The administration paid black men the wages of laborers instead of soldiers. White men received thirteen dollars per month and black men received ten dollars, minus a three-dollar clothing allowance. The administration claimed to be obeying the laws as they were then written, though many thought this was passively done out of deference to those still against black troops. It seemed that every letter a member of the Fifty-fourth received contained accounts of how their families were suffering. One soldier pleaded, "My wife and three little children at home are, in a manner, freezing and starving to death . . . How can men do their duty, with such agony in their minds?" Another soldier wrote to Lincoln, telling him of the battles they had fought on the South Carolina coast. He continued, "Now the main questions is. Are We Soldiers, or are we LABOURERS."49
Sergeant William Walker of the South Carolina Third Infantry (Colored) learned the tragic answer. He, like around 80 percent of the black men who fought, had escaped slavery.50 For these men in particular, the three dollars were critical for financially fraught families. He led a group to the tent of their commander where they stacked their weapons in protest and peacefully returned to their tents without their weapons. For this act, officers charged Walker with inciting a mutiny. A few weeks later, his life ended in front of a firing squad. Governor Andrew lamented, "The Government which found no law to pay him except as a nondescript and a contraband, nevertheless found law enough to shoot him as a soldier." Scholars often herald Lincoln's softhearted tendency to commute execution sentences. One then wonders why Walker was not worthy of such mercy?51
Private Wallace Baker of Charles's Massachusetts Fifty-fifth met a similar fate when his anger over the issue boiled over and he struck an officer. A witness remarked, "No man ever met his death with less trepidation than Wallace Baker." One inequality led to another, with black men making up 8 percent of the Union fighting force but more than 20 percent of the executions. As well, there were still no commissioned black officers, and this inequality was now the cause of almost as much unrest. The Lincoln administration believed this prohibition was a way to soften the shock of employing blacks as soldiers at all. One soldier wrote, "We want men we can understand and who can understand us . . . we want simple justice."52
Finally, and most deadly, soldiers did not feel protected by the government in the event of their capture. In December of 1862, Confederate president Jefferson Davis ordered southern armies to turn over captured black men to state governments which would deal with the prisoners according to state law. These laws punished black insurrections with death. However, the reality was that wounded or surrendered soldiers would not even make it that far. Members of Lewis's regiment were found bound and executed near the sites of their South Carolina battles. One black soldier captured in Virginia escaped to recount that he watched as defenseless friends were led away to the woods and hung, executed on the banks of a river, and had their skulls crushed by the butt ends of muskets.53
Confederates themselves left the most chilling accounts of what happened to black soldiers after battles. G. W. Grayson, serving in Florida, compared the aftermath of a battle to quail hunting. Rebels combed through fields first and, ignoring cries for mercy, executed whom they found. They then proceeded to a nearby creek where black men hid with only their noses above water. Grayson thought his comrades seemed like wild beasts as they dragged the black men out of the water and murdered them.54
Hannah Johnson was the mother of a Massachusetts Fifty-fourth private whom she had brought out of slavery in Louisiana to raise in upstate New York. After her enormous efforts to ensure a better future for him, she was reluctant to let him fight. Eventually she did because she believed "Mr. Lincoln will never let them sell out colored soldier for slaves . . . he will rettallyate and stop it." In a letter to Lincoln, she told him that her son had proved himself as a man at Fort Wagner and deserved his protection. Although it seemed cruel, she implored him to react in kind or the Confederates would not end their brutality. She also asked him about rumors that he would rescind the Emancipation Proclamation. Begging him to never do such a thing, she added, "When you are dead and in Heaven, in a thousand years that action of yours will make the Angels sing your praises I know it."55
The discrimination pained Douglass on a number of levels. It jeopardized not only the lives of his sons, but also the lives of young men whom he had publicly and prominently promised would have equal treatment. This is what Steams had understood to be the arrangement, but that did not change how those who believed his assurances would view him. As reports of these discriminations reached the North, recruiting became more difficult.
At a New York City recruiting meeting at Shiloh Church, Douglass finished his recruitment oration and, like a preacher saving those who would come forward, Douglass asked who would join the army. Only one man stood up. Douglass was appalled and called the audience cowards. A man named Robert Johnson stood up and told Douglass that it was not weakness that kept them from enlisting but respect for their manhood, that Johnson would not subject himself to such unfairness. This argument left Douglass in a quandary: No one more than Douglass had asked black men to assert and protect themselves.56
Such addresses were masterful and compelling, but Douglass could not keep making them. The sickening realization of betrayal crept over him. On August 1, he wrote a letter explaining why Steams would not see him at an upcoming recruiting event in Pittsburgh. Douglass's dream had confronted a painful reality. He so badly wanted to keep recruiting black men to fight, but until circumstances changed, he could no longer be the one to tell them to ignore discriminations that could well cost them their lives. Thinking of all the abuses these young men already suffered, Douglass felt he owed them that much. His recruiting was supposed to come from his heart and without qualification. He had let his own sons prepare to sacrifice their lives for a callous government unwilling to protect them. Perhaps he had been naive, too eager to think clearly, or had just overestimated the humanity of the commander in chief. Douglass's letter had nothing but love for Steams. He was very clear as to who was solely responsible for his disillusionment: Abraham Lincoln.
