The supreme “testing” of that “government of the people” about which Lincoln had spoken so carefully at Gettysburg was precisely Douglass’s subject as well. In language far more direct than Lincoln’s, Douglass announced that the “abolition war” and “peace” he envisioned would never be “completed until the black men of the South, and the black men of the North, shall have been admitted, fully and completely, into the body politic of America.”16 Here, in late 1863, he demanded immediate suffrage for blacks. In such expressions of equality, Douglass, too, looked beyond Appomattox to the long
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