Between Stanton's unwillingness to address whether or not Douglass would receive a commission and the time that lapsed as August became September, it became clear to Douglass that he would not have an opportunity that had come to mean much to him. Without answers, the theory he settled on was that the government was not ready to bestow any honors on a black man, and certainly not official military rank. Douglass said he did not doubt Stanton's sincerity in the moment of their meeting. He thought that after further reflection Stanton had decided it was too soon for such an action. It was not a personal rejection, but a rebuff to the black man's ability to be anything more than a private in the army, a grievance that after all had been so crucial to his Washington lobbying.16
On a personal level, he considered it a broken promise. It was his fond hope to go south to work, but he would not do it under these circumstances for a number of reasons. He felt the vulnerability of going into such dangerous territory without any rank to protect him. Douglass was still a marked man in much of America. More than that, seeing himself as a distinguished man in his mid-forties, serving without an officer's rank did not fit the part. It was an insult not just to himself but to the dignity of the people he longed to represent. In any case, his worth to his people as an advocate whose words were nationally received was more valuable than his laboring anonymously in the service. Furthermore, with two sons serving in the military and Frederick Jr. now helping recruit where his father would have gone, he felt that they embodied the sacrifice he was already making.17
Perhaps out of wishful thinking, Douglass never assigned blame to Lincoln. At least publicly, he never cast doubt on Lincoln's assurance to him that he would sign any commission Stanton sent him, although it was clear that Stanton had known of the idea from an exchange with Steams a few days before meeting with Douglass, while Lincoln may have only learned about it during Douglass's visit. Douglass may have never blamed Lincoln because he did not want to publicly jeopardize the value of their developing relationship, but privately he suspected Lincoln's role in reneging on the commission. Ottilie Assing never forgave Lincoln for Douglass's not receiving the commission. Her strong feelings reflect the distress that she saw him suffer.18
As for the newspaper, it was embarrassing to have ended one of his great life's works for nothing. In his autobiography, Life and Times, this episode of his life bears the one-word title "Disappointment." Still, slavery was very much alive, and there was much work ahead of him. His mission would have to be fulfilled another way.19
Without a commission or a newspaper, Douglass took a brief break from his work, just to be a father and take on the new role of grandfather. Rosetta had abruptly given up her floundering teaching venture to marry a newly freed young man named Nathan Sprague. For a daughter so fixated on her father, it was not surprising that Sprague's background would be similar to that of Douglass. He was said to have descended from Maryland governor Samuel Sprigg and was free through a daring escape from slavery. Unfortunately for Rosetta, the similarities were too few. Nathan managed to fail at an extensive list of professional endeavors, many of which ended with a weary father-in-law parting with money. For now, the young couple moved into the Rochester property and Rosetta gave birth to a child. After the heartbreaking loss of his youngest daughter, he was pleased to welcome a new child named Annie into his life. Julia Griffiths Crofts yearned to see the joy of a baby girl playing in the kind arms of Douglass among the old trees that surrounded his estate. She imagined "Grandpa Douglass" feeding the child his favorite "Maryland biscuits."20
There was other news. Douglass's middle son, Charles, reported a rumor going around that Massachusetts Governor John Andrew might defy the War Department's resistance on black officers and commission Charles's older brother, Lewis, as a lieutenant. Charles found that "Lewis is highly spoken of in Boston and New Bedford . . . Everyone says that he will receive the first commission." As for what Charles heard of the regiment so brutalized at Fort Wagner, "the 54 boys have been worked hard but they are plucky yet and want to be in a fight." Lewis had been rewarded a furlough to return to New York because of his "good conduct in the field."21
But Lewis was falling deeper into an illness that would prevent his return to action. The water that he had been drinking in South Carolina was contaminated and many others in his regiment were experiencing its sickening effects. For three weeks in October, Douglass sat at his son's bedside, tending to his needs and talking of these past few chaotic months. He told Gerrit Smith that his battle-tested young man was mending slowly. Griffiths Crofts wrote, "Poor dear Lewis—I trust he will soon recover."22
As he nursed his son, Douglass imagined what would happen if the Union could just win this war. Fulfilling his duties as a father, the thought crossed his mind that if his great goal could somehow be achieved, it would please him to quietly retire with his growing family.23Douglass had already received an invitation from the Cooper Union Institute to speak early in the new year.24He knew that he would have to produce something significant for an address that would be nationally covered. Unfortunately, he only found himself depressed when he read the newspapers. In the eastern battlefields, there was no action and no progress as the Army of the Potomac awaited a new general to take over from George Meade. They would have to wait, for Grant had one last duty to fulfill in the west, righting the bloody Union loss at Chickamauga and raising the siege in Chattanooga.
