The New York Times argued earlier in December that emancipation would be a public opinion disaster: "The time for the safe and successful treatment of the Slavery question, in its broadest aspects, has not yet comed "39
1862
CHAPTER 7
Different American Destinies
Amonth after the New Year began, Douglass was in Boston again. He was the fourth speaker in a series of talks hosted by a new group, the Emancipation League. Abolitionists founded the association to promote emancipation as a moral and military necessity. The group's leadership was dominated by the allies of William Lloyd Garrison, so it was notable that Douglass was invited because he and his former mentor were still estranged. Garrison had never been one to tolerate dissent, yet now the nonviolent Gar-risonians were all for winning the war and fighting against the division of the nation. Douglass could hardly hide his satisfaction, believing that these events proved him ten years ahead of them in his thinking.l
His February 1862 speech centered on the need for the nation to solve the issue of slavery, which, he said, involved "the whole question of life and death to the nation." Despite his brief flirtation with the idea of Haitian resettlement, Douglass was utterly committed to being an American. He clearly stated a message intended for Abraham Lincoln and every American who shared Lincoln's views: "In birth, in sentiment, in ideas, in hopes, in aspirations, and responsibilities, I am an American citizen."2
Douglass traveled from Philadelphia to Milford, Massachusetts, to Jersey City, to Naples and South Livonia, New York, telling white Americans, "We have sought to bind the chains of slavery on the limbs of the black man, without thinking that at last we should find the other end of that hateful chain about our own necks." He recounted the distinguished history of black troops in previous conflicts, comparing the Union's mediocre generals with national heroes who had been glad to have black soldiers under their command. He had traveled more than two thousand miles in January alone, battling throat problems and colds, no small matter for a man who often spoke for three hours a night.3
Rosetta Douglass
As he traveled, his family's letters trailed him. His eldest daughter, Rosetta, was twenty-two, and knew well the more vulnerable Douglass that her father kept hidden from the world. After the Civil War she would write, "You say you are a lonely man no one knows it better than myself and the causes." From an early age, she assumed a strong role in her father's life and corresponded with Douglass's female reformer friends. She also proved talented at the piano, mellifluous sounds the fiddle-playing Douglass loved to hear. He would respond by singing for her and neighborhood children on summer nights, often favoring "Nelly Was a Lady" and "My Old Kentucky Home." 4
When she was a little girl, several weeks into her education at a school in Rochester, she described her day to her father, which included the faculty isolating her the whole time, allowing her inside the building only when the white girls went outside. Although no white parents had asked for the separation, the principal did this in deference to the racial feelings of local citizens. Douglass was livid that anyone would humiliate Rosetta, and he boycotted the schools by hiring private tutors for his children. Desegregating the city's schools became one of his long-term projects, and nine years later segregation ended in Rochester schools. By then, Rosetta had finished her education at the progressive Oberlin College preparatory school.5
After graduation, Rosetta went to the Philadelphia area to teach. She found teaching to be difficult, and the shadow that her famous father cast made the prospects of failure more depressing. Her wish to please her father made her struggles teaching and her dislike of the family she was staying with even harder. She wrote, "I did not know I could be so unhappy . . . I would like to come home but—feel ashamed because I did so very much wish to get—school and pay my board and I then could feel independent."6
Her father also was unhappy. Douglass lamented what the renewal of the stalled war might bring. "It is enough to exhaust the patience of Job, to read every morning that 'all is quiet on the Potomac'"7 After the disaster of Bull Run, Lincoln had appointed young General George McClellan to mold an army that would be prepared the next time they went into conflict. McClellan was adept at drilling and sluggish in moving his men toward battle, much to Lincoln's frustration. Lincoln and his newly appointed secretary of war, Edwin M. Stanton, struggled to make the conservative general engage the enemy. Lincoln wanted to win; McClellan was content to force a draw, one that would make the South able to rejoin the Union with slavery intact, its social institutions untouched.
The general's contentment to let slavery go unharmed made him anathema to abolitionists like Douglass. Yet, the longer Lincoln retained McClellan as his general, the more Douglass took Lincoln to be a confused man. At New York City's Cooper Union Institute in February, a crowd of more than two thousand heard Douglass speak. He was convinced that people he encountered over the previous months were changing their views, seeing emancipation in a new light. But would Lincoln?8
There were strains in Lincoln's life that had nothing to do with the war. On February 20, his beloved son Willie died of a fever. A gifted, bright, and sweet child, said to be the most like his father of the four sons, this was a heavy blow, particularly to his wife, whose grief would border on madness for many months. Both Douglass and Lincoln went through the very personal devastation of losing children who were close in age. But the swift and pressing current of national affairs propelled Lincoln's life onward, despite grief.
