Douglass wanted Lincoln to weather this onslaught of criticism and stand committed to what he had previously said. Douglass had faith that it would not end the hope of winning this war. He did not ignore the practical realities of politics, however, suggesting to Lincoln, "In answer to your copperhead accusers—your friends can make this argument of your want of power—but you cannot wisely say a word on that point." If politicians around the country wanted to tell their constituents that Lincoln was powerless to annul the Emancipation Proclamation because of the effect it would have on the army, so be it. But for Lincoln himself to concede this rendered a serious blow to the moral case for abolition that Douglass was hoping to build into a permanent reality.
Douglass offered strength to the president on a decision that could have huge ramifications for Douglass's abolition war. When the war began Douglass offered ideas in the public arena, hoping against hope that they would somehow work their way to Lincoln. Now he had the chance to influence a Lincoln decision directly, and he did so with clarity and force.
At some point during Douglass's zealous advice not to release this letter, a secretary of Lincoln's announced "Governor Buckingham of Connecticut." Lincoln ignored the message and Douglass, puzzled, continued making his point. A few minutes later, the attendant made the same pronouncement.
Douglass arose from his seat and said, "I must not stay to prevent your interview with Governor Buckingham." Douglass knew immediately that this was not just any state governor, but one he viewed as noble and patriotic. William A. Buckingham was also someone for whom Lincoln held personal affection. While visiting his son Robert at Exeter in 1860, Lincoln had spoken around New England to raise his national profile. During a number of speeches in Connecticut, Lincoln had shared the podium with Buckingham. Lincoln knew he could count on Buckingham to be a reliable supplier of troops and support.
Douglass exclaimed, "Mr. Lincoln, I will retire."
Lincoln cut him off, "Oh, no, no, you shall not, I want Governor Buckingham to wait." He called out in a voice Douglass always found surprisingly high, "Tell Governor Buckingham to wait, for I want to have a long talk with my friend Frederick Douglass."
Douglass would later record, "This was probably the first time in the history of this Republic when its chief magistrate had found an occasion or shown a disposition to exercise such an act of impartiality between persons so widely different in their positions and supposed claims upon his attention." Douglass was being modest in describing his national importance, as Lincoln knew exactly what he was doing.
Lincoln had a shocking proposal to make, and Frederick Douglass was the only person he wanted for the assignment.
All of what they had discussed before, the opposition to the war, the fury at emancipation aims, the cries for peace, the North's abandonment of Lincoln—all this boiled down to a grim prospect that both men well understood: Lincoln would not be reelected, and the war would end in a peace that left the majority of slaves still in bondage. After all, Swett had given him this very fact the day before. If this was the real situation, what must be done? Lincoln had a solution that would need Douglass's expertise and effort.
Every day the war went on, the Emancipation Proclamation and the Confiscation Acts made it possible for women and men to find freedom when they reached Union army lines, or when these lines reached them. But Lincoln was not satisfied. He wanted to make the proclamation much more effective in these precious few remaining weeks. The war after all, might end in six months or less. In what Douglass described as a regretful tone, Lincoln lamented, "The slaves are not coming so rapidly and so numerously to us as I had hoped."
Douglass did his best to explain to Lincoln how skilled slaveholders were at keeping information from their laborers. For all he had thought about slavery, Lincoln had little practical experience of it. Douglass attempted to convey just how cut off from the world, from information that others took for granted, an enslaved person truly was. Douglass estimated that most did not actually know of the president's proclamation.
"Well," Lincoln pronounced, "I want you to set about devising some means of making them acquainted with it, and for bringing them into our lines." Douglass listened as Lincoln told him that he wanted a plan "by which we could get more of the slaves within our lines."
Lincoln sincerely wanted to know the best way they could induce blacks out of their situation in the South, for McClellan would surely not care. Lincoln related, with urgent words underlined by Douglass in a letter, "Now was there time—and that such only of them as succeeded in getting within our lines would be free after the war is over."
