In the end, though so much of his political career was predicated on the slavery controversy, he admitted, "If all the earthly power were given to me, I should not know what to do, as to the existing institution."22This frustration was not a political position, but a sincere perplexity as to what must be done. The idea that the nation would tear itself apart over slavery was an agony for him, and something in him resisted the idea that southerners could be sincere in their threat of secession, and beyond that, war. Deep down he trusted, as Jefferson had before him, that the corrosive nature of slavery would eventually cause it to collapse upon itself, that it would die an appropriate death. Exactly how this might happen was beyond his imagination, and perhaps his perplexity was mixed with equal measures of wishful thinking and denial.
Frederick Douglass saw Lincoln's election as a shift, a change, a potential opening, and people long accustomed to disappointment will happily take even chaos instead of the status quo and the stagnant. At the very least, Douglass believed anything that incensed the South the way the rise of Lincoln seemed to must be a positive development.
Rumors of secession by the South were now spreading. These were bewildering days as an anxious nation felt caught in a whirlwind that threatened a frightening new reality. Had the South truly reached a point where they felt they could no longer remain? Would the nation not endure a full century?
While the thought of conflict between North and South was something Douglass had long dreamed of, such a thought truly horrified most northerners, conjuring a sense of bloody apocalypse, not a time of jubilee. Douglass anticipated new opportunities for abolitionists after Lincoln's election, but he and other prominent radicals soon found fresh anger directed at them with a vitriol they had not encountered before. If the country was falling apart because of slavery, many began to violently blame abolitionists like Douglass for the coming schism. In Knoxville, Tennessee, a ferocious crowd mistook a man for Douglass and attacked him with bludgeons and knives.23
He was to learn this more personally in, of all places, Boston. The experience would be another of his close brushes with death.
On the frozen morning of December 3, Douglass walked into the Tremont Temple, the imposing building that stood only feet away from the Park Street Church, where William Lloyd Garrison had made his first anti-slavery speech in the city thirty years ago. Boston had sheltered Garrison's pioneering antislavery newspaper, the Liberator, as well as the equally powerful voices of black radicals such as David Walker and Maria Stewart. The forceful and effective black community had led a civil rights revolution culminating in the first racial integration of an American city's school system in 1855. Douglass assumed he was entering a city venerated as a beacon of antislavery reform; instead, it was a powder keg.
Douglass was prepared to speak at an event organized to commemorate the first anniversary of John Brown's martyrdom. There was an electric air to the proceedings, as hundreds of abolitionist sympathizers filed into the hall. Also entering were conservative Boston residents, some from affluent Beacon Hill town houses across the Boston Common, people whose profits in business ventures had long been linked to southern cotton for the looms of Lawrence and Lowell. Working-class Bostonians entered too, many of them dock workers from Boston's North End, tied to the South through the Democratic politics of the Little Giant and hatred of economic competition from free blacks. Although these two groups did not share financial standing, they had mutual contempt for abolitionists whom they perceived to be splitting the nation in two.
From the moment organizer and journalist John Redpath called the meeting to order, the hissing began. J. Stella Martin, a black minister, tried his best to quiet the crowd and to begin electing officers for the meeting, but he received a similar response from the restive crowd. Martin told the abrasive audience, "I hope this is not South Carolina." Redpath walked off the stage, then down an aisle to where the most heckling seemed to be coming from. He had grown up in Scotland and showed that his literary sophistication did not outweigh his penchant for a fight. He grabbed a critic by the collar and began dragging him to the door. Redpath repeatedly tried to heave him out of the proceedings, but the man's friends surrounded him and successfully freed the startled spectator.
Martin was still on stage attempting to yell over the crowd and bring the assembly to order. Democrats screamed that he would not silence them. Abolitionists in the hall gave three cheers for Frederick Douglass. Franklin San-born, a wealthy abolitionist who had been implicated in John Brown's raid, tried to assist Martin, pleading, "This is not the Boston I have known."