Those in favor of emancipation were still trying to get a good read on Lincoln. On January 20, Lincoln met with two such men, Moncure Daniel Conway, Unitarian minister and outspoken abolitionist, and William Henry Channing, nephew of the illustrious minister. After their meeting with Lincoln, Conway reported that Lincoln told them that it was their responsibility, not his, to move public sentiment in support of the action they desired. In order to raise this enthusiasm for freeing the blacks, Lincoln told them they could "say anything you like about me, if that will help. Don't spare me!" After he finished laughing, he more seriously told them that action on this account was possible in the future.9
Meanwhile, Lincoln was not totally idle, quietly following his long-held belief that a cautious, long-term solution to the conundrum of slavery was the way forward. He was working on gradual, compensated emancipation plans. He wanted to pay slave owners fairly for their loss of "property," and in demonstrating his math for a senator, he wrote: "Less than one half-day's cost of this war would pay for all the slaves in Delaware at four hundred dollars per head." Further, "less than eighty-seven days' cost of this war would, at the same price, pay for all in Delaware, Maryland, District of Columbia, Kentucky and Missouri." He suggested a date in 1882 by when slavery would be over in these states. Lincoln felt it was better to spend this money on freeing people as opposed to killing them. To his bitter disappointment, however, his arranged meetings to press these ideas with border state representatives went nowhere. He would need another approach.10
Word of these efforts finally reached Douglass, and he took them as grounds to cautiously believe in Lincoln's sincere, though flawed, efforts again. As infuriatingly moderate and hesitant as these plans were, they were the first time in his life that he had seen a sitting American president advocate any form of freedom for his people.11Writing in an English newspaper, Douglass revealed that during February he had thought Lincoln a man intent on "repressing all anti-slavery sentiment at the North, and so to manage the war as that slavery should receive no detriment." He wanted the English to know, as they evaluated helping the Confederacy, that this news changed the equation. Douglass did not champion dealing with slavery in mild terms, as Lincoln's plans on gradual emancipation did, but the fact that the president was taking positive steps, however subtle, made Douglass consider the notion that "we have fairly reached the turning point of the moral struggle involved in this terrible war."12
Lincoln would need more pressure. Yet, Douglass optimisti
cally told a Rochester audience in late March, "A blind man can see where the President's heart is . . . He is tall and strong but he is not done growing, he grows as the nation grows."13
This movement on gradual emancipation wasn't the only encouraging news for Douglass. Lincoln steadfastly upheld the execution of Nathaniel P. Gordon, a sea captain caught with 893 black people on a ship bound for the United States from Africa. Though domestic American bondage remained intact, international human trafficking was piracy; however, up to now no president had enforced the ultimate penalty for those involved in its perpetuation. Many thought Lincoln overzealous for demanding the life of this Maine man with a young wife and child, but as sympathetic a man as Lincoln was, he thought stealing souls from their native land for slavery's dark purposes was not forgivable in this world. The execution penalty stuck.14
For abolitionists, this was a matter beyond one man's life—it reflected, instead, a position on whether people could continue fueling slavery with new blood and not fear the consequences. After Gordon's execution, Ottilie Assing contentedly wrote, " . . . the captain's execution is therefore the first blow directly aimed at the trade itself in this country."15
Meanwhile, the Lincoln administration had also signed off on a measure backed by Charles Sumner, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, to bestow full diplomatic recognition to two black republics, Liberia and Haiti. There were critics of this action, but Lincoln was again showing a reformer spirit. James Redpath relayed the message to Haiti's president that the United States would not object to a black ambassador being sent. Lincoln's wording to Redpath still reflected his Illinois roots, quipping, "You can tell the President of Haiti that I shan't tear my shirt if he does send a nigger here!"16
Words like these made Douglass cringe, but he was more interested in action, especially when he heard Congress was considering a bill to abolish slavery in Washington, D.C. Douglass explained the symbolic importance of slavery's preservation in Washington in the March Monthly, stating ironically that it "must be kept alive as a token to all the world that America, after, as before the rebellion, is under the dominion of the slave power." The result was a "damning inconsistency of a free country with a slave capital."17Many white Washingtonians, with their southern sensibilities, dreaded the measure, believing it would bring an influx of shiftless free black people into their city. Lincoln had encouraged Sumner to push such legislation, which the House and Senate shortly after passed. However, even if he was ready for the underlying reality of the measure, Lincoln may have had concerns about the mechanics of this emancipation.18
In the days between the measure's congressional approval and the president's signature, Bishop Daniel A. Payne of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, physically slight but spiritually powerful, visited Lincoln and expressed his wish that Lincoln's pen would meet this paper.19The bill was passed on Friday night, April 11. On the following Monday, Payne met with Lincoln in the company of Representatives Elihu Washburn and Carl Schurz. The four sat by a fire and Payne asked, "I am here to learn whether or not you intend to sign the bill of emancipation?" He continued, "Mr. President, you will remember that on the eve of your departure from Springfield, Illinois, you begged the citizens of the republic to pray for you." They had done so and had also prayed they would be delivered from this wicked institution, he said. Lincoln, whom Payne found warm but not fluent in his conversation, responded, "Well, I must believe that God has led me thus far, for I am conscious that I never would have accomplished what has been done if he had not been with me to counsel and to shield." Yet he would not say whether or not he would sign the bill. After twenty minutes, Payne left for Lincoln pamphlets on what the A.M.E. Church was doing to improve the lives of black people, then departed.20
On April 16, as McClellan was just beginning his achingly slow advance on Richmond and the nation was still absorbing the vast number of deaths suffered in the near-loss of the battle of Shiloh in the west the week before, Lincoln signed the act abolishing slavery in the capital. It was something he had expressed support for since he was a congressman more than fifteen years ago. In a message to Congress, Lincoln wrote, "I have never doubted the constitutional authority of Congress to abolish slavery in this District; and I have ever desired to see the national capital freed from the institution in some satisfactory way."
