John Wilkes Booth, central plotter of a conspiracy to violently bring down the Lincoln administration, was present and is reported to have muttered, “That means nigger citizenship. Now, by God, I’ll put him through. That is the last speech he will ever make.”53 And it was. Three days later, Booth, a virulent racist, shot Lincoln in the back of the head at Ford’s Theater during the performance of “Our American Cousin.”
African Americans and Lincoln’s White House
Let your motto be Resistance! Resistance! RESISTANCE! No oppressed people have ever secured their liberty without resistance.54—Henry Highland Garnet
Under Lincoln’s command, political access to the White House had been extended to the black community for the first time in U.S. history. Among the best-known black leaders who met with Lincoln at the White House were Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth, but many lesser-known activists and ordinary African Americans met with him there as well. The significance of these encounters cannot be overstated.
While there is little evidence that black input was the sole determinant in strategic decisions that were made by Lincoln (and presidents that followed him, particularly those in need of black popular support), black views were part of a shifting matrix of considerations in policy construction. While sometimes that meant doing the exact opposite of what African Americans saw as in their interests, the multiracial space that Lincoln opened would be a critical new element in the ongoing struggle for black freedom and equality.
As early as 1829, the emergence of a radical black voice in national public discourse began to appear. September of that year saw the publication of Walker’s Appeal.55 The seventy-six-page pamphlet advocated that blacks revolt against their white enslavers and called for nothing short of full liberation and equality for African Americans, enslaved and free.56 The pamphlet also argued against colonization:
Let no man of us budge one step, and let slave-holders come to beat us from our country. America is more our country, than it is the whites—we have enriched it with our blood and tears. The greatest riches in all America have arisen from our blood and tears: —and will they drive us from our property and homes, which we have earned with our blood?57
A bounty was put on Walker’s head: $10,000 if he were brought in alive, $1,000 if dead. He was found dead at his home nearly one year later in June 1830.
The National Negro Convention movement, which brought together black leaders from around the nation, was another vehicle for challenging the dominant political and racial discourses of the mid to late nineteenth century and for projecting a progressive black perspective in pre–Civil War politics. However, it would be articulate and determined individuals such as Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, Martin Delany, Alexander Crummell, Rev. Bishop Turner, and Rev. Henry Highland Garnet, among others, who would most effectively raise the stakes and agitate the conscience of the nation on the issues of justice, rights for blacks, and the moral atrocity of permitting whites to enslave people of color.
Frederick Douglass, circa 1855
Douglass in particular was a powerful and relentless movement organizer, orator, and writer whose singular voice never yielded to the racist perspectives of the times, whether they were held by hard-core conservatives or sympathetic liberals. Born into slavery in Maryland in 1818, he escaped to the North when he was twenty years old and quickly became a galvanizing force of resistance to the slaveholding South and its Northern allies. His speeches against slavery and for justice for black Americans were riveting and drew massive crowds. Douglass was able to win supporters across lines of race, class, and gender, from the very poor and marginalized to European kings and queens and American presidents. His visits to the White House were historic, and nearly all were turning points in the relations between African Americans and the U.S. presidency.
By the time of his iconic 1852 Fourth of July speech he was already the most famous black activist in the nation. He had written a best seller in 1845, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, and traveled to Europe to speak on behalf of the rights of African Americans. He played a pivotal role at the 1848 Seneca Falls convention where the American feminist movement was born, and he was the publisher of North Star, one of the most important antislavery publications in the country.
On July 5, 1852, in Rochester, New York, Douglass spoke before the Rochester Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society to a crowd of 500 to 600 people in Corinthian Hall. In that speech he articulated the meaning for blacks of the nation’s celebration of its independence from England seventy-six years earlier. It was as magnificent a presentation on the morality and politics of race as has ever been delivered in the United States. In that seminal speech, reflecting the collective sentiments of all African Americans, he raises the question, “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” His answer is devastating.
