Douglass and Lincoln
By the same authors
Sarahs Long Walk: The Free Blacks of Boston and How Their Struggle for Equality Changed America
By Stephen Kendrick
Night Watch: A Novel
Holy Clues
Douglass and Lincoln
How a Revolutionary Black Leader
and a Reluctant Liberator
Struggled to End Slavery
and Save the Union
PAUL KENDRICK AND
STEPHEN KENDRICK
Copyright © 2008 by Paul Kendrick and Stephen Kendrick
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information address Walker & Company, 104 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.
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eISBN: 978-0-802-71846-4
Art credits Collection of the New-York Historical Society: (negative #35765). Courtesy of the Lincoln Museum, Fort Wayne, Indiana: (ref. #0-16), (ref. #65), (ref. #3479), (ref. #4023), (ref. #0-66), (ref. #4088), (ref. #3488), (ref. #4630), (ref. #0-97), (ref. #0-108), (ref. #747), (ref. #3842). Courtesy of the Boston Public Library: National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution: (NPG.80.21), (NPG.89189). Frederick Douglass Papers, Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard University: Courtesy of the National Parks Service, the Frederick Douglass National Historical Site.
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First U.S. edition 2008
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Printed in the United States of America by Quebecor World Fairfield
For Moormans, Kendricks, and Gotliebs,
from Virginia to Ohio to California,
the Civil War until today.
To our family.
"I am to speak to you tonight of the civil war, by which this vast country—this continent is convulsed. The fate of the greatest of all Republics trembles in the balance... The lesson of the hour is written down in characters of blood and fire."
—Frederick Douglass
Contents
Prologue: The Mission
To 1860
1. Black Republicans
2. A Self-Made Man
3. To the Brink
4. "I Used to be a Slave..."
1861
5. Mighty Currents
6. Remorseless Struggle
1862
7. Different American Destinies
8. On the Wire
1863
9. "Give Them a Chance"
10. First Meeting
11. "Clenched Teeth and Steady Eye"
1864
12. "An Abolition War"
13. Revolutionary Dialogue
14. Going Home
1865
15. Sacred Efforts
16. "It Made Us Kin"
Epilogue: America's Stepchildren
Appendix: Aftermath—The Douglass Family
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
PROLOGUE
The Mission
In the early April dusk of 1866, nearing the first anniversary of Abraham Lincoln's assassination, a large Springfield crowd filed into Representatives Hall of the imposing Illinois State Capitol building. In this great gallery a year earlier the president's rapidly blackening body had lain in state, with thousands of his fellow townspeople filing by to say goodbye. A few could still recall the day twenty-eight years earlier that the gangly young lawyer had ridden into town.
They were gathering on the anniversary to hear a lecture titled "The Assassination and Its Consequences," and it brought back more than just memories of Lincoln's funeral. In this vast room Lincoln had accepted the 1858 Republican Senate nomination, delivering his controversial "House Divided" speech; though losing that contest to his longtime rival Stephen Douglas, the obscure lawyer found himself unexpectedly propelled to the presidency. In this stately stone building, Lincoln had appeared over two hundred times before the state supreme court; had meticulously researched in the law library his Cooper Union speech; and had gone each evening to a relaxed men's club for political talk, tales, and conviviality.
Governor Richard Ogles by, an old friend of the late president, escorted the evening's presenter up to the speaker's desk. By coincidence, Oglesby had been in Washington on the last day of the president's life, dropping by the White House to chat with his exhausted but cheerful friend, who was clearly savoring the end of the brutal war. This night, before "a large audience, composed of the most intelligent, refined and cultured of our citizens," the governor introduced the speaker, renowned abolitionist orator Frederick Douglass. The Republican-leaning Illinois State Journal noted that in his introduction Oglesby "paid a well deserved need of praise to the colored race, whose devotion to our country in its hour of peril assisted in ridding our land of rebellion . . ."1 The less enthused Springfield Register described the evening in different terms: "The radical negro party of this city are reduced to the desperate straights [sic] of importing the negro Douglass to bolster up their tottering party organization . . . This won't save you, gentlemen. Such men as Fred. Douglass . . . have ruined the country already."2
Douglass stepped forward and was "greeted with prolonged applause—a fitting tribute to a worthy man." Though he had been presenting his talk on Lincoln's assassination throughout the country for several months, standing where Lincoln spoke gave grave emphasis to his opening point that only great figures truly educated this world. "Prior to the Civil War there was apparently no danger menacing our country, but a few far seeing men foresaw the calamities that have come upon us, and their warnings were treated as idle talk . . . The few listen and the many pass on, unheeding the precipice over which they are being hurled." The speaker soon thundered in full flow, the packed crowd captivated in his spell. A highly experienced public orator, Frederick Douglass, by force of words fused to the impressive personal dignity in his majestic bearing, had transformed himself from the slave child Frederick Bailey into an internationally known figure who calmly claimed his place in the world. In his time, only fellow abolitionist Wendell Phillips equaled him as a speaker, but no other orator could compare to the redemptive power of the life story he embodied. His narrative was compelling for more than just his daring escape from slavery on the eastern shore of Maryland. Through years of dogged and at times extremely dangerous touring from town to town, by writing a bestselling personal testimony of his struggle to freedom, by editing one of the nation's most notable black newspapers, and finally, through his service as a recruiting agent for black soldiers, Frederick Douglass had become the voice of his people.
