Douglass saw this as one of the most dangerous threats yet seen to possibly ending slavery in America. He was appalled that Republicans he had championed, such as William Seward, seemed increasingly comfortable with such ideas. Douglass warned his readers, "We are, therefore, now in danger of having an open palpable Covenant with Death, and Agreement with Hell." Though he did not believe the Constitution to be inherently proslavery, work in Congress was now moving forward to change that forever. This was, in the abolitionist's eyes, a moment of extreme peril. As frightened politicians thought to fix the Union, it seemed the rejoining "must be again cemented with the slave's blood." If the North relinquished what antislavery principles it had, "The plantation rule will thus extend itself over the North, and the Negro will be hated, persecuted and despised as never before." Further, Douglass feared for the safety of any abolitionist around the country.4
In a strange quirk of history, the presidents-elect of both the North and South left their homes on the same day, February 11, for their places of inauguration, Lincoln from Springfield and Jefferson Davis from his Mississippi farm. A week later in Montgomery, Alabama, Davis was sworn in as the first president of the Confederate States of America. Despite these events, Lincoln's twelve-day train procession to Washington was marked by a strange series of statements along the way. In Columbus, Ohio, he told the state legislature, "I have not maintained silence from any want of real anxiety. It is a good thing that there is no more than anxiety, for there is nothing going wrong. It is a consoling circumstance that when we look out there is nothing that really hurts anybody. We entertain different views upon political questions, but nobody is suffering anything."5In Cleveland, he added, "I think that there is no occasion for any excitement. The crisis, as it is called, is altogether an artificial crisis . . ."6
Artificial or not, it seemed real enough to detective Alan Pinkerton, who after death threats against the president-elect whisked him overnight into Washington and deposited him at Willard's Hotel at six A.M. The train tour was over, and Lincoln had nine days until Inaugural Day to pull together a speech, a cabinet, an administration, and a nation.
One of the few hints that Lincoln was apprehensive of what awaited him was when he had admitted earlier in New York, "It is true that while I hold myself without much mock modesty, the humblest of all individuals that have ever been elevated to the Presidency, I have a more difficult task to perform than any one of them."7The frightening results of the folly and indecision of the last administration much less the southern insurrection certainly made this statement hardly hyperbole. The new president would take office with the military in pitiable shape, most of the talented West Point graduates already in the process of joining the Confederate army, many of the Union's forts and ports wrenched from his control, a significant proportion of Congress absent or soon to be, the Treasury's coffers virtually empty, the chief justice his sworn enemy, and the nation shorn in two. George Washington had formed a government from nothing; Abraham Lincoln had to form a government from chaos.
A few days before the inauguration, Douglass was feeling hopeful about Lincoln's intentions, as the man had given no indication that he would in any way capitulate to the South's demands. The editor took this as a sign that Lincoln would not betray the ideals upon which voters elected him. If he was correct, he knew the South would never accept this president, that "the context must now be decided, and decided forever, which of the two, Freedom or Slavery, shall give law to this Republic. Let the conflict come."8
Abraham Lincoln was inaugurated the sixteenth president of the United States on the early morning of March 4, in a tense city where blue winter sunshine could not disguise its gloom. Troops lined the streets and snipers were arrayed atop federal buildings. As Lincoln rode from the White House to the Capitol, one spectator commented, "It seemed more like escorting a prisoner to his doom than a President to his inauguration."9Despite the ominous atmosphere, Lincoln in a dry and coolly reasonable address sought to appeal to his countrymen, principally to his southern listeners (if there were any at that point) to save the Union. He stoutly maintained that "the Union of these States is perpetual." Secession was, in this sense, an illusion that his government would never recognize as legitimate. As president, sworn to uphold the nation's laws, he would address the insurrection by fulfilling his oath. That need not mean war—"In your hands, my dissatisfied fellow countrymen, and not in mine, is the momentous issue of civil war. The government will not assail you"
Yet he was more than willing to meet his disaffected countrymen halfway. There would be no interference with slavery or any state's "domestic institutions." He would enforce the Fugitive Slave Law (as odious as he found it). He would even support the draconian Crittenden constitutional amendment permitting slavery (like the existence of the Union) in perpetuity. Lincoln essentially offered to make the entire basis of the Civil War a nonexistent factor.
In a shift of tone, he concluded with an evocative flourish: "The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battle-field, and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearthstone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature."10
As the day ended, Lincoln walked into his office for the very first time, and he was greeted with the news that Major Robert Anderson felt he did not have the supplies to hold out until the Union navy could resupply him. Fort Sumter was the first item on the desk, and there was no time left to compromise.