Douglass composed one of his most important addresses, "The Mission of the War." On November 17, he tried out an early version of the speech at Corinthian Hall in Rochester, where he had given his first speeches defining the war. He had no trouble filling the hall and hundreds were turned away. Afterward, he felt very good about using this new message in travels around the country.25
He journeyed to Boston, where he spoke and spent time saying goodbye to his son Charles, who had also endured sickness through the summer. Charles was finally ready to ship off with two hundred other men to fill the depleted ranks of the Massachusetts Fifty-fourth. He had been told a few weeks before to be ready at a moment's notice to set out for Morris Island, South Carolina. Having heard of the bloody engagements that Lewis had been in, Charles retained little desire to experience war's glory firsthand. Confusion over how long he rested from his illness led a commander to at one point list him as a deserter. Charles assured his father, "I will never desert, I will take a bullet first." That said, he was doing anything he could to extend his time in Massachusetts. Charles asked for an autographed picture of his father to give to a Swedish-born Lieutenant Wulff who, Charles believed, could request that Lewis be left in camp.26
Charles Douglass
While Lewis had been stationed in the Carolina islands, Charles had been dealing with his own hardships. Falling sick soon after arriving at camp in Massachusetts, Charles had a long stay in a makeshift hospital that left him thinking he would like to care for the others around him. For a young man who had grown up so far from suffering, it was a cruel baptism. His letters to Douglass in September convey disbelief at just how miserable the army allowed conditions to be for incapacitated black troops. Though he was a private, hardly a trained doctor or nurse, he spent many agonizingly long nights as the only man on duty in the sick ward. When men took a turn for the worse in darkness, Charles was helpless. He recounted, "I was up all night and stood over those that died and laid them out, wrote to their friends, and in fact done most all that was to do except doctor them." All he could do was ease their agony.
Away from the makeshift hospital until evening one day, upon returning he was told "that there had been no doctor there all that day and there is one man then that will die and others that are very sick." Before the regiment shipped out, the conditions improved, but there still seemed to be a lack of medical care at the camp. For those still here, Charles pronounced, "now they are treated worse than dogs."
Spending so many days and nights around the sick only worsened his own condition. Charles wondered if the government knew t
hat it was nearly starving them to death. The army gave them tiny rations that were supposed to last a week. Charles boiled large pots of bland stew so their rations would last a little longer. No authorities were interested in his complaints. Charles objected that "hospital rations were small and that we could not draw full rations that is a funny way to starve a lot of men . . . we were used mean." When old friends ran into him, they hardly recognized the withered Charles. He told them that the transformation was not from sickness but from the lack of rations given to the sick. Begging his father to "think hard of me," he warned "a person will do most anything before they will starve" and he felt himself "falling away more and more."27
That illnesses struck Douglass's two fighting sons for a sizable portion of 1863 was no aberration. In the Civil War, disease killed more men than battle did; while the ratio for white soldiers of deaths by illness to deaths in combat was two to one, the rate for black soldiers was about ten to one. One in twelve white enlistees lost his life to infection, but a staggering one in five black soldiers met this fate. Poor prior health of many black men coming into the service from a life of bondage may explain part of the discrepancy, yet there were clearly critical elements of discrimination once they entered the service that proved to be fatal.
White commanders believed that black men could withstand more arduous work, especially in blistering sun and in lowland environments. They justified the dangerous work conditions because of their belief in physiological differences between the races. Many also assumed that the traditional slave diet ought to be replicated for the good of these men. This meant unremitting rations of pork and corn, with occasional variants of beef and wheat. Both of these assumptions created havoc with the health of free men and former slaves.
Whether or not Charles's commanders were correct in ordering him out of the hospital and off to South Carolina, many lives were also lost because white officers firmly believed that slaves were adept at faking illness to be spared severe toil. This proved to be a dire factor in pushing black soldiers back into action too quickly. As Charles discovered all too clearly, efforts to save black lives did not seem equal to those for white soldiers.28
Aside from the discrimination Charles witnessed in health matters, the continuing controversy over equal pay for black soldiers also infuriated him. He heard of Governor Andrew's solution, which was for Massachusetts to pay the three-dollar discrepancy between what the federal government paid white and black troops. He fumed whenever he thought of how they were denied "what was promised us." Of course, to many soldiers, the one who had passed on the faulty pledge had been his father. He hoped that "our boys wont except of any less than what they enlisted for."29
While in Boston saying goodbye to his second son headed into combat, Douglass gave his new speech again. He knew the speech well by now, having traveled from Rochester to Philadelphia to Boston, stopping at towns in between, spreading the word of this mission. He was back to the pace of travel he had been on for the better part of the war. Griffiths Crofts worried for him at his hectic pace, but added, "Never was a long-looked for letter more welcomed to anxious friend than yours . . . We are all thankful that you are still in Rochester [and] that the dangerous task of recruiting in the South is given up!" Her delight was palpable. Even so, she could not help but remind him how "the belief that you are gone to fight in the South" had hurt her fundraising efforts on his behalf in England. She continued to pray that he would "be preserved amidst all the danger around you [and] that your boys may escape the fire."30
Rosine Draz had thought that he was in the South "already and that you were exposed to most fearful dangers." When news reached her of what Douglass had decided, "I thanked God when I found my dear friend that you would not recklessly expose your precious life by going without the protection of Government in the midst of cruel enemies." Draz, an intensely religious woman, believed God had lifted up Douglass as his instrument to end slavery—and thus would never jeopardize his life in the South. She assured Douglass that eventually he would see "the fruits of your noble devoted labors. Take courage, my believed friend. God is near to save his people."31
Douglass returned to Washington on December 7 to speak at Henry Highland Garnet's Fifteenth Street Presbyterian Church on behalf of the Contraband Relief Society. In saying farewell at their summer meeting, Lincoln had told Douglass to come and see him whenever he was in Washington; the two men did not meet to renew that conversation because Lincoln had returned home from the dedication of the Gettysburg cemetery with a mild case of smallpox and was confined to his room. Still, as the president recovered, Lincoln sent a letter to Henry C. Wright, head of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, saying, "I shall not attempt to retract or modify the emancipation proclamation; nor shall I return to slavery any person who is free by the terms of that proclamation, or by any of the acts of Congress." In reading these words, Douglass was indeed confirmed in his sense that, once having moved forward, this president did not go back.32
1864
CHAPTER 12
"An Abolition War'
TheCooper Union Institute was packed as Douglass stepped forward to the podium. This was Douglass's third time to speak from the nation's most prestigious lecture hall, and he was about to deliver a speech that he had been preparing for all his life. In the same place four years earlier, Lincoln had spoken in clear, cogent themes that defined and clarified the issue of slavery, propelling him to the presidency. Douglass needed to define the meaning of this war and to link his own life's mission to the larger mission of the war itself. The North was tired of this war and the toll of its dead soldiers, and without such a redefinition, everything might be for naught.