He signed the act, but more troubling words followed. Lincoln was gratified that "the two principles of compensation, and colonization, are both recognized, and practically applied in the Act."21Part of the act's language concerned funds for black people to emigrate elsewhere. Douglass would soon learn more about Lincoln's affinity for programs that took black people out of the country. For now, however, he focused on the positive, as did the seventeen black churches all over Washington, whose worship services on Sunday thundered with rapturous praise as never before. Celebrations like this happened in free black communities all over the country, so long starved for news this splendid. In a letter of gratitude to Senator Sumner, Douglass revealed, "I trust I am not dreaming but the events taking place seem like a dream."22
Douglass had no doubt that this was the most significant result of the war thus far. Douglass sought to capitalize on the momentum. In an article titled, "Shall We Look Back?" he reminded readers that when something is set in motion, it tends to keep rolling—but its corollary was equally true, if that motion ceases, it is all the more difficult to get the object moving again. He pointed to this time of extraordinary opportunity that abolitionists could not let pass without pushing on. Emancipation in one city was a great boon, but the District of Columbia was small in comparison to a vast land where every sunrise brought more agonizing toil.23
The constant goal that Douglass pressed for was the still somewhat incredible notion that black men could fight for their own freedom in this conflict. It was no secret that encampments of black people who had taken flight from slavery were swelling by the thousands, and Douglass recommended that the government start furnishing "ARMS, NOT ALMS FOR THE CONTRABANDS." 24He was encouraged by the actions of General David Hunter, whose respect for authority was at best questionable. Working in Union-occupied parts of the South Carolina sea islands where white owners had abandoned their plantations, Hunter took charge of organizing the black men left behind. Instead of farming crops, he decided they would be more useful preparing to fight. On May 9, he issued a general order that freed those enslaved in Georgia, Florida, and South Carolina. Because Hunter believed military necessity forced martial law, which he declared to be incompatible with slavery, he thought he could accomplish what John Fremont had failed to do.
When news of Hunter's ambitious experiment reached the North, Douglass was elated and reprinted Hunter's letter to Secretary of War Edwin Stan-ton in his paper. Hunter maintained that black men would make fine soldiers: "The experiment of arming the Blacks, so far as I have made it, has been a complete and even marvelous success." Describing these men as eager to fight and attentive to military discipline, Hunter was seeking to challenge the deeply held racist belief that these men would be too dense and cowardly for the training of a soldier. Though these disorganized regiments would never take the field, the ramifications of the order were immediate and long term.25
Much of the nation felt very differently than the determined General Hunter. The New York Times wrote that arming black men was "laden with possible dangers to humanity." Peter Sturtevant told Lincoln from New York, "This act has done us more harm than a loss of two battles and has made Kentucky & Maryland almost against us if not wholly."26
On the other hand, German-American Republican Carl Schurz wrote to Lincoln that while the president could well feel it was necessary to annul this declaration, it was an issue that was not going away: "As our armies proceed farther South the force of circumstances will drive us into measures which were not in the original programme, but which necessity will oblige you to adopt." He hinted that freeing and arming black men might have to be part of a new program.27<
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Though he was well aware of this dynamic, Lincoln publicly distanced himself from the situation as thoroughly as he could, quickly issuing a proclamation stating that he "had no knowledge, information, or belief, of an intention on the part of General Hunter to issue such a proclamation." He made it clear that this action was void.
Yet Lincoln's document did not have the terse, cross quality he had addressed to Fremont after his declaration of freedom in the area he commanded. The ensuing months had seen an evolution of Lincoln's thinking on the matter, a change clearly indicated in the second paragraph of his nullification.
I further make known that whether it be competent for me, as Commander-in-Chief of the Army and Navy, to declare the Slaves of any state or states, free, and whether at any time, in any case, it shall have become a necessity indispensable to the maintenance of the government, to exercise such supposed power, are questions which, under my responsibility, I reserve to myself, and which I can not feel in leaving to the decision of commanders in the field.28
It was as much an assertion of the president's powers to emancipate people, a contentious issue, as it was a rebuke of Hunter. Was Lincoln opening the door to something?
Douglass and Lincoln Page 13