"For Something beyond the Battlefield": Frederick Douglass and the Struggle for the Memory of the Civil War

1989 ◽  
Vol 75 (4) ◽  
pp. 1156 ◽  
Author(s):  
David W. Blight
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Frederick Douglass

The Life and Writings of Frederick Douglass. Volume III, The Civil War, 1861-1865.

1953 ◽  
Vol 19 (3) ◽  
pp. 396
Author(s):  
William E. Baringer ◽  
Philip S. Foner
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Frederick Douglass

Epilogue

2020 ◽  
pp. 254-272
Author(s):  
Jerome Tharaud
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
National Culture ◽  
Mark Twain ◽  
Frederick Douglass ◽  
American Civil War ◽  
Literary Realism ◽  
William Apess ◽  
Conservation Movement ◽  
Phillis Wheatley ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter looks beyond the American Civil War to consider the ways evangelical space continued to shape how Americans saw the landscape and themselves in literary realism to the conservation movement. It mentions how Mark Twain became a representative figure of how a secularizing America remained haunted by a sense of sacred presence rooted in the soil itself. It reviews the story about the rise of white Protestant evangelicals within U.S. national culture and how their form of evangelical space became American space by the eve of the Civil War. The chapter explores the ironic story about how evangelical space escaped control as writers and artists from other traditions reconfigured the relationship between landscape representation, media, and the sacred to produce their own apocalyptic geographies. It recounts how William Apess, Frederick Douglass, Phillis Wheatley, Robert S. Duncanson, and Henry Obookiah appropriated and adapted evangelical space.

Fugitive Slaves in Britain: The Odyssey of William and Ellen Craft

1978 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 41-62 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. J. M. Blackett
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Frederick Douglass ◽  
Fugitive Slaves ◽  
Fugitive Slave

Early on a December morning in 1848, long before anyone else stirred, two slaves, a man and woman, made their bid for freedom from a plantation, just outside Macon, Georgia. She, almost white, was dressed as a slave master, he as her valet. In four days they were in Philadelphia; three weeks later they moved to the safer city of Boston where they remained until the passing of the infamous Fugitive Slave Bill in September 1850 forced them to flee to England. Nineteen years were spent under the “ mane of the British lion ” free from the “ claws of the American eagle.” Finally, after the Civil War they returned as farmers to their native Georgia. Their bold odyssey in 1848 brought them fame and renown. It was a story of love, determination and resilience, the virtues of frontier America, conquering all odds. No other escape, with the possible exception of Frederick Douglass' and Josiah Henson's, created such a stir in ante-bellum America as did the Crafts'.

Frederick Douglass' Civil War: Keeping Faith in Jubilee.

1990 ◽  
Vol 77 (2) ◽  
pp. 676
Author(s):  
William S. McFeely ◽  
David W. Blight
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Frederick Douglass

A Holy Baptism of Fire and Blood

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
James P. Byrd
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Abraham Lincoln ◽  
Frederick Douglass ◽  
The Other ◽  
Inaugural Address ◽  
The Bible ◽  
State Authority ◽  
Biblical Texts ◽  
North And South

In his Second Inaugural Address, Abraham Lincoln said both North and South “read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other.” Lincoln quoted several biblical texts in this address—which, according to Frederick Douglass, “sounded more like a sermon than a state paper.” The Bible, as Lincoln’s famous speech illustrated, saturated the Civil War. This book offers the most thorough analysis yet of how Americans enlisted scripture to fight the Civil War. As this insightful narrative reveals, no book was more important to the Civil War than the Bible. From Massachusetts to Mississippi and beyond, the Bible was the nation’s most read and most respected book. It brought to mind sacred history and sacrifice. It presented a drama of salvation and damnation, of providence and judgment. It was also a book of war. Americans cited the Bible in addressing many wartime issues, including slavery, secession, patriotism, federal versus state authority, white supremacy, and violence. In scripture, both Union and Confederate soldiers found inspiration for dying and killing like never before in the nation’s history. With approximately 750,000 fatalities, the Civil War was the deadliest of the nation’s wars. Americans fought the Civil War with Bibles in hand, with both sides calling the war just and sacred. This is a book about how Americans enlisted the Bible in the nation’s most bloody, and arguably most biblically saturated war.

Frederick Douglass

2020 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Geoff Palmer
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Civil War ◽  
The United States ◽  
Abraham Lincoln ◽  
Frederick Douglass ◽  
Black American ◽  
Church Of Scotland ◽  
Free Church ◽  
Chattel Slavery ◽  
The Church

Frederick Douglass, Black abolitionist, author, and statesman, was born into chattel slavery in the United States in 1818. Douglass’s antislavery activism inspired his sons to fight in the Civil War to end slavery in the nation (1861–1865). It also enabled him to meet other U.S. abolitionists such as James McCune Smith, the first Black American graduate in medicine (Glasgow University, 1837), as well as John Brown and Abraham Lincoln. Douglass arrived in Scotland in 1846, where he gave many lectures on the evils of chattel slavery and was aware of the roles politicians and the church played in maintaining this institution. He argued that if the Free Church of Scotland refused to help to abolish slavery in the United States, it should “Send Back The Money” that it acquired from slaveholding investors. A commemorative plaque to Frederick Douglass was unveiled in Edinburgh in November 2018. This article reflects on Frederick Douglass’s activism in Scotland and what it means for Scotland’s African diasporic residents. 

Frederick Douglass and Scotland, 1846

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alasdair Pettinger
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Main Part ◽  
Frederick Douglass ◽  
Vital Role ◽  
Historical Documents ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
American Slavery ◽  
History And Literature ◽  
Changing Attitudes ◽  
Literary Techniques

Frederick Douglass (1818–95) was not the only fugitive from American slavery to visit Scotland before the Civil War, but he was the best known and his impact was far-reaching. In 1846 his stunning oratory drew enthusiastic crowds from Ayr to Aberdeen who came to hear him promote his new autobiography and deliver the abolitionist message. Although the main part of the book is framed by accounts of the racist discrimination Douglass faced on both his outward and return sea voyages, it does not offer a chronological narrative of his speaking engagements in Scotland. Rather, each of the three central chapters focus on a different set of encounters with notable Scots in order to demonstrate the vital role they played in the transformation of Douglass from a subordinate envoy of a white-run abolitionist society to an independent antislavery campaigner in his own right. In particular, they prompted far-reaching changes in his styles of speaking and writing, in his choice of heroes and how he identified with them, and in the new fervour with which he attempted to control the way he was represented verbally and pictorially. Situated at the intersection of biography, history and literature, it applies literary techniques of close reading to materials normally treated as historical documents, such as letters and newspaper reports, in order to draw out the subtleties of Douglass's changing attitudes, ideas and affiliations.

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