Douglass had had high hopes that the new president would step into the leadership void, but he was severely disappointed when he read Lincoln's inaugural address, both for the coldness it displayed toward the slaves and the conciliatory, even kind, attitude offered to the South. The words he seized upon were "I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so."11It seemed to him that the adding of the word "inclination" was superfluously callous, if not morally obtuse.
In his rage, Douglass declared that Lincoln had begun his presidency by "announcing his complete loyalty to slavery."12In regard to a constitutional amendment that would write slavery permanently into the nation's constitution, Lincoln said he favored such a step, saying "[H]olding such a provision to now be implied constitutional law, I have no objection to its being made express, and irrevocable."13
From Douglass's vantage point, what kind of antislavery president was this? Lincoln spent a considerable amount of his speech reassuring the South that he would indeed enforce the Fugitive Slave Law.
In this straightforward signal to the South that even slave laws would be faithfully served, Douglass declared in his April Monthly, "what an excellent slave hound he is . . ." Douglass saw what his radical allies had been saying all along in their opposition to the Republican candidate, and he furiously turned on Lincoln, condemning his "slave hunting, slave catching and slave killing pledges." Sickened, Douglass felt he had been betrayed. A livid Douglass wrote,
Some thought we had in Mr. Lincoln the nerve and decision of an OLIVER CROMWELL; but the result shows that we merely have a continuation of the PIERCES and BUCHANANS, and that the Republican President bends the knee to slavery as readily as any of his infamous predecessors.
Douglass felt humiliated by Lincoln's weakness. This attitude of benevolence and conciliation would only embolden the southern traitors when Lincoln should "blast their high blown pride." Sadly, Douglass concluded, "Mr. Lincoln opens his address by announcing his complete loyalty to slavery in the slave states. He stands upon the same moral level, and is in no respect better than they."14
Yet somehow, these same slaveholders did not hear in this speech any such moral similarity. What they read in Lincoln's appeal was another anti-slavery screed, and so the nation moved headlong into a bloodbath.
Lincoln was acutely aware that the stakes of the war extended beyond the nation
and its borders. The Confederacy's hope to expand and create an empire based on the model of southern slavery had been openly espoused, most notably by Alexander Stephens, his old friend who was now vice president under Jefferson Davis. Stephens proclaimed these states formed only "the nucleus of a growing power, which, if we are true to ourselves, our destiny, and high mission, will become the controlling power on this continent." 15 The annexation of Cuba often had been discussed before the war, and if the South were to win its liberation, that expansion effort would likely continue, with an eye to countries in Central America.
Prior to the war, Alexander Stephens had served with Lincoln in Congress, and they continued a correspondence up to the war and communicated about tentative peace offers during the war itself. In a March 1861 speech in Savannah, Stephens attempted to interpret why this great collision had come, admitting that slavery was, as Thomas Jefferson had predicted long ago, the "rock upon which the old Union is split." But he doubted that Jefferson had fully understood the true nature of slavery, falsely believing it to be an evil, a social institution that the nation would find a way to outgrow. This was "fundamentally wrong," Stephens proclaimed; Jefferson's error was believing in "the equality of the races": "Our new Government is founded upon exactly the opposite ideas; its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man, that the slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and moral condition." Stephens added that his new government "is the first, in the history of the world, based on this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth . . . ,"16
Lincoln understood what powerful elements of the Confederate government coveted and why this demanded a war waged until such ambitions were checked. He made it clear, however, that if war came, it would not be from his hands. Yet, the unthinkable seemed more likely each day as state after state left the Union, and rushed steps toward establishing a new Confederate States of America proceeded, most notably with elected representatives and newly appointed president Jefferson Davis preparing an army for their "nation's" defense. The hastening dynamic of secession seemed inexorable.
William Lloyd Garrison and Wendell Phillips, leading radical abolitionists, had for more than a decade advocated disunion, ridding the northern states of the taint and corrupting influence of slavery. After espousing this course for so long, many abolitionists were shocked that what they had wished for was coming to fruition. With a clearer mind, Douglass viewed these events as nothing less than a calamity. He had always been more than a little dubious of his fellow abolitionists (particularly those who had never been personally exposed to slavery nor had been slaves); their proclamations had often smacked of moral posturing rather than a way of freeing slaves.
