David Blight Writes About Frederick Douglass’s Dream of a Pluralist Utopia

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:

had always believed that America had a “mission”—that the United States was a set of ideas despite its “tangled network of contradictions.” Now the time had come to reconceive the mission. Douglass’s immediate post–Civil War definition of a nation came quite close to the Irish political scientist Benedict Anderson’s modern conception of an “imagined community.” In his “Composite Nationality” speech, Douglass explained that nationhood “implies a willing surrender and subjection of individual aims and ends, often narrow and selfish, to the broader and better ones that arise out of society as a whole. It is both a sign and a result of civilization.” And a nation requires a story that draws its constituent parts into a whole. The postwar United States served as a beacon—“the perfect national illustration of the unity and dignity of the human family.”

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.

 

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Author: Patrick Young

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