Douglass found Lincoln's words spoken with "great earnestness and much solicitude" while he listened with concentrated interest. Douglass immediately replied that it would take organizing a group of black scouts, following a plan owing much to John Brown's ideas, to venture beyond Union lines—despite the dangers of the war and capture—to spread word of the Emancipation Proclamation and lead whoever they could find toward freedom.
Lincoln asked Douglass to submit a written plan on how to implement this task. As Douglass left, Governor Buckingham strolled into Lincoln's office. He was a markedly handsome, white-haired man with chiseled cheekbones and a sharply angled nose. Douglass still feared that he might have been rankled by having to wait, but this was far from the case as Buckingham's manner was jovial.
Never was the revolutionary nature of the Civil War clearer. In two months, it would be the fifth anniversary of John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry. At the time, Lincoln, ever the cautious politician, recovering from his senatorial loss and unsure of what role, if any, politics would play in his future, had denounced this type of zealous, violent exploit. Now, as president of the United States, he proposed a mission that bore Brown's stamp. The man to whom he was making this overture had been wanted for treason in connection with Brown and once might have been on the very same Virginia gallows with Brown.36
Douglass would not turn down Lincoln's proposal. At the time of their meeting, it is estimated that less than 5 percent of the enslaved population were freed because of the Emancipation Proclamation. Despite all the thousands in conscript camps, the progress of slaves finding emancipation was going slowly. Douglass had written in the November 1862 Monthly that he expected a slave insurrection to follow the proclamation. Yet that had not happened, and Lincoln was right to wonder if something could be done to hasten the process.37
Acute southern fears of a slave rebellion existed before and after Nat Turner, Denmark Vesey, and the onset of war. Incidents like the hanging of seventeen black men in Culpeper County, Virginia, in October 1862 under the accusation of insurrection were common across the Confederacy. What really chilled the slaveholder's spine was the fear that the North would use covert agents as catalysts to start slave uprisings, especially after the Emancipation Proclamation. Until Lincoln's meeting with Douglass, this had only been paranoia.38
Lincoln's idea did not come out of nowhere. In May 1863, James Gilmore of the New York Tribune furnished Lincoln with a copy of a proposal from Augustus Montgomery, a Tennessee Unionist, to General William Rosecrans that outlined a plan to induce black people throughout the South to rebel on the night of August 1. Lincoln would not publicly endorse the scheme, but there is no evidence that he objected to it.39However, nothing would come of it other than an anxious Jefferson Davis, who sent a copy that he obtained to all rebel governors. Clearly these ideas had been developing for a long time. That Lincoln had included in the Emancipation Proclamation a provision prohibiting Union army interference with any effort among black people to attain their freedom suggests how far back these ideas about slave insurrection went in his mind, though he was now inclined to contradict his earlier thinking. During the meeting with John Eaton that had prompted Douglass's second visit to Washington, Lincoln wondered aloud about what sort of communication system they needed to free more black people, by any means. Eaton did not have an answer, but Douglass did.
