How A U.S. President And A Former Slave Who Sometimes Disagreed Became Friends
One was born in a one-room cabin in Kentucky. The other, born into slavery in
Maryland. In time, they became two of America's best leaders.
By Glenn T. Stanton
February 18, 2021
The two men came from extremely modest means, one even more than the other. Primarily because each understood the rare power of self-education and the gift of books, both went on to have lives of remarkable celebrity, accomplishing extraordinary things for our nation.
One was born in a humble one-room cabin in Kentucky. The other was born into slavery in Maryland. In time, they became two of America’s greatest, most consequential leaders during our nation’s most trying time.
Frederick Douglass taught himself how to read, recognizing in his earliest years that education could be “the pathway from slavery to freedom.†He escaped slavery in Maryland at the age of 20, landing as a free man in New York City in 1838 via stops along the Underground Railroad.
A man of great ambition who possessed a moral conviction of steel, Douglass published his “Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass: An American Slave†in 1845 and began an antislavery newspaper, The North Star, just a short while later. Within years of winning his freedom, Douglass became arguably the most famous black American in the country.
In the presidential election of 1860, as the Democratic Party was famously pro-slavery, Douglass publicly endorsed the Republican candidate. This candidate, of course, was Abraham Lincoln, who won the White House with less than 40 percent of the popular vote, but successfully earned the majority of Electoral College votes. Writing a month after Lincoln’s election in 1860, Douglass half-heartedly celebrated the would-be Great Emancipator’s victory:
Mr. Lincoln, the Northern Republican candidate, while admitting the right to hold men as slaves in the States already existing, regards such property as peculiar, exceptional, local, generally an evil, and not to be extended beyond the limits of the States where it is established by what is called positive law.
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https://thefederalist.com/2021/02/18/how-a-u-s-president-and-a-former-slave-who-sometimes-disagreed-became-friends/
