Page 13 - Integrity Seminars - Special Report

I do not know why we have so much trouble people, by the publication of your inimitable
seeing this as a part of our biological makeup. book on the subject of slavery. That contribution
The need for dignity, self-esteem, and autonomy to our bleeding cause, alone, involves us in a
come with the genetic territory, and a healthy debt of gratitude which cannot be measured . . .
society has to recognize these needs and
recognize that verbal self- expression is an
essential component in their satisfaction.

This is why it is so lamentable when we neglect
to teach our students how to express themselves
clearly, and even grammatically. They are losing
out on the full development of an absolutely
fundamental human capacity. If you read the
letters written home by the Civil War soldiers, by
even the ordinary enlisted men—you do not have
to read the letters of colonels and generals—you
are struck by the fact that they are capable of
writing grammatical English in a way that my

incoming freshmen are often unable to do. I want
to say that we lose more than just good term
papers if we lose the capacity for careful
self-expression. We lose the ability that human
beings have to attain their full intellectual and
rational potential. ("Social Ontology and Free
Speech“ Hedgehog Review, Fall 2004).
Douglass’s letter to Stowe helps address a topic
we identified at the beginning of this series:
[5] Recognize the Antislavery activists--including many

importance of the liberal African-Americans currently or formerly

enslaved--faced seemingly insurmountable
arts in fostering difficulties . . . seeking to eliminate a form of

understanding, enriching "property in man" that may have "exceeded the
invested value of all of the nation's railroads,
thinking, and defining factories, and banks combined."

purpose

The mystery, in short, is not the existence or
In a March 8, 1853 letter to Harriet Beecher expansion of slavery worldwide. The mystery is
Stowe, Frederick Douglass wrote: how slavery ever came to be abolished.

I desire to express, dear Madam, my deep sense
of the value of the services which you have
already rendered my afflicted and persecuted

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