marginalized person, whether of color or a woman, is interrupted in a meeting, her ideas dismissed (though perhaps later adopted), for fear of losing caste, each of these keeping intact the whole system that holds everyone in its grip.

‘Caste is not a physical object like a wall of bricks or a line of barbed wire,’ the Dalit leader Bhimrao Ambedkar wrote. ‘Case is a notion; it is a state of mind.’

No one escapes its tentacles. No one escapes exposure to its message that one set of people is presumed to be inherently smarter, more capable, and more deserving than other groups deemed lower. This program has been installed into the subconscious of every one of us. And, high or low, without intervention or reprogramming, we act out the script we were handed.

And yet, somehow, there are the rare people, like Einstein, who seem immune to the toxins of caste in the air we breathe, who manage to transcend what most people are susceptible to. From the abolitionists who risked personal ruin to end slavery to the white civil rights workers who gave their lives to help end Jim Crow and the political leaders who outlawed it, these all-too-rare people are a testament to the human spirit, that humans can break free of the hierarchy’s hold on them.

These are people of personal courage and conviction, secure within themselves, willing to break convention, secure within themselves, not reliant on the approval of others for their sense of self, people of deep and abiding empathy and compassion. They are what many of us might wish to be but not nearly enough of us are. Perhaps, once awakened, more of us will be.”

Key word: “Awakened” –– not the misappropriated, misunderstood and maligned “woke.”

Her book is a warning to us in 2023 and 2024..

To paraphrase Sinclair Lewis, who also warned of dictatorships, it can happen here.

“Caste” is a must-read book for anyone interested in bridging the great divide caused by the Big Lie, Lost Cause, and forces of fear, hate, grievance, and resentment. The book is indispensable when considering the fate of military monuments and namesakes that honor the insurrectionist leaders of the Confederacy. (In the weeks ahead many military bases and sites will be renamed to stop honoring insurrectionist Confederates.)

Secretary of the Army Christine E. Wormuth speaks with soldiers of 25th Infantry Division at U.S. Army Garrison Hawaii, Jan. 24, 2023. (Sgt. Rachel Christensen)

According to Defense News, U.S. Army Secretary Christine Wormuth recently finished reading “Caste: The Origins of our Discontents" after hearing Gen. Peter Chiarelli endorse it.

We had the privilege of reviewing Wilkerson’s compelling book last year, and a new paperback version was published last month.

The version of Wilkerson’s book in this particular review is written for young people, at least at a high school reading level. It’s accessible without watering down any of the message, vocabulary, or concepts. Not surprisingly, “Caste” has reportedly been banned at some libraries, including in Texas.

“Caste” was a Book Club recommendation by Military Families magazine when it was first published. According to reviewer Kate Lewis:

“Like Wilkerson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning debut, ‘The Warmth Of Other Suns,’ ‘Caste’ has already won near-universal adoration from literary circles. ‘This might be the most important book I’ve ever chosen for my book club,' Oprah Winfrey said when naming the book to her bestseller-making list, and Wilkerson’s powerful nonfiction narrative lives up to the acclaim.”

In fact, echoing Oprah, “Caste” is one of the most important books we’ve featured over fourteen years on our Navy Reads blog. And this version for young people is absolutely excellent.

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.