In the first months of his recruiting, he had thought Lincoln's silence on inequality and Confederate ruthlessness belied strong action to come. After all, issuing the Emancipation Proclamation had sent Douglass's hopes soaring. That faith was nearly gone. There were so many moments when Lincoln could have asserted himself against such obvious wrongs. Douglass asked, "How many 54ths must be cut to pieces, its mutilated prisoners killed and its living sold into Slavery, to be tortured to death by inches before Mr. Lincoln shall say 'Hold, enough!'" Deafening silence was the response. He believed that Lincoln felt nothing at the thought of black men massacred. Until the North executed southerners for every black life taken, Douglass held Lincoln as responsible as Jefferson Davis. Douglass's guilt mixed with sadness and anger, for he had been complicit in allowing young men to be "betrayed into bloody hands by the very Government in whose defense they were heroically fighting."57
Steams knew Douglass was right about the administration needing to take a firmer stand. He also knew how devastating Douglass's denunciations could be for the war effort. Fortunately, Steams was a very clever man. He wrote back that if Douglass's issues were with Lincoln, then he should address them to Lincoln. Face to face.
Douglass had written that abolitionists should "speak out trumpet-tongued in the ears of Mr. Lincoln and his Government." Steams took this literally and thought Douglass should lead the way.58
Douglass liked the idea.
CHAPTER 10
Tirst Meeting
August of 1863 was oppressively hot, with temperatures climbing to 104 degrees, streets steaming. There was no refuge from mosquitoes that found the filthy, odorous waterways to be an ideal home in Washington. The miasmic smell of sewage and garbage was thick in the air. The sewage draining into drinking water made many sick, including Willie Lincoln, who possibly died from typhoid fever. Along Penns
ylvania Avenue, there were cheap saloons, slaughterhouses, and markets. Fish and oyster peddlers stood on the corners, geese and hogs roamed through the streets. Through the city wafted the stench of dead horses, cows, cats, and other animals decomposing in and around the canals that ran close alongside the city's blocks and within easy sight of the White House.
The wounded and dying soldiers in the makeshift hospitals all over the city reinforced the overpowering stench of death, making it impossible to forget that the nation was at war.l Wounded men lay in unsanitary quarters in what had been mansions, schools, federal buildings, churches, and hotels from Judiciary Square to Washington Circle. Crippled men hobbled on their new crutches, adjusting to a life without limbs. They were the lucky ones. For many of their companions, these sweltering, putrid spaces would be their last images of life. The profession of undertaker burgeoned everywhere; Dr. Hutton & Co. on E Street between Eleventh and Twelfth bragged, "Bodies Embalmed by us NEVER TURN BLACK!"2
Journalist Noah Brooks estimated that Washington was the dirtiest city in America. He thought the moral sleaze rivaled the physical filth. Drunks and scoundrels of every kind overran what was virtually an urban military encampment. In the month before Douglass arrived, there were seven murders in one week. Going out at night in Washington, which had a feeble police force, was not recommended. The most frequented whorehouses were close to the White House, in mansions around Lafayette Square and the south side of Pennsylvania Avenue. A city official estimated that there were 450 brothels and five thousand prostitutes.3
Charles Dickens, visiting twenty years earlier, mockingly wrote that Washington had "spacious avenues that begin in nothing, and lead nowhere; streets, mile-long, that only want houses, roads, and inhabitants; public buildings that need but a public to be complete." Washington was then the fourteenth largest American city, with just over sixty thousand residents. Before the war, congressmen had felt they were living in a village with half-built markers of a great city. One could find a good baseball game near the Potomac River, but not the sophisticated entertainments of New York, though perhaps John Ford's new theater would bring some cultural development.4
Slavery had ended in the city only a year ago. Under the "black code," if white authorities caught a free black person without a residence permit, they could sell them into slavery. Offenses as trivial as bathing in the canals or flying a kite in the wrong place could be met with lashes. For black soldiers who passed through, rocks and the fists of civilians were hard realities. Many still called the local jail the "Washington Slave Pen" because of the manner in which Lincoln's friend and appointee Ward H. Lamon kept escaped blacks. Emancipation was a great boon, but Washington was still a repressive city.5
On this Monday morning, August 10, the Daily National Republican reported that Navy Yard engineer James Robinson had dragged a black man named James Wedge from his house and beaten him so severely that Wedge was left crippled. For this assault, Robinson was fined $5.94. If Douglass had wanted to reach the White House by the rickety, horse-drawn streetcars, he would have had to find one that had a sign, COLORED PERSONS MAY RIDE IN THIS CAR.6
Early this morning, Frederick Douglass arrived in the office of Kansas senator Samuel Pomeroy. Douglass carried with him a note from George Steams charging Douglass with representing him for business related to recruiting for the government. Pomeroy was a man whose courage was not in doubt. Washington was so racist that Douglass believed it would be a daring act for Pomeroy to walk down the street with him. Though Pomeroy was a Massachusetts man and had served as a state representative on Beacon Hill in the early 1850s, he had moved to the Kansas territory as it erupted in violence over whether it would enter the Union as a free or slave state. When the town of Lawrence was under attack from slavery supporters, residents chose Pomeroy as chair of a committee of public safety. He did all he could to stem the powerful attacks of "border ruffians," but despite his efforts, the town was eventually pillaged and burned.7
