From slavery to freedom Essay

Ironically, Fredrick Douglas all but snatched the Emancipation Proclamation from Abraham Lincolns hands to make of its flat rhetoric a sharpened call for freedom and equality. Douglass had never regarded the stop of slavery as enough, either for himself or for his people it had to be the beginning of an embrace of the vague privates fullness as a person, a beginning that would point straight toward an end, within profligate reach. For Douglass, each gain in the struggle, and the Emancipation Proclamation decidedly was one of the greatest, simply meant that America essential move on to the next gain. (Mcfeely, 1991) Douglasss commitment to abolitionism, gruesome elevation, and womens rights outstripped his commitment to other mixer reforms. His major social reform passions black liberation and womens liberation underscored his egalitarian humanism. The logic and pauperism for his social reform odyssey derived essentially from his quest for morality, order, and progress. Even though his interrelated social reform enthusiasms were intrinsical to his vision of a moral, orderly, and progressive civilization, he nonetheless evinced a keen sense of the need for priorities among them.(Martin, 1984) In retelling his journey from slavery to freedom in the middle of the decade, less than a year after the Cleveland expatriation convention, Douglass was responding implicitly to the arguments of Del some(prenominal) and other pro-immigration supporters that in the foreseeable future blacks would remain slaves, or de facto slaves, in the United States arguments that would come forth to have gained added currency with the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854.Central to Douglasss continued hopefulness about blacks prospects in the United States, despite such obviously negative developments, was a renewed commitment following his 1851 get by with Garrison to the informing ideals of the nations original revolutionary documents. In many ways during this period , Frederick Douglass became the first American success a peerless self-made man and symbol of success a gay and tireless spokesman a thoroughgoing humanist. The most striking and enduring aspect of Douglasss heroic bequest in his day its classic, even archetypical aura has persisted down to the present.Although often viewed and used differently by others, the heroic and legendary Douglass clearly personifies the American success ethic. The key to his eminently evocative essence is twofold. Douglasss influence had a far reaching affect. In April 1855, Uriah Boston, a prominent figure in the black community of Poughkeepsie, New York, wrote a letter to Douglass in reference to his newspaper. Boston expressed concern all over the increasingly separatist tone of prominent black abolitionists like William J. Wilson and James McCune Smith.Responding to pieces they had written in the black press, Boston criticized the two for urging the colored people to preserve their identity with th e African race. He feared that any claim of distinct national identity on the part of black people might bestow credence to the propriety and necessity of African colonizationthe dreaded scheme of the American Colonization Society. For Boston, blacks could never constitute a nation within the nation. You cannot mix nationalities, he wrote. No man is a comme il faut citizen of one certain country while he claims at the same time to be a citizen of any other country.