He alone of all our Presidents was to have the opportunity to destroy slavery, and to lift into manhood millions of his countrymen hitherto held as chattels and numbered with the beasts of the field.
Douglass identifies Abraham Lincoln as the singular president with the historical opportunity to abolish slavery and elevate millions of enslaved people.
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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…
None now denies the ability of the colored race to acquire knowledge of anything which can be communicated to the human understanding by letters.