You cannot be unmoved if you read the entire speech. Clearly the Founding Fathers were great men to forge a confederacy between very independent minded states of their time, found a nation, win a war against a great and wealthy power,and write a constitution that established the greatest republic the world has ever seen. Yet as Douglass points out, whether it was political, economic or racial fears, they were unable or unwilling to end slavery and enfranchise everyone in this grand human endeavor. It was the Achilles heel of the new Republic. As Lincoln said no foreign power could take a drink of water from the Ohio River without the consent of the American people. The nation could only be destroyed by internal dissension and civil war. It almost was. Slavery was ended with much bitter bloodshed. Yet today’s citizens continue to suffer the consequences of this “peculiar American institution”. It may yet be the core cause for the dissolution of the American endeavor. Face it. The American nation can neither survive “multiculturalism” or a delusional approach to racial and social realities.
One of the things Douglass resented about the U.S. in his day was that even most of the abolitionists in the Union states didn’t see blacks as equal to whites. These abolitionists wanted to end slavery, but they were perfectly content to treat freed and escaped slaves as second-class citizens in the Union.
Slavery was ended *because* of much bitter bloodshed. When the war began, there was no intentions at all of freeing the slaves. It was nearly two years later that Lincoln decided to issue the Emancipation Proclamation, which only freed some slaves, and was seen as a war tactic to weaken the South.
Once the war was over, Lincoln pushed for the 13th amendment because if the South was allowed to keep their slaves, their economic engine would have once more produced massive amounts of Foreign Trade, but this time the South would be intent on using that money to get revenge for the bloodshed perpetrated upon them.
They would have minimized their investments in Northern Shipping or New York businesses such as banking, insurance, warehousing, and they would have insisted on using Southern companies for all their transactions. Additionally, there would never be another Southern vote in the Congress for anything wanted by the Republicans. The entire block would be forever voting against anything desired by the power block which won the war.
By freeing the slaves, not only did the Washington/New York power axis dissolve most of the capital held by Southern interests, they also prevented them from reestablishing their former profits from foreign trade. Additionally, by giving these freed slaves the right to vote, they diluted the political power of these Southerners who would be otherwise expected to do everything of which they could think to thwart the political desires of the Northern power block.
Freeing the slaves solved a lot of potential political and economic problems for the Northern Interests who needed to stop the South from gaining economic independence from their control.
But don't think anyone did it because it was the moral thing to do. This was a calculated move to retain power, and nothing else.