On the recordJanuary 1, 1881
I am free to say that, had I been guided only by the promptings of my heart, I should in this controversy have followed the lead of Charles Sumner.
Said by
Frederick Douglass
Source
gutenberg.orgI am free to say that, had I been guided only by the promptings of my heart, I should in this controversy have followed the lead of Charles Sumner.
Douglass explains his decision to diverge from his friend Charles Sumner on the issue of Santo Domingo's annexation, despite his personal feelings.
Share
More from Frederick Douglass
To-day the negro, starting from nothing, pays taxes upon six millions in Georgia, and forty millions in Louisiana.
The vote of the colored man, formerly beaten down and stamped out by intimidation, is now revived, sought, and defended by powerful allies, and this from no transient sentiment of the moment, but from the permanent laws controlling the…
Nothing but the shot-gun or the bull-dozer’s whip can keep them from voting their convictions.
In any fair condition of things the men who till the soil will become proprietors of the soil.