The crowd cried "Put him out," and a man broke onto the stage, shaking his fist at the speakers. They shouted "Where's the Union?" and one man shrieked that John Brown was in hell. All Douglass heard was mad laughter and competing cheers in the growing chaos. Martin called for police to restore order, and when they appeared, the superintendent of the theater appealed for the crowd to respect those that had rented the hall. This seemed to work for a few moments.
Then a surprising motion went up for an antiabolitionist named Richard S. Fay, recently failed candidate for Congress and son of a well-known judge, to be chairman. His supporters were the majority in the hall, and the motion passed with deafening support.
Police now swarmed the hall. Dock workers raised their fists and older men lifted their canes as they pushed toward the stage. They sensed they now controlled the meeting. As Fay started to address the fuming crowd, Douglass was ready to make his presence felt. Rising on stage, he asked, "Mr. Chairman, will you allow me one word?"
Tremont Temple
Fay angrily replied, "No! not yet!" A deafening noise rose from the shocked abolitionists, whose celebration was being hijacked. Fay then lamented the possible dissolution of the Union while Douglass kept trying to interrupt him. The crowd cried, "Order! Order! Sit Down! Throttle him." The Reverend Martin told his supporters in the hall, "We do not recognize him as chairman."
Coldly, Fay countered, "If you keep quiet while I speak, you will hear some truths which you do not hear at home." As the police moved through the hall pulling apart those exchanging blows, Fay read resolutions condemning John Brown, determined to reassure the South that Massachusetts did not sympathize with the "martyr."
Douglass forcefully interrupted again, and though Fay's supporters called for him to quickly end the assembly, he told Douglass to speak quickly. Fay's people did not want to hear Douglass, and they stood on their seats to jeer him. Douglass bellowed over the shouts, "This is one of the most impudent. . . barefaced . . . outrageous acts on free speech . . . that I have ever witnessed in Boston or elsewhere . . . I know your masters."
The crowd chanted, "Treason, treason! Police! Police! Put him out! Put him out!"
He continued, "I have served the same master that you are serving." Men screamed as he continued, "You are serving the slaveholders. Sir, there is a law which we are bound to obey, and the Abolitionists are most prompt to obey it. It is the law written in the Constitution of the United States, saying, 'all men are born free and equal.' " Douglass coolly added that this applied even to "the stout, big-fisted fellow down there, who has just insulted me." Douglass's supporters roared with laughter. Fay's men were indignant, demanding "Put a rope round his neck."
The police moved to the front of the stage and Douglass assured them, "I will sit down when my time is out." He fearlessly taunted again, "If I was a slave-driver, and had hold of that man for five minutes, I would let more daylight through his skin than ever got there before." At this taunt, Fay and his men declared that Douglass was finished and began to fling chairs at him. Word of the proceedings now spread around the streets of Boston, and more antiabolitionists came rushing in. Yet Douglass would not stop, howling, "I will not yield the floor." As the level of crowd violence rose higher, the police seized Douglass to carry him away.
Douglass broke free from their hands and ran to the other end of the platform. Three cheers went up for him. Members of the mob
gleefully shrieked, "Put him out." The chief of police announced, "If you retire, you will stop the police from performing a very unpleasant duty." Douglass still tried to speak, "We will not yield our place on the platform. No, by God!"
Some agitators drew their guns and pointed at the black speakers still on the stage. Women screeched in fear. Police now began to hurl black men out of the hall, and Douglass's followers abruptly seemed far less committed to stay and fight for their lives than he did. A journalist watched with astonishment as Douglass, fighting "like a trained pugilist," took on scores of white men. Casting men off him, Douglass "cleared through the crowd to the rostrum, which he clutched with an air that indicated his determination to hold to his place."