Douglass considered the abolitionist Pomeroy a friend but did not endorse his work on voluntary black emigration plans. When his son Lewis wanted to go with a group Pomeroy was organizing to Central America, Douglass wrote with sadness to Pomeroy, "To see my children usefully and happily settled in this, the land of their birth and ancestors, has been the hope and ambition of my manhood." Douglass could see neither justice nor wisdom in the colonization project. As Lincoln pushed the idea to colonize Chiriqui (in Panama) in 1862, he turned to Pomeroy for help. The project was on hold by October 1863, but this was more because of the resistance of Central American governments and the corruption of some of the proprietors. Still, it was not at all clear at this time that either Lincoln or Pomeroy had terminated the initiative.8
Douglass and Pomeroy headed over to the War Department. Douglass's first meeting of the day would be with Secretary of War Edwin Stanton.9Despite his far-flung travels, Douglass had not been in Washington before, and he was thrilled to look up for the first time at the Freedom statue that adorned the Capitol dome, recently set in place. The great dome had been half-finished at the beginning of the war, and despite the tightness of the federal budget, Lincoln decided that work should go on—that its completion would be a morale boost to the country in the midst of war.10
Assistant Secretary Charles Dana greeted Douglass and Pomeroy. Douglass had known Dana since the idealistic Harvard graduate had lived on the Brook Farm in Massachusetts, a Utopian experiment steeped in socialism. They had continued their friendship during Dana's fifteen years at the New York Tribune. Dana now served as Stanton's watchdog on Ulysses S. Grant, the controversial new luminary of the Union army who had won Union control of the Mississippi River after the recent victory in the long siege at Vicksburg. Rumors of Grant's fondness for drink dogged Grant, but since he seemed to be the only Union general who won victories, Lincoln was inclined to leave him alone on this subject (and even talked of sending a case of whatever it was Grant drank to his other generals). Taking time away from these and other matters, Dana walked Douglass into the office of his incisively sharp and usually irritable superior, located on the second floor and behind a constantly crowded reception room.11
Edwin Masters Stanton was the sort of man who always seemed to have had a poor night of sleep. The short, thick, impressively gray bearded and usually sweaty Quaker glanced at Douglass through his round wire-rimmed glasses with little interest. It took Douglass only seconds to realize he was dealing with a man with little concern for niceties. Lincoln's secretary John Hay said that he would rather suffer pox in a hospital than ask Stanton for a favor. His flat eyes conveyed time was of the essence, and Douglass imagined him thinking, "Well, what do you want? I have no time to waste upon you or anybody else, and I shall waste none. Speak quick, or I shall leave you." It did not increase Douglass's ease that Stanton was standing at his tall desk during the entire meeting, as he did with all visitors. The impatient but brilliant secretary of war found it was a none-too-subtle way of shifting power to his side of the room.12
Secretary of War Edwin Stanton
Stanton's stern abruptness served to shield Lincoln from things and people he preferred not to confront, and the president himself said, "I want to oblige everybody when I can; and Stanton and I have an understanding that if I send an order to him which cannot be granted, he is to refuse it. This he sometimes does."13(This system would perhaps be exercised toward Douglass himself in the next month.) Stanton was close and intensely loyal to his chief, although before the war Stanton, a Democrat, had ruthlessly mocked him. Few people liked the secretary of war, but Lincoln liked his utter focus on winning the war, and so they spent countless hours together in the War Department and the Telegraph Office, waiting for word from distant battlefields.
Douglass quickly contemplated how he could keep this meeting as brief and clear as possible. He laid out the matters he was intending to bring to the president's attention: unequal pay, no black officers, and the frightening lack of protection for black soldiers.
The status of this last issue had, however, changed substantially in the last eleven days. In Douglass's resignation letter to Steams, the main issue he had bemoaned was lack of protection for black troops. Douglass's patience had run out at just the moment Lincoln finally took action. On the last day of July, the administration published an order from the president that, regardless of class, color or condition, the government would try to protect soldiers of color. To put a black soldier back into slavery (particularly if that man had been free in the North) was "barbarism, and a crime against the civilization of the age." For each Union soldier executed, they would deal with a Confederate in kind. Further, the administration would respond to any Union soldier sold into slavery by placing an enemy soldier in hard labor.14Douglass had long pleaded for the administration to do something—and Lincoln had done it. Yet because so many hopeful acts, such as Congress's Second Confiscation Act, had previously floundered in execution, Douglass still planned to press Stanton and Lincoln on this visit to ensure that they would put the brutal order into action.
Douglass then chose to elaborate on a larger point. He told the Secretary of War that there were two extreme opinions hurting his people. While some painted them as demons, others saw them as angels. Some people's expectations were crushingly low, others naively high.
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