We are sometimes asked, in the name of patriotism, to forget the merits of this fearful struggle, and to remember with equal admiration those who struck at the nation’s life and those who struck to save it,--those who fought for slavery and those who fought for liberty and justice.
From his 1871 Decoration Day speech at Arlington, Douglass challenges the notion that patriotism requires forgetting the moral distinctions between those who fought for slavery and those who fought for liberty.
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Lincoln was not only a great President, but a GREAT MAN--too great to be small in anything.
It only abolished slavery where it did not exist, and left it intact where it did exist.
Land is not worth much where there are no people to occupy it, and a mule is not worth much where there is no one to drive him.