I answer, a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciations of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade, and solemnity, are, to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy—a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices, more shocking and bloody, than are the people of these United States, at this very hour.”58
In the speech, he contrasts “your National Independence” with the reality that he and other African Americans are “not included within the pale of this glorious anniversary. . . . The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity and independence, bequeathed by your fathers, is shared by you, not by me.”59 Referring to slavery as “the great sin and shame of America,” he blasts the hypocrisy of the nation, stating, “Whether we turn to the declarations of the past, or to the professions of the present, the conduct of the nation seems equally hideous and revolting. America is false to the past, false to the present, and solemnly binds herself to be false to the future.”60 Time and time again in his lengthy talk, Douglass returns to the theme of contradictions between hype and reality. Citing a former president, he argues, “You declare, before the world, and are understood by the world to declare, that you ‘hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal; and are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; and that, among these are, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness;’ and yet, you hold securely, in a bondage which, according to your own Thomas Jefferson, ‘is worse than ages of that which your fathers rose in rebellion to oppose,’ a seventh part of the inhabitants of your country.”61
Despite his unyielding critique, he states at the end of the speech that he is hopeful. He believes that there “are forces in operation” fighting for abolition that will “inevitably work the downfall of slavery.”62
Douglass’s relationship to the White House was ongoing and pivotal. He received important appointments from four presidents—secretary of the Santo Domingo Commission (Ulysses S. Grant), U.S. Marshal for the District of Columbia (Rutherford B. Hayes), Recorder of the Deeds for the District of Columbia (James A. Garfield), and Minister-Resident and Consul-General of Haiti (Benjamin Harrison). He turned down an offer from President Andrew Johnson, who, Douglass rightly believed, did not genuinely want fairness and equality for African Americans. With the emergence of Douglass and other national black leaders, never again would the voice of African Americans be silenced in their struggle for liberation, justice, and human rights.
[The negro is] the stomach of the rebellion.63
—Frederick Douglass
Although he only met with Lincoln twice (in addition to crashing his second inauguration party), Douglass was the one black leader who clearly had the most access to Lincoln and the most influence on hi
m politically. The two men met on August 10, 1863, and on August 19, 1864, both times at the White House. By 1861, Douglass had emerged as the nation’s most prominent black leader. Much debate has emerged regarding his relationship with and views on Lincoln. Douglass was clearly frustrated with Lincoln in the early years of the war and his administration. Speaking against Lincoln’s advocacy for black colonization, he stated, as we have seen, that Lincoln seemed bent on making himself appear “silly and ridiculous.” He also wrote, “Mr. Lincoln is quite a genuine representative of American prejudice and Negro hatred and far more concerned for the preservation of slavery, and the favor of the Border Slave States, than for any sentiment of magnanimity or principle of justice and humanity.”64
“Marching on!”—The Fifty-fifth Massachusetts Colored Regiment singing John Brown’s March in the streets of Charleston, February 21, 1865
But Douglass also supported the Civil War and believed from the very beginning that it would result in the liberation of blacks from the nightmare of enslavement to white people. Like Delany, he lobbied Lincoln to include black soldiers in the Union military, and when Lincoln finally relented due to the faltering military efforts of the Union and thus a critical need for more troops, Douglass personally helped recruit and establish the 54th and 55th Regiments of black soldiers.65 More than 180,000 African Americans would participate as Union soldiers—with 37,000 killed—fighting in 499 combat situations that included thirty-nine major battles.66 In fact, it was the mistreatment of black soldiers that drove Douglass to seek a meeting with Lincoln. Blacks were not only offered lower pay than white recruits, they were also asked to buy their own uniforms.67 Injured black soldiers were sent to different treatment facilities than whites and the dead buried in different cemeteries—facts that embittered Harriet Tubman against Lincoln68 but which drove Douglass to meet with him in person to press for immediate change.
At the August 1863 White House meeting initiated by Douglass, he advocated on behalf of black soldiers: the massacre of black soldiers by the Confederates, equal pay for black soldiers, and fair promotion of black soldiers.69 From the moment the Union accepted blacks as soldiers, the outraged Confederacy was determined to punish them as harshly as possible. The Confederate secretary of war, James A. Seddon, issued an order early in the war regarding captured black troops, that read, “We ought never to be inconvenienced with such prisoners. . . . Summary execution must therefore be inflicted on those taken.”70 The policy was carried out inconsistently, because some black soldiers were enslaved, some held in prisoner-of-war camps (but never exchanged for white prisoners), and some indeed executed. Black troops were murdered at Milliken’s Bend, Louisiana; Jackson, Louisiana; Poison Spring, Arkansas; Olustee, Florida; Petersburg, Virginia; and many other locales, including Fort Pillow, Tennessee, where a notorious massacre took place on April 12, 1864. Led by General Nathan Bedford Forrest—who after the war became the first national leader and founder of the Ku Klux Klan—Confederate troops slaughtered twice as many black troops as they did whites in the captured fort. The massacre even spurred Lincoln to vow retaliation.71
As a concession to the racial prejudices of whites in the North, the Union had denied equal pay and fair promotions for black troops. In principle, Lincoln agreed with Douglass on each point, but he demurred when it came to taking political action. Lincoln stated that it was an effort to get black soldiers accepted in the first place, so keeping their pay lower than whites’ would help to “smooth the way” for their eventual full inclusion and eligibility for equal pay. He also said he would sign commissions to promote black soldiers given to him by the secretary of war, a weak commitment at best. Finally, Lincoln asserted that retaliation was not the best solution to the targeting and abuse of black soldiers by enemy forces, and went on to say that he thought the conditions for African Americans in the ranks were improving. Following the meeting, however, Lincoln issued an order that the Union would retaliate if black soldiers were massacred or abused. For the most part, Douglass was sympathetic to the president’s positions, although he often did not agree with them.72 He also reports that during a meeting Lincoln said, “Douglass, I hate slavery as much as you do, and I want to see it abolished altogether.”73
White House as it appeared around the time Frederick Douglass went there to meet with President Lincoln.
