Frederick Douglass by David W. Blight

Author:David W. Blight
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Much later, in Life and Times, Douglass gave this moment a special personal meaning: “I had resided long in Rochester and had made many speeches there which had more or less touched the hearts of my hearers, but never to this day was I brought into such close accord with them. We shared in common a terrible calamity, and this touch of nature made us more than countrymen, it made us Kin.” His use of the words countrymen and kin is revealing. So much of the war’s meaning, of his own life, were caught up in those words. In common grief with his mostly white fellow citizens, the black orator felt a sense of belonging. The war had provided a common sense of nationhood, Lincoln’s death virtually a common sense of family. Douglass had often used his own story as the embodiment of America’s representative exiled son. Out of a common search for meaning in Lincoln’s violent death at the dawning of peace, Douglass felt a unity with other Americans. His sense of birthright may have felt more complete that afternoon than ever before. The exiled son who had returned to the free state of Maryland in late 1864 as Noah’s “sign” that the flood (slavery and the war) was almost over, was the same exiled son returning to Rochester in April 1865 to announce national redemption through Lincoln’s blood. Both were homecomings, one to Douglass’s native Maryland, and the other to his adopted western New York. His two lives, two homes, two sides of the Chesapeake, slavery and freedom, were no longer divided. At least for now, Douglass could weep tears of kinship with his countrymen.51

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