I've been advocating for the publication of an annotated, or translated, version of BTW's speech. There is so much layered in there. In newspaper reports right after the speech they put "miscellaneous sources" in parentheses because they were trying to take attention away from what it meant. BTW used this phrase to refer to the plantations. In his language masses = blacks, miscellaneous = whites.
If you search the phrase "these efforts will be twice blessed--"blessing him that gives and him that takes" you'll be be led to Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice. The character who said this has the same name as BTW's daughter, Portia. In her autobiography she explains that her dad quoted Shakespeare and that she was named after the character in this play.
What does "nothing" mean in BTW's statement that "nothing in thirty years has given us more hope and encouragement"? He was using all kinds of seemingly empty phrases to point to specific things.
The thing I'm really stuck on is what BTW meant in the statement "nearly sixteen million hands." It was only a few days before he gave the speech that the US newspapers became full of info about the hand-chopping off that was taking place by colonizers in Congo in central Africa.
Frederick Douglass has talked about how rhetorical trickery was part of survival. BTW had learned it when he was a little kid, and kept doing it for the rest of his life.