One year later, in August 1864, Douglass met with Lincoln again at the White House. On this occasion, it was Lincoln who had requested the sit-down. The war was faltering and Northern supporters were growing weary; Lincoln was in a fretful mood. According to Douglass, the president told him that he felt “that a peace might be forced upon him which would leave still in slavery all who had not come within our lines.”74 Douglass had been summoned to the White House, he wrote, because Lincoln wanted him to play a central role in distributing information about the Emancipation Proclamation to those who were still enslaved in the Confederate South. Fewer blacks than expected were escaping and crossing Union lines, thus undermining the military dimension of the Proclamation. Most critical for Douglass was his belief that Lincoln had grown since their first meeting, during which the president stated that his top priority was to save the Union with or without ending slavery. However, at their second meeting Douglass sensed “a deeper moral conviction against slavery than I had ever seen before in anything spoken or written by him.”75 He agreed to take on the president’s assignment.
Douglass describes what happened at the White House inauguration affair with an almost embarrassing giddiness. As he tells it, he literally crashed through two police officers who, according to Keckly, were under orders to admit no blacks to the event. However, Douglass later discovered that Keckly was mistaken, and no such order had been given.76 Once inside the White House, he encountered another layer of security preventing him from going farther. While blocked, he protested that the president would want him at the event and implored someone to tell Lincoln that “Fred Douglas is at the door.” In less than a minute word was sent back to let him in. In Douglass’s words:
I could not have been more than ten feet from him when Mr. Lincoln saw me; his countenance lighted up, and he said in a voice which was heard all around; “Here comes my friend Douglass.” As I approached him he reached out his hand, gave me a cordial shake, and said: “Douglass, I saw you in the crowd today listening to my inaugural address. There is no man’s opinion that I value more than yours; what do you think of it?” I said: “Mr. Lincoln, I cannot stop here to talk with you, as there are thousands waiting to shake you by the hand”; but he said again: “What did you think of it?” I said: “Mr. Lincoln, it was a sacred effort,” and then I walked off. “I am glad you liked it,” he said.77
This was the last time the two men would meet face to face.
According to historian Bennett, Douglass became more mellow in his old age and bought into the post-assassination mythology built up around Lincoln, but he remained overwhelmingly critical of Lincoln and in fact viewed him as a racist.78 Unable to deny the existence of favorable quotes by Douglass regarding Lincoln, Bennett wants to have it both ways, characterizing the positive quotes as isolated and decontextualized. Bennett’s speculations notwithstanding, Douglass seemed entirely genuine when he praised Lincoln as having “conducted the affairs of the nation with singular wisdom, and with absolute fidelity to the great trust confided in him” and considered his assassination a “terrible calamity.”79 It is more likely that Douglass understood Lincoln’s limits both as president of the United States and as a white man constrained by the dominant sensibility of his times, but knew that the steps he took nevertheless led to black liberation from slavery. Douglass best sums up his own complex reading of Lincoln:
Our faith in him was often taxed and strained to the uttermost, but it never failed . . . when he strangely told us that we were the cause of the war; when he still more strangely told us that we were to leave the land in which we were born; when he refused to employ our arms in defence of the Union; wh
en, after accepting our services as colored soldiers, he refused to retaliate our murder and torture as colored prisoners; when he told us he would save the Union if he could with slavery . . . when we saw all this, and more, we were at times grieved, stunned, and greatly bewildered; but our hearts believed while they ached and bled.80
In addition to conferring with Douglass, President Lincoln also met with Sojourner Truth. Born into slavery in Swartekill, New York, in 1797, Isabella Baumfree became one of the nation’s foremost advocates for both abolition and women’s suffrage. Although an 1827 New York law freed her and all the state’s enslaved black people, she had already escaped to another part of the state and was living independently with one of her children. A deeply religious individual, she adopted the name Sojourner Truth in 1843, believing it was sent to her through divine intervention. In an inspired and powerful talk delivered in 1851 at the Women’s Convention in Akron, Ohio, known popularly as her “Ain’t I a Woman” speech, she linked the struggles for black liberation and women’s liberation, an ideological and political leap few took at the time. She stated:
Well, children, where there is so much racket there must be something out of kilter. I think that ’twixt the negroes of the South and the women at the North, all talking about rights, the white men will be in a fix pretty soon. But what’s all this here talking about?
The Black History of the White House Page 18