For the North to secede from the South would have been to abandon forever the slaves to their fate, leaving abolitionists basking in their moral purity. It reeked of recklessness, and now they were tasting their own disunion-ist remedy. Douglass asked a question that demanded a realistic answer: "Will the South become less intensely slave-holding, and the North more antislavery?" Douglass thought not. In these drastic times, Douglass wanted Lincoln to speak forcefully on how he would fight to hold on to all parts of the country. Not to do so would quickly create for northern abolitionists a powerless situation that his English abolitionist friends had long experienced as they looked on American slavery, as "a thing of foreign interest over which we have no power, and therefore, no responsibility." Successful southern secession would "end the thirty years moral warfare with the accursed slave system." As the nation dissolved, patriotic feelings stirred in him. In his writings he evoked "the mighty rivers and fertile fields that bind it together" and other patriotic images to help Americans understand that true separation was impossible.17
It was a strange time of political limbo as the southern states fell, one by one, like dominoes, into the seduction of separation. In this void, the president seemed a nonentity. Douglass was vexed by the president who seemed neither strong enough to preserve the Union, nor moral enough to champion emancipation.18In Rochester, New York, the Democrat and Chronicle reported, "On no occasion since the days of the Revolution have our citizens undergone the same degree of anxious exciting suspense that characterizes every hour of the day."19
In the middle of the night of April 12, 1861, firebrands in South Carolina let loose sustained artillery fire upon Fort Sumter, the spectacular cannonade lighting up the Charleston harbor. The suspense at last over, the war that so many had predicted, and so few envisioned in its future course of savagery, was upon them all. Douglass exclaimed, "Thank God!—the slaveholders themselves have saved our cause from ruin!"20
Confusion gripped cities and towns around the country. Six days after shots rang out at Fort Sumter, at a public meeting held in Rochester, thousands of citizens crowded the City Hall. Speaker after speaker called on free men to defend the Union, to enlist and respond to Lincoln's call for volunteers. Douglass described these days as "deep, intense, heartfelt, widespread and thrilling excitement."21He welcomed war because, as he told a friend in words similar to Lincoln's, "I have little hope of the freedom of the slave by peaceable means."22As he awoke in the morning and as he tried to fall asleep at night, his thoughts shifted from buoyant expectations of what this war could beget to despondency on whether the immense opportunity at hand would be lost in compromises by feeble leaders. He feared premature capitulation by the North, before the war could engulf slavery.
On the day the first local soldiers would depart Rochester, American flags hung from every building in town and patriotic designs flew from telegraph poles. The first eight companies from Rochester left on May 3 on trains bound for Elmira. Douglass was one of the twenty thousand who crowded State Street to watch the troops parade. His emotions swelled as he watched wives embracing departing husbands and heard the mournful cries of mothers who did not know if they would see their sons again. Though it was not a thought held by many in this throng, he held slavery responsible for every aching moments in these families' lives.23
But this was not his only emotion as the men marched to their destinies. The black man also watched these boldly outfitted men with envy, wondering when and if the country would afford the same opportunity to his people. Douglass wrote that he was ready to go and would have gladly marched in these ranks. Only days before, he had told residents to "let a few colored regiments go down South and assist in setting their brothers free, and they could and would do this work effectively for our government." Someone stopped Douglass in the street and asked what his people would do in this conflict. Douglass responded, "Would to God you would let us do something!" 24
Intimately understanding how the social structures of the South worked, Douglass told audiences that it would quickly and efficiently put black men to work building fortifications and doing other hard labor to aid the war effort. Clearly, the Union was not taking equal advantage of the vast resources his people could offer. He detested the racism he saw in the North's refusal to employ black men, asking northerners why they thought that they were too aristocratic to march by the side of a black man.25He also predicted, "If this conflict shall expand to the grand dimensions which events seem to indicate, the iron arm of the black man may be called into service."26
His life mission of destroying slavery now had a means and purpose—to put free blacks into the battle. To do so, he encouraged blacks to organize themselves into martial societies and companies, to buy arms and learn to use them. Douglass declared, "Let's not only be ready on call, but be casting about for an opportunity to strike for the freedom of the slave, and for the rights of human nature." He began articulating these goals in monthly lectures on Sunday afternoons at the Spring Street A.M.E. Zion Church in Rochester. Every month the crowds grew, until church leaders realized they needed to find a larger space if they were going to continue sponsoring Douglass's addresses. Along with his monthly newspaper, these speeches gave him the opportunity to push for an ab
olition war.27He told an audience on April 28, ". . . the control of events has been taken out of our hands . . . we have fallen into the mighty current of eternal principles—invisible forces, which are shaping and fashioning events as they wish, using us only as instruments to work out their own results in our National destiny." The understanding of freedom and the war that Lincoln would come to would be strikingly similar. Douglass predicted in April, "But the time may yet come when the President shall proclaim liberty through all the land." This was a conflict that "will, and must, if continued, take on a broader margin. The law of its life is growth."28
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