With his splendid mane of graying hair swept back from his broad forehead, blazing brown eyes, deep regal voice, and overwhelmingly powerful physical presence, Douglass awed white and black listeners alike. He had been a slave, yet in this commanding personal appeal, audiences had no trouble believing President Lincoln had invited this man to the White House. The personal meetings of Douglass and President Lincoln in Washington during the Civil War had represented a racial revolution in themselves, and Douglass reminded his audience of the stunning social impact of the conflict. He forcefully recalled, "Mr. Lincoln was a tall
man—morally and intellectually, as well as physically—and like the high peak of a mountain, he caught the light of the coming dispensation . . . At the time of his death, slavery was abolished, and liberty established; and he who today argues in behalf of slavery or any of its horrid pretensions, stamps upon the grave of Abraham Lincoln." Douglass then added words more revealing than his listeners would ever know about the president he had dealt with: "He did not profess to be a Moses, and turn Pharaoh."3
Frederick Douglass
While the president in his essential decency had never expressed the slightest temptation to "turn Pharaoh," the uncertain tides of war and the nation's deep reservoir of hatred toward Douglass's people threatened at every crisis to turn this unparalleled opportunity for a great Exodus into disaster. Lincoln had spoken truly of his personal convictions when he wrote: "If Slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong."4But Lincoln had been born in the slave state of Kentucky and had married into the slave-owning Todd family of Lexington. His only truly intimate friend, Joshua Speed, had returned to Kentucky after his Springfield days to oversee a slave plantation. Further, Lincoln had been nurtured in "Free Soil" Illinois with its fervent antiblack laws and had long been an open and steadfast opponent to radical abolitionism. It was not surprising that this man had been a reluctant liberator.
The intent of Douglass's talk was not to dwell in that past, but to confront new realities facing a victorious North and a world without Lincoln, struck down by "the crime of all crimes, the sum of all villainies." This speech was not marked by triumph, but rather by a looming menace that all the gains of the Civil War might be surrendered. "The danger impending over us is the cold, cruel wanton surrender and betrayal of our friends and allies,"5cried Douglass, referring to the many thousands of slaves who streamed into Union lines as "contraband," the men and women who had picked the crops, cooked the food, and fed valuable information to the army, and most of all, the 180,000 black soldiers at last granted the right to carry a musket. One in ten Union soldiers who had served was black, and Lincoln, before his death, rightly noted that these men had provided the deciding edge of victory.
Though he did not say so that night, Douglass had spent the last four years engaged in a long and public contest with a president who was slow to emancipate, reluctant to put black soldiers into battle, and at his death had made no firm commitment to give the vote to the black man, except possibly perhaps for "the very intelligent, and . . . those who serve our cause as soldiers." 6 All these struggles between the two men were set aside by Douglass this night.
When it had counted, at critical twists and turns of the war, Lincoln, in fact, had become an effective collaborator in Douglass's decades-long pursuit of the total and irrevocable destruction of slavery. The odds of this black abolitionist agitator and a cautious prairie lawyer ever meeting—much less profoundly influencing each other as allies—seemed unlikely. Yet the violent lessons of the war had drawn them together in what Douglass in 1862 called "characters of blood and fire."7A strange partnership even in their own time, in the midst of deep and weighty disagreements, they managed to forge a strong mutual understanding and respect. In the end, Douglass's understanding of the meaning of this war and his personal mission—the liberation of black Americans—was to be inescapably bound up in the life, and the death, of the paradoxical and enigmatic President Lincoln.
Lincoln's mission was to save the Union, while Douglass's mission was different and two-pronged: emancipation through this conflict and then equality in the future. The latter quest speaks with particular power and relevance through the years. At the heart of Douglass's message was the belief that the nation must confront the interconnectedness of black and white. Many, including Lincoln, had tried to evade this reality. Douglass understood that the Union itself would not survive without the monumental contribution of African-Americans, though their rightful place in the country would not be secured until white Americans respected their rights and allowed them opportunities within the lifeblood of the nation. Douglass prophesied that for a nation to be redeemed, we would need each other, then and now. Lincoln needed the black soldier to win his war; Douglass needed Lincoln to win his people's freedom; and in the end, they needed each other to move the nation forward. Their relationship, their struggle, tells us much about ourselves as a people and about why the failure to fully achieve Douglass's vision of equality means our Civil War is not yet over.
