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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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.
To-day the negro, starting from nothing, pays taxes upon six millions in Georgia, and forty millions in Louisiana.