Blight’s study is particularly of note because, more than showing the persistent religious preoccupations of Douglass, he theologically identified internal tensions to Douglass’s thought, namely, the tension between a providentialist and an apocalyptic view of history. The former providentialist position emerges in writings such as “The Suffrage Question,” where Douglass, reflecting in 1856 on a the failure of the New York legislature to overturn the “property clause” for voting rights, writes that “we are not at all disheartened…for Right must be triumphant in the End.” Douglass here takes inventory of the “recuperative energy” of progress aligned with providence. “There is about Truth an inherent vitality…Progress is the law of our being.”
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With the advent of war and the realization of what Douglass referred to as “the irrepressible conflict,” he makes acute use of the language of divine judgment. What is happening in the war is God’s just condemnation of slavery: “God in history everywhere [pronounces] the doom of those nations which frame mischief by law, and revel in selfishness and blood.” “Slavery has done it all,” Douglass writes, “Our National sin has found us out…During the last twenty years and more, we have as a nation been forging a bolt four our own national destruction.” The punishment is self-incurred: “We have sown the wind, only to reap the whirlwind.” In “Our National Fast,” furthermore, Douglass’s theology of judgment reaches a peak intensity. Here he draws directly from the prophets to chastise the Union’s political establishment, especially the Lincoln administration, for its lack of abolitionist initiative. Quoting Isaiah, Douglass writes, “I will hide mine eyes from you: yea, when ye make many prayers, I will not hear: your hands are full of blood.” In the same article, “Nemesis,” Douglass echoes Paul’s Romans epistle, attending to creation’s groaning under the weight of racial slavery and its war: “The land is now to weep and howl, amid ten thousand desolations brought upon it by the sins of two centuries against millions on both sides of …show more content…
Along similar lines, after a prophetic indictment of the Civil War as divine judgment for racial slavery, Douglass invokes Jubilee themes of political release, in a characteristic (as subsequent examples confirm) climatological image: “Could we write as with lightning, and speak as with the voice of thunder, we should write and cry to the nation, Repent, Break Every Yoke, let the Oppressed Go Free for Herein alone is deliverance and safety!” Judgment, here imaged as a thunderstorm, occasions the possibility of repentance and the deliverance of the
With the advent of war and the realization of what Douglass referred to as “the irrepressible conflict,” he makes acute use of the language of divine judgment. What is happening in the war is God’s just condemnation of slavery: “God in history everywhere [pronounces] the doom of those nations which frame mischief by law, and revel in selfishness and blood.” “Slavery has done it all,” Douglass writes, “Our National sin has found us out…During the last twenty years and more, we have as a nation been forging a bolt four our own national destruction.” The punishment is self-incurred: “We have sown the wind, only to reap the whirlwind.” In “Our National Fast,” furthermore, Douglass’s theology of judgment reaches a peak intensity. Here he draws directly from the prophets to chastise the Union’s political establishment, especially the Lincoln administration, for its lack of abolitionist initiative. Quoting Isaiah, Douglass writes, “I will hide mine eyes from you: yea, when ye make many prayers, I will not hear: your hands are full of blood.” In the same article, “Nemesis,” Douglass echoes Paul’s Romans epistle, attending to creation’s groaning under the weight of racial slavery and its war: “The land is now to weep and howl, amid ten thousand desolations brought upon it by the sins of two centuries against millions on both sides of …show more content…
Along similar lines, after a prophetic indictment of the Civil War as divine judgment for racial slavery, Douglass invokes Jubilee themes of political release, in a characteristic (as subsequent examples confirm) climatological image: “Could we write as with lightning, and speak as with the voice of thunder, we should write and cry to the nation, Repent, Break Every Yoke, let the Oppressed Go Free for Herein alone is deliverance and safety!” Judgment, here imaged as a thunderstorm, occasions the possibility of repentance and the deliverance of the