May 6, 2011
The two months following Lincoln’s inauguration found Frederick Douglass struggling to understand and bitterly demoralized by the president’s policies, but also exhilarated by the outbreak of war at Fort Sumter. He had no interest in the new president’s oratorical olive branches to the seceded South, his poetry about the “mystic chords of memory” or the “better angels of our nature.” Indeed, Douglass despised the olive branches, calling the speech “little better than our worst fears,” and a “double-tongued document, capable of two constructions,” concealing rather than declaring a “definite policy.”...
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/05/06/lincoln-douglass-and-the-double-tongued-document/?module=Search&mabReward=relbias%3As