Police officers swarmed around him, taking hold of his body, one jerking Douglass by his hair. The officers were now emotionally with the crowd instead of protecting the speakers, and some angered officers took hold of Douglass and dragged him to the edge of the Tremont Temple stage. They then violently threw him down the stairs. Still conscious and fighting, Douglass rose to escape as his assailants pursued him until he was out of the hall.
With Douglass and his followers seemingly routed, the southern sympathizers now set to write new resolutions denouncing the incendiary abolitionist assembly which was now effectively in shambles. Still, it was not over. From the back of the auditorium, astonishingly, Douglass walked back in with clothes torn, hair disheveled, and eyes blazing with rage. To the shock of the crowd, he walked right down the aisle. No eyes left him and no hands touched him. Once he got on stage, he looked around for a few moments and then situated himself. Sitting in silent resolve, it was clear that Douglass would not be moved until he was ready to leave on his own accord. The police chief confirmed that, on orders of the mayor, this meeting was over.
The horde did not let up during the day, knocking down any black men they found, beating and trampling them, and smashing the windows of black households. One free man fought back by hacking at a white man's leg with a hatchet. Abolitionist orator Wendell Phillips and women he was walking with on the Common were stalked by men howling, "Stone him!" "Hit him with a brick!" "Hang him!"24
That night, abolitionists reconvened at the Joy Street Baptist Church, which for decades, in an alleyway on the backside of Beacon Hill, had been the heart of Boston's black community. Furious white men were outside the church, lobbing rocks at the windows. When it was Douglass's turn to speak, the lessons of that morning were clear. The topic of that meeting had been "How Can American Slavery Be Abolished?" The fury Douglass had seen in the New England whites left no doubt as to both the staggering nature of the challenge they all faced—and the unavoidable solution. Now he would spend his life "in advocating John Brown's way of accomplishing our object."25
In further reflecting on Lincoln's election, Douglass was staggered that the South would bother with the secession movement. In assessing the Republican stance, he could not figure what the southern firebrands had to gain—if they just took Lincoln's platform at face value, they could achieve all that they had ever wanted. In believing that the new president in his moderation was in fact abolitionism's "most powerful enemy," he thought the new administration could well be "the best protectors of slavery," and if this were so, the South had nothing to fear. "Slavery will be as safe, and safer, in the Union under such a president, than it can be under any President of a Southern Confederacy." Only if they seceded would Lincoln "would then be entirely absolved from his slave-hunting, slave-catching, and slave-killing pledges and the South would have to defend slavery with its own guns, and hunt her negroes with her own dogs."26
The unsettling events of December, however, culminated with stunning news flashing through the telegraph wires on December 20 that the Union now truly faced its greatest crisis in the seventy-two years since the ratification of the Constitution. By unanimous vote at the secession conference meeting in Charleston, South Carolina formally dissolved its ties with the United States. With that vote, the visage of war loomed nearer than ever. The epicenter of disunion, Charleston was important because it promised to be the flash point of war in a more immediate way: The day after Christmas, Ken-tuckian Major Robert Anderson transferred his federal troops from Fort Moultrie to the more easily defended Fort Sumter in the Charleston harbor. It was one of few remaining federal redoubts in northern control, and the secessionists were clear that it could not remain.
The president-elect in this crisis atmosphere wrote a reassuring letter to an old friend, Alexander H. Stephens, knowing the Georgia congressman was publicly advocating against the wisdom of secession. As he had maintained so many times, Lincoln stated that he would never interfere with slavery where it already existed: "The South would be in no more danger in this respect, than it was in the days of Washington." Then he added a just summary of what was still dividing them all, despite these repeated vows of nonintervention. "You think slavery is right and ought to be extended; while we think it is wrong and ought to be restricted. That I suppose is the rub."27This point was the rub indeed, and the resulting friction was set to explode.
The final conflict that Douglass had so long predicted was now drawing closer. As December 1860 ended, the imminent secession of six other Deep South states looked inevitable, and eight other states pondered their course. Once secession began, Douglass was determined to command a national stage from which he would allow no man to remove him.