CHAPT
ER 14
Going Home
Douglass's mind was racing after this second meeting with Lincoln. There was much to digest. He had entered the meeting still thinking of the politician who said he would save the Union with or without slavery. Instead, what he found in Lincoln on that August day was a "deeper moral conviction against slavery than I had ever seen before in anything spoken or written by him."1
While gaining a newfound admiration for the president was encouraging, it did not outweigh a general distress Douglass felt because the country was unlikely to reelect Lincoln. He and the president must somehow free as many enslaved people as they could before November. Once Lincoln was out of office, there was little hope for the millions still in chains. Douglass was keenly aware of the current political climate, but something about hearing Lincoln's acknowledgment of it drove home this crushing reality like never before. In addition, Douglass feared Lincoln might not take his advice and might release his response to Charles Robinson's letter that would retreat from emancipationist aims.2
After seeing Douglass, Lincoln told his Wisconsin visitors, Judge Joseph Mills and former governor Alexander Randall, that he could not go back on his previous stipulations for the end to the war, no matter how it might affect his own political prospects. He could not live with himself by, in effect, turning back to bondage the men who had fought so hard: "I should be damned in time and eternity for so doing . . . The world shall know that I will keep my faith to friends and enemies, come what will." He never sent the letter.3
Later that afternoon, John Eaton encountered Douglass, who seemed a nervous wreck. During the trip, the orator was staying with William Lee, one of the most prominent black men in Washington. The strong presence of slavery in Washington until two years before existed alongside a tradition of black enterprise in the city. Lee's father, Alfred, had started a business selling feed in 1830. Having grown up around the store, William carried on and expanded its operation when his father died. Now William Lee was a wealthy man.4
Eaton called on Douglass at Lee's house on Bridge Street in Georgetown. The energetic chaplain was eager to hear how the meeting with the president had gone. Referring to Lincoln's queries on spreading word of the Emancipation Proclamation through the South, Douglass explained, "He asked me a number of questions, which I am preparing to answer in writing."5
Over the next ten days, Douglass consulted with as many black leaders as he could, attempting to formulate an effective plan. All whom he spoke with thought it was an inspired notion, and most thought he could actually accomplish this difficult goal. Ten days after the meeting, Douglass composed a letter to Lincoln with a detailed ten-page plan. Lincoln would appoint a general agent to employ twenty-five loyal men (whether the general agent might be Douglass himself, the letter did not say). This leader would assign the group to various areas near Union lines where they could maximize their effectiveness by reaching the most slaves. Once in position, they would find one or more local residents intimately familiar with the terrain they would be moving in. They would train as many local "conductors" as possible on how to run missions to steer people out of bondage and toward the army. These agents, paid two dollars a day, would clandestinely move behind enemy lines, keeping meticulous records of the locations of plantations they visited. They would also record the names of any people led from these places.
Douglass was adamant that they would have to possess the support of Union commanding officers on the ground to maximize the protection they would have during this dangerous work. Douglass also insisted that "provision be made that the slaves or Freed men thus brought within our lines shall receive subsistence until such of them as are fit shall enter the service of the Country or be otherwise employed and provided for." Every two weeks, an agent would send on a written report, with up-to-date numbers, to the general agent, who would then prepare an overall report for Lincoln's eyes. The general agent would work out of Washington with one clerk, along with a roving commission that would visit the various patrols to provide additional oversight on the progress and faithfulness of the agents. Douglass closed his description of what such an operation would look like saying, "I think it enough to give your Excellency an Idea of how the desirable work shall be executed."6
Douglass drew extensively on some of the plans that John Brown had written in Douglass's Rochester home when his children were young. But these plans also owed much to Underground Railroad conductors such as Harriet Tubman, who had perfected daring raids of escape in the South over the last ten years. Douglass was simply providing a national infrastructure to coordinate as many escapees as possible before the Emancipation Proclamation was annulled. When he wrote this letter to the White House on August 29, they did not have a day to waste.
Meanwhile at the White House, the same despondency on the fate of his reelection that caused Lincoln to ask Douglass for help prompted the president to write a remarkable memorandum. It read, "This morning, as for some days past, it seems exceedingly probable that this Administration will not be re-elected. Then it will be my duty to so co-operate with the President elect, as to save the Union between the Election and the inauguration; as he will have secured his election on such ground that he cannot possibly save it afterwards." Lincoln asked his cabinet members to sign the back of the folded and sealed paper, without knowledge of its contents.7
George McClellan's Democratic nomination became official in Chicago on August 29. McClellan's nomination cemented for Douglass as well as for many wavering and previously harshly critical radical abolitionists the idea that they must at last support Lincoln. Douglass sincerely wanted a more strongly antislavery candidate, but in the face of McClellan, Lincoln would do.
