About this episode
In 1860, Frederick Douglass gave a speech in Boston after an anti-slavery meeting he'd been part of was violently broken up by a mob. The speech was called A Plea for Free Speech in Boston, and its most famous line survives everything since:
Liberty is meaningless where the right to utter one's thoughts and opinions has ceased to exist. That, of all rights, is the dread of tyrants.
Sixteen years later, in 1876, Douglass stood in front of a newly-unveiled statue of Lincoln in Washington and delivered what is arguably the most complicated eulogy in American history. He argued that liberty is not something given — it is something claimed. That the same voice which had been shouted down in Boston was the voice that undid slavery. And that the right to speak is inseparable from the right to be free.
This episode carries his 1876 oration in full, and asks the same question of us today: what does publishing on your own domain actually claim, when the platforms that carried your voice can be quiet-loaded with new rules tomorrow morning?
Read A Plea for Free Speech in Boston (1860) on Wikisource.
Chapters
- 0:00 — Opening — the meaning of this monument
- 5:00 — Not for Lincoln, but for ourselves
- 12:00 — Lincoln, the man of his time
- 20:00 — The wound and the promise
- 27:00 — What we owe those still to come
- 32:00 — A closing plea for the right to speak