Pulitizer Prize winning historian David Blight writes in this month’s Atlantic Magazine about the post-Civil War vision of Frederick Douglass. According to Blight, Douglass had been a fierce critic of the empty pieties of white America, but after emancipation he envisioned a nation transformed. Blight writes that Douglass:
Americans needed a new articulation of how their country was an idea, Douglass recognized, and he gave it to them. Imagine the audacity, in the late 1860s, to affirm the following for the reinvented United States:
A Government founded upon justice, and recognizing the equal rights of all men; claiming no higher authority for its existence, or sanction for its laws, than nature, reason and the regularly ascertained will of the people; steadily refusing to put its sword and purse in the service of any religious creed or family.
Few better expressions exist of America’s founding principles of popular sovereignty, natural rights, and the separation of Church and state. From his enslaved youth onward, Douglass had loved the principles and hated their flouting in practice. And he had always believed in an Old Testament version of divine vengeance and justice, sure that the country would face a rending and a renewal. Proudly, he now declared such a nation a “standing offense” to “narrow and bigoted people.”
This is a substantial article that deserves to be read in its entirety.
1 thought on “David Blight Writes About Frederick Douglass’s Dream of a Pluralist Utopia”