Charles Douglass, struggling to survive Grant's brutal offensive campaign in Virginia, received wonderful (possibly lifesaving) news in the summer of 1864. His unit was to leave the area around Petersburg, Virginia, and report to the vastly safer Point Lookout, Maryland. Although now safe from battle, his sicknesses returned and his body weakened; respiratory problems and high fevers were soon a major concern.
Lewis, recovering on Morris Island in South Carolina from his own health problems, worried about his brother's fever. Would they both make it out of this war? Lewis had had enough of fighting and the southern climate, and wished he could go home to help recruit black troops in New York and to see his beloved Amelia as well.8
Douglass was seemingly powerless to help Charles, as he desperately waited for news of his son. During his first bout with illness in 1863, when he had been on the outskirts of Boston, Charles had often written of the poor treatment a black soldier received. The chance of Charles enduring a second bout was dangerously uncertain—and even more precarious as he was now in a very different environment. Point Lookout was on a desolate, sandy, windswept peninsula where the Potomac River meets the Chesapeake Bay. In close proximity to thousands of suffering Confederate soldiers in an overflowing prison camp in Point Lookout, Charles and these soldiers were bearing up to excessive heat and unsanitary water while living on sandy and soggy ground.
It occurred to Douglass that there was one man who could do something about Charles's fate. For a man as proud as Douglass, it would not have been easy to turn to Lincoln for help, especially regarding favored treatment for his son. But Charles's life was at stake, so on the same day that he sent Lincoln his plan, Douglass sent a second letter. This one was labeled "Private." In it, he confessed, "I hope I shall not presume too much upon your kindness—but I have a very great favor to ask." Thinking that Lincoln might assume this had to do with the other letter he would be receiving simultaneously, Douglass made it clear, "It is not that you will appoint me General Agent to carry out the Plan now proposed—though I would not shrink from that duty." The purpose of this letter was "that you will cause my son Charles R. Douglass. 1st Sergeant of Company I—5th Massachusetts Dismounted Cavalry—now stationed at 'Point Lookout' to be discharged."
It was a rare instance when Douglass took off the m
ask of national race leader to reveal a father, loving and afraid. Douglass pleaded his case, "He is now sick—He was the first colored volunteer from the State of New York— having enlisted with his Older Brother in the Mass-54th partly to encourage enlistments—He was but 18, when he enlisted—and has been in the service 18 Months. If your Excellency can confer this favor—you will lay me under many obligations."9
Douglass trusted Lincoln enough to open himself and lay bare his fears. Lincoln had disappointed Douglass on many occasions when it had come to the war, but in doing this very personal action, Lincoln gave Douglass an immeasurable gift. Lincoln wrote a simple note, "Let this boy be discharged," and sent it on to the War Department.10
It took less than half a month for Charles to receive word that, thanks to Lincoln, he was being honorably discharged. Though he had spent the majority of his service being quite ill, he had done his duty in battle bravely and endured almost all a body could bear. Charles headed to Washington, D.C., to recover in better conditions as well as to deal with his discharge paperwork, ensuring the government would pay all they owed him. Now he could sign the correspondence to his father, "Charles Douglass civilian."11
Once again, Lincoln did not follow up on all he had discussed with Douglass. Before, it had been the missing commission; now it was the emancipation plan. The reasons were the events of September 2, when the electric news arrived that General William Sherman had taken Atlanta. That long-delayed victory changed everything. For the Union cause, the prior four months had seemed caught in a morass of despair, but now this significant strategic success suddenly revealed that victory was not only possible, but likely. The loss of the great city of Atlanta in the heart of the South doomed the Confederacy in a way that the loss at Gettysburg had not. Sherman's army had battled from Tennessee through Georgia over more than four months, with Atlanta in their sights. The Chicago Tribune read, "The dark days are over. We see our way out . . . The Republic is safe!"12For the first time in months, it seemed as if the man in the White House was not leading the country to ruin.
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