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nonviolence and nonresistance, Douglass reminded his listeners that
Americans had drenched the soil in blood merely to escape the payment of
a three-penny tax upon tea! Why was it glorious, he asked, for Patrick
Henry to shout "Give me liberty or give me death!" but a "crime" to save
a black man, a fugitive slave, from bondage by shooting the "monster" who
tracks him down to return him to slavery? Douglass recalled Jefferson's
comment that one hour of bondage "is worse than ages of that which our
fathers rose in rebellion to oppose."
But reserved, church-going Bostonians were shocked to hear Douglass
defend violence. "I should welcome the intelligence tomorrow," he had told
them, "that the slaves had risen in the South, and that the sable arms...were
engaged in spreading death and devastation." Perceiving the alarm his
remarks aroused, he chided his audience for greeting the news of foreign
revolutions with joy but fearing similar upheaval and transformation at
home. "You shed tears over fallen Hungary," he scolded. "You are all on
fire at the mention of liberty for France or for Ireland; but are as cold as an
iceberg at the thought of liberty for the enslaved of America."
When Lincoln finally delivered his Emancipation Proclamation,
Douglass viewed it as a faithful return to the American revolutionary tra–
dition. "We can scarcely conceive of a more complete revolution in the
position of a nation," Douglass declared a few weeks later. "Mr. Lincoln
has not exactly discovered a new truth," he said, "but has dared to apply an
old truth, a truth which carried the American people safely through the
war for independence."
Douglass not only anchored the abolitionist movement in the
American revolutionary tradition, he also transcended that tradition.
Women were in a kind of slavery too. Whereas a founder like John Adams
considered slavery "an evil of Colossal magnitude" and could envisage
rights for black men, poli tical rights for women always remained incon–
ceivable to Adams. At most, the husband of the brilliant and talented
Abigail countenanced women's authority in the private sphere of the home.
Douglass's support for women's rights broke new ground. Sexual
equality-the emancipation of "half the human family"-would be "a
revolution," he proclaimed, "the most strange, radical, and stupendous that
the world has ever witnessed." The struggle for equal rights for women
recognized the morality, dignity, and rationality of all citizens. Every able
citizen would be an active and responsible member of the national politi–
cal community. "No man should be excluded from the Government on
account of his color, no woman on account of her sex," Douglass assert–
ed. "There should be no shoulder that does not bear its burden of the
Government." Once women were active in the public arena, society itself
would be transformed by their intellect and "remarkable intui tion" in
