Frederick Douglass: “Our National Capital” Lecture

Glossary

• abroad widely known
• abundant in vexation having many troubles
• the blandest suavity the most casual nonchalance
• break his bell wires a reference to the mechanism of doorbells, important in the era before the telephone; the equivalent of “ringing his phone off the hook”
• civil service government employment, typically nonelective, within the executive branch
• dark side of our fellow citizens African Americans
• furnish no criterion do not really matter
• lilies of the field … arrayed like one of these sarcastic comparison of idle young men to the flowers spoken of by Jesus in Matthew 6:28–29
• national capital a pun referring both to Washington, D.C., and to “capital” as money or another unit of value
• oriental a person from an eastern country, the term referring here to someone unfamiliar with American culture
• place hunters job seekers