By contrast, The Atlantic’s 1860 endorsement of Abraham Lincoln, written by James Russell Lowell, had run to 7,331 words, and Lincoln himself was not mentioned until the 1,747th word. (The editorial did succeed, of course. And yes, I’m taking credit on behalf of The
Atlantic for Lincoln’s presidency.) Douglass published his call for a radical reimagining of the American idea at an ambiguous but promising moment. Already, the infant project of Reconstruction— of the South, of the lives of newly liberated Black Americans, of the Constitution itself—was stimulating opposition that would, by 1877, prove shattering to the cause of equality. And yet Doug lass was correct, as his biographer David W. Blight writes in this issue, in understanding that “the United States had been reinvented by war and by new egalitarian impulses rooted in emancipation.” Douglass’s essay, which Blight brilliantly annotates for us (p. 30), is “full of radical brimstone, cautious hope, and a thoroughly new vision of constitutional authority.”
Diese Geschichte stammt aus der December 2023-Ausgabe von The Atlantic.
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Diese Geschichte stammt aus der December 2023-Ausgabe von The Atlantic.
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