It must be admitted, truth compels me to admit, even here in the presence of the monument we have erected to his memory, Abraham Lincoln was not, in the fullest sense of the word, either our man or our model.
From his speech at the dedication of the Freedmen's Memorial Monument to Abraham Lincoln, Douglass offers a complex assessment of Lincoln's legacy for African Americans.
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His iron sentences, cold and harsh, sunk like heavy weights deep into my heart, and stirred up within me a rebellion not soon to be allayed.
The good to be sought and the evil to be shunned were flung in the balance and weighed against each other.