Prophets, indeed, were abundant before the war; but who cares for prophets while their predictions remain unfulfilled, and the calamities of which they tell are masked behind a blinding blaze of national prosperity?
Douglass critiques the disregard for prophetic warnings in the face of national prosperity.
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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…
They cannot be coaxed or driven to vote with their enemies against their friends.
No power beneath the sky can make an ignorant, wasteful, and idle people prosperous, or a licentious people happy.