Carl%20Sagan%20-%20The%20Demon%20Haunted%20World

The Path to Freedom
'Shall such a man be held a slave in a Christian land?' called
out Garrison.
'No! No!' shouted the audience.
And even louder, Garrison asked: 'Shall such a man ever be
sent back to bondage from the free soil of Old Massachusetts?'
And now the crowd was on its feet, crying out 'No! No! No!'
He never did return to slavery. Instead, as an author, editor
and publisher of journals, as a speaker in America and abroad,
and as the first African-American to occupy a high advisory
position in the US government, he spent the rest of his life
fighting for human rights. During the Civil War, he was a
consultant to President Lincoln. Douglass successfully advocated
the arming of ex-slaves to fight for the North, Federal
retaliation against Confederate prisoners-of-war for Confederate
summary execution of captured African-American soldiers,
and freedom for the slaves as a principal objective of the war.
Many of his opinions were scathing, and ill-designed to win
him friends in high places:
I assert most unhesitatingly, that the religion of the
South is a mere covering for the most horrid crimes - a
justifier of the most appalling barbarity, a sanctifier of
the most hateful frauds, and a dark shelter under
which the darkest, foulest, grossest, and most infernal
deeds of slaveholders find the strongest protection.
Were I to be again reduced to the chains of slavery,
next to that enslavement, I should regard being the
slave of a religious master the greatest calamity that
could befall me . . . I . . . hate the corrupt, slaveholding,
women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and
hypocritical Christianity of this land.
Compared to some of the religiously inspired racist rhetoric of
that time and later, Douglass's comments do not seem hyperbolic.
'Slavery is of God' they used to say in antebellum times.
As one of many loathsome post-Civil War examples, Charles
Carroll's The Negro a Beast (American Book and Bible House)
taught its pious readers that 'the Bible and Divine Revelation,
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