It is a remarkable fact that by 1950 Frederick Douglass was a nearly forgotten man, except perhaps for schoolchildren still encouraged to read his first and briefest autobiography. When the historian Philip Foner transcribed hundreds of pages of forgotten speeches and long-scattered letters in the late 1940s, certain that Douglass was a missing key figure in our history, to his astonishment, "No commercial publisher or even university press displayed the slightest interest in making available the letters, editorials, and speeches of this man of towering dimensions."8Finally, a small radical press consented to publish them. The power of Douglass's voice, once again in circulation, served to spark a considerable reevaluation and renewal of interest in Douglass and his world of radical abolitionism.
The Civil War has often been called America's Iliad, but it has not been noted enough that we are still engaged in writing it. Frederick Douglass is a relatively new player in the Lincoln saga, and the reason for this is relatively simple: Lincoln, as the Great Emancipator, has always been portrayed as the sole wise and benevolent actor in the great drama of the Civil War. With cumulative force, early Lincoln biographers presented a man bedeviled by fierce and unrelenting Radical Republicans and obsessive abolitionists, whose fanaticism helped push the nation into an "unnecessary war." As the new president came to power, the nation stumbled almost heedlessly into a needless sectional war over slavery. Both sides of this great and tragic conflict fought nobly and with great courage, "brother against brother." It was a simple narrative, and since it possessed so many reassuring elements, it long constituted a compelling and comfortable story that stood the test of many generations.
The silence in those earlier biographies about the role of Douglass in the Civil War era reflected an oddity that historians of the last forty years have had to struggle with: how could one accurately tell the story of the Civil War without referring to 180,000 black troops in the Union army, or to the tidal wave of black people who freed themselves by crossing Union lines, forcing Lincoln's hand to face the challenge of emancipation (a reality that was not Lincoln's so much to give as to recognize); or to the radical abolitionists, including the overlooked Frederick Douglass, who were perhaps more the tale's heroes than its villains? And that perhaps Lincoln, still undeniably great, might not have been the only actor on the stage—that the war was a complex, messy, and complicated tale, and that its hero was, in fact, flawed in ways that the old story would not allow.
The Civil Rights era made these historical questions not merely valid but socially inescapable. In Memphis the night before he was killed, Martin Luther King Jr. evoked a panorama of scenes in history he would be tempted to see: "I would come on up even to 1863, and watch a vacillating president by the name of Abraham Lincoln finally come up to the conclusion that he had to sign the Emancipation Proclamation."9The old vision of Lincoln as the secular savior of the black people was becoming tarnished, fairly or unfairly, with a new narrative, exemplified by Ebony magazine's editor Lerone Bennett's searing and angry Forced into Glory: Abraham Lincoln's White Dream, a book that pointed out, quite accurately, that Lincoln had been a white supremacist sharing the racial prejudices of his times. This disenchantment with Lincoln had in truth started with W. E. B. Du Bois, who as early as 1922 had been compelled to recant harsh words about Lincoln.
In this climate, a figure such as Frederick Douglass reemerged in his old power. Because of the way we have largely ignored the role of African-Americans in the epic of the Civil War, and in the muted and almost amnesiac manner in which the story of the resulting failure of the Reconstructio
n era has been told, Americans have been largely blind to a startling truth: that the epic of the emancipation of four million slaves remains one of the greatest stories in world history. In that magnificent story, Douglass had been a national hero. He was a fighter, facing down death from early slave breakers many times in his youth and facing down rioting mobs throughout his travels. The writing of three autobiographies had well suited him for stepping into this ennobling heroic role, for he understood that his life had always been the story of his people redeemed, that somehow his personal odyssey to fame and worldwide attention was both a vindication and a symbol for what it was possible for a black man to achieve—in a nation that refused to offer manhood, equality, even the right to vote.
One reason he emerges as a figure second only to Lincoln is that he spoke the truth, spoke it to powerful figures who did not wish to hear it, accurately predicted the path the war would take, and offered everything he had, including the lives of his children, to gain freedom for others. In a talk he gave all across the North in 1864 entitled "The Mission of the War," this greatness and clarity of vision still speak. Calling the conflict "a solitary and ghastly horror," he asked, "Now, for what is all this desolation, ruin, shame, suffering and sorrow? Can anybody want the answer? . . . We all know it is Slavery." Yet in the midst of the numbing loss, he dared to face the larger meaning of this violence. "But even from the length of this struggle, we who mourn over it may well enough draw some consolation when we reflect upon the vastness and grandeur of its mission . . . The blow we strike is not merely to free a country or a continent—but the whole world from slavery—for when slavery fails here—it will fall everywhere." He added, "We have no business to mourn our mission."
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