This night's sponsor was the Woman's Loyal League, a group advocating to amend the Constitution to end slavery. People arrived early to get good seats. Leaders of New York reform groups sat arrayed on the platform behind Douglass, and Oliver Johnson, the editor of the National Anti-Slavery Standard, introduced Douglass to the crowd's loud cheers and applause. His address lasted two hours, but they stayed with him through each peak and valley of his oratory, waving their hats, yelling "hear, hear," and rising to their feet in numerous ovations.1
This war, he said, would lead to either the nation's salvation or its ruin. The outcome was very much in doubt. It depended on whether the war "can teach a great nation respect for the long-despised claims of justice." Douglass called it cowardly to trust that God would intervene to fulfill the nation's charge. America's destiny was in their hands. He recounted the "desolation, ruin, shame, suffering and sorrow" of a war caused by slavery. They could now win a victory for all humanity in the epic struggle against human bondage. This nation would "have no business to mourn over our mission. We are writing the statutes of eternal justice and liberty in the blood of the worst of tyrants as a warning to all after-comers."2
Cooper Union Institute, shown in Harpers Weekly, March 30, 1861
In this speech, he tried not only to inspire a restless and war-weary people, he also tried to deal with the charge that he and other radical abolitionists were guilty of not wanting the war to end yet—not now, not with slavery untouched. That charge opened them up to bitter criticism and presented them as bloodthirsty and callous. Douglass was forthright in admitting that he was glad the war had not ended too quickly: "I say the longer the better if it must be so—in order to put an end to the hell black cause out of which the Rebellion has risen." But he answered quickly the deeper charge. "Say not that I am indifferent to the horrors and hardships of the war. In common with the American people generally, I feel the prolongation of the war a heavy calamity—private as well public. There are vacant spaces at my hearthstone which I shall rejoice to see filled again by the boys who once occupied them . . . " Then he asked all who mourned to reflect "upon the vastness and grandeur of its mission." The world had seen many wars, but not one like this: "The blow we strike is not merely to free a country and a continent—but the whole world from slavery—for when sla
very fails here—it will fail everywhere. We have no business to mourn over our mission."
Douglass was glad to hear that Peace Democrats were proclaiming this war an "abolition war" and agreed with them emphatically. He restated that abolition was the "comprehensive and logical object of the war." Slavery—no other reason—had caused the South to disregard the ballot, republican institutions, and the Constitution.
The mission of the war had four components. First, this must be an abolition war. Second, no peace could be accepted if it was not an abolition peace. Third, as earned by their military service, America must regard black people as fellow citizens. Last, whether a soldier or citizen, blacks must be able to vote and live free of discrimination.
Douglass applauded the Emancipation Proclamation, but "excellent as that paper is—and much as it has accomplished temporarily—it settles nothing." For him, the problem was that Lincoln still spoke with moral indifference. He reminded them all that in Lincoln's annual message of 1863, he had painted emancipation as an emergency measure of wartime, believing that "the general government had no lawful power to effect emancipation in any State." Douglass thought Lincoln still had not shown he "understood and accepted its true mission." This lack of understanding was not necessary, for the Confederacy knew the conflict was over slavery, and John Brown had predicted it before a single cannon was fired.3
Lincoln had accepted a war to restore the old Union. He had been willing to "faithfully catch, hold and return runaway slaves," among other concessions to slaveholders. Despite the fondest wishes of the administration, the tide of events and great, almost mystical, forces were serving to propel this war toward the mission that Douglass articulated. He called it, "a growing war in every sense."
Douglass and Lincoln Page 22