It was a great thing to achieve American independence when we numbered three millions, but it was a greater thing to save this country from dismemberment and ruin when it numbered thirty millions.
Douglass compares the achievement of American independence to the greater challenge of preserving the Union during the Civil War.
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Still another ground of hope I find in the fact that colored men are strong in their gratitude to benefactors, and firm in their political convictions.
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…
No power beneath the sky can make an ignorant, wasteful, and idle people prosperous, or a licentious people happy.