A Frederick Douglass Collection

 

One of my Christmas presents this year was the Library of America’s collection of Frederick Douglass’s speeches and writings. I have enjoyed reading in it the last few days. I had admired his work before but had not read that much of it. (One really interesting piece I remember, not in this volume, was an introduction he gave of Robert Ingersoll at a political meeting where he quoted Robert Browning in his appreciation of Ingersoll. A person wouldn’t be seeing much of that sort of thing at meetings of Republicans or Democrats these days.) In a career of over fifty years from the 1840s to the 1890s, he gave a lot of speeches and wrote a lot of articles. The book contains dozens of them. I recommend it to people interested in the struggle to end slavery, the Civil War, and the success and later failures of reconstruction and also to anyone interesting in reading strong, well written, radical, uncompromising defenses of the liberal values of liberty and individual rights by an excellent author who also must have been a splendid orator.

There is one group of people I particularly wish would get it and read it. Many conservatives and even a few libertarians have an unfortunate tendency to romanticize the Confederacy and ignore or gloss over the facts and history of slavery, the Civil War, and reconstruction. Slavery was not just some regrettable unwise policy. It was a savage abomination that had to be abolished and a direct contradiction of the principles of liberty and the Declaration of Independence. The secessionists left the Union to preserve slavery - believing that Lincoln and his Republicans would create conditions for eventually abolishing it. They made that plain at the time. Claims about other motivations besides preserving slavery were later inventions by apologists for the “lost cause” of the Confederacy. The American army officers who joined the rebellion committed treason by doing so and were fortunate to have been dealt with so leniently after they lost. The slaveholders deserved what they got from the Union army during the war and reconstruction. The main thing wrong with reconstruction was that it ended too soon and left the ex-rebels in position to gain control of the governments of southern states and deny black citizens their rights for decades to come. Another few years of occupation by the Union army might have made a difference.

Those today who are soft on the Confederacy should know better, but since they don’t, reading this book might help them to learn. Something needs to.