 There are many concerns about Douglass’s view of natural law, manifest destiny and providence—these concerns are on display in the last quotation, and it is not merely the supernaturalism, the belief in a historical teleology, driven by cosmological ontological-theological determination; it is also the costs of the assumptions of such a conception of historical development (McCarthy 2009); namely, his adoption of nineteenth century conceptions of the backwardness (or in kinder terms, underdevelopment) of non-Western European groups; thus his relative silence about the United States’s destructive actions against and policies toward Native American groups. Douglass’s views have lead Wilson Jeremiah Moses to characterize him, along with other early black political figures, as a Moses figure: he is an exodus leader, recipient of the natural law for chosen peoples—African Americans in their travail for freedom as well as the American Republic as a whole—and he (paired eternally with Abraham Lincoln) is a law giver (Moses 1978).