1861
CHAPTER 5
Mighty Currents
The four long months leading to Lincoln's inauguration were filled with anxiety, as South Carolina's actions sank in and the telegraph wires burned with more secession news. On January 9, Mississippi withdrew from the Union; the next day Florida; the next after that Alabama; on January 19 Georgia passed its ordinance of secession and on January 26, Louisiana; Texas followed suit on the first day of February. As the cascade of secession continued, federal forts and garrisons also fell, quickly creating the potential flash point of Fort Sumter in Charleston harbor as a lonely holdout to federal authority. Like others, Frederick Douglass felt acutely nervous over the course of events but for a reason few shared. What he most feared were last-minute concessions to the South that would deal a weighty blow to abolitionist interests. Douglass thought the antiabolitionist mobs in Boston, Philadelphia, Rochester, and elsewhere were furthering the South's demands and aggressive stance. He pleaded with those who blamed abolitionists for the nation's dire prospects to recognize the true threat, and he asked, "Now what disturbs, divides and threatens to bring on civil war, and to break up and ruin this country, but slavery. Who but one morally blind can fail to see it; and who but a moral coward can hesitate to declare it."1
Though it seemed an impossible political goal, Douglass still asserted that immediate and full emancipation was actually the only means to any lasting peace. Such a drastic measure was now "a matter of life and death."2 The South more than the North seemed to understand this, and that was why they were so ready to fight, although in some sense their political position had never seemed so promising. Though the new president was still silent on the matter of emancipation, his long train of statements on allowing slavery to be protected where it already existed held steady. Still, it was possible, from the southern perspective that the president-elect's refusal to offer any sort of "compromise" (which abolitionists considered simple capitulation) indicated that Lincoln was indeed an enemy to any future that they imagined.
Either way, Lincoln's firm history of refusing slavery's expansion into the emerging western states meant that sooner or later the slave states would be overwhelmed in Congress by the further admission of free-state politicians. The South saw that their previous hold on the levers of power was now irretrievably broken. Even if the Republican agenda held firm, without touching slavery where it existed, few southerners felt sanguine about seeing the presidency and both houses of Congress move inexorably into the control of those who believed slavery was a moral wrong. Those advocating se
cession were looking not simply at Lincoln's election, but at the meaning of his election for decades to come.
From the northern perspective, however, this view of things seemed strange and close to paranoid. The rise of the Republican party did not signal that abolitionism was anything more than a fringe movement, and there was little taste for anything abroad other than keeping the widely unpopular Fugitive Slave Law, a draconian measure that allowed slaveholders to take black people into the South with virtually no legal recourse. As Douglass had seen all too well, there was in fact a rising tide of hope in the North that an overarching compromise such as Henry Clay's 1850 effort could somehow yoke the clashing sections together one more time. Douglass spoke for many abolitionists when he implored the North not to give in again. He called the efforts of politicians for such compromise as "cowardly, guilty and fantastical."3
But compromise efforts did emerge, including one that proposed to write slavery into the Constitution. The Crittenden Compromise was introduced to Congress on December 18. Kentucky senator John Crittenden, a man whose admiration of Henry Clay was as great as Lincoln's, spoke on the floor of the Senate on January 9, 1861, in favor of the multifaceted plan, and though its prospects seemed dim, others were hoping the president-elect would eventually break his silence to support it. On the surface, its chief provision was to reimpose the old 1820 Missouri Compromise limits on slavery, only allowing slave states below the 36°30' latitude, but it also proposed a new constitutional amendment stating slavery in its current states would be free of federal intervention forever. Since Lincoln was clearly against expansion of slavery into the western territories and had based his whole reentry into politics on this sole idea, it was improbable he would endorse any new slave states, north or south of that famous line. But would he support the amendment that preserved slavery in perpetuity? There was no word from Lincoln, and by January 16, it appeared dead in the Senate, but there was a long period still until the new president was inaugurated.
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