Excerpts from Books and Wikipedia
"Douglas's realization of the critical importance of literacy to the winning and exercise of freedom was common among members of both races. . . . The American Anti-Slavery Society hired Douglass and sent him on speaking tours of northern states. . . . Antislavery became one of many transatlantic reforms that included temperance, Sunday schools, missions to the heathen, the distribution of Bibles, and rights for women. Nineteenth-century reformers, their faith strengthened by the expectation that they worked to hasten the millennium and the Second Advent of Christ, were far more hopeful than reformers in our own chastened world. Douglass shared their confidence that right would triumph. . . . "As time went by, Douglass's estrangement came to approximate that of the Transcendentalists, a celebration of the spiritual and moral potential inherent in the human individual. But his unquenchable optimism about the future continued to manifest a kind of millennialism, such as he had heard from African American preachers. . . . Douglas, like Emerson, put his faith in an American melting pot, out of which would spring a new humanity."