After recovering from the shock and emotion of the reunion, he was gratified to find both vigor and warmth left in the fifty-two-year-old woman who was a maternal figure to the whole community around St. Michaels. Douglass knew how effectively slavery could extinguish a person's spirit. That had not happened to Eliza. She was illiterate but had managed to follow his ascending career, naming a daughter, Mary Douglass Mitchell, after him in 1856. Before the recent emancipation, she had been free because earlier her owner Thomas Auld had agreed to sell her and her two children to her husband, Peter Mitchell, for one hundred dollars. This had been a costly manumission in sweat and toil, since she did domestic work for five dollars a month and Mitchell was a field hand, making less than fifteen. They were also raising nine children. But in time, enough had been saved. After emancipation, their children worked in the same menial careers, the sons doing farm labor and the daughters serving households.
This was better news than what had become of Douglass and Eliza's own generation. The siblings talked of family members Douglass remembered, though this was a painful exercise. Story after story ended with a sale into a Deep South slave state, at which point Eliza's knowledge of a loved one ceased. Their family had been thoroughly scattered in a way no one could ever reconstruct.30
The choir sang "Home, Sweet Home!" as the brother and sister stepped forward together. There was magnificent, lengthy, and affecting applause as Douglass reached the dais and surveyed this remarkable scene. Behind him was a "Welcome Home" sign. He was overwhelmed, confessing, "I could not anticipate the extent and depth of this welcome." He reminisced about those who had been at this church more than thirty years before. Many were deceased but they were very alive in Douglass's memory. He saw familiar faces all over the audience and rejoiced not just that they were meeting again, but "especially that we are permitted to meet here on the soil of our birth," for it was a land he loved and wished he had never had to leave. Two days above all others marked a lifetime for him: the day he left Maryland and the day he returned. "No speaker, I think, ever appeared before a public assembly, in circumstances more unusual and striking than I do this evening."
Though there was plenty to say, he did not talk just about the past. The Maryland constitution now ended slavery, but he pressed his audience to ensure there would now be equal rights. Those against it were seeing black people as threats to white people, but Douglass framed this argument as disparaging the ability of white people. He thought that they were fully capable of succeeding while others had full rights, explaining, "I would defend you from yourselves." In his opinion, "The more men you make free, the more freedom is strengthened, and the more men you give an interest in the welfare and safety of the State, the greater is the security of the State." Unfortunately, the vote would not come to Maryland blacks until the Fifteenth Amendment.31
He exhorted the crowd to save, to buy land, and to create strong schools for their children. "You have now the opportunity, and I trust you will improve it." Douglass for nearly three hours invested his address with more emotion than any he had ever given.32
He made speeches at two more Baltimore churches, then at three additional events, before returning to Washington for an oration at the Israel Baptist Church. There he found a message from President Lincoln, inviting him to come to the Soldiers' Home to take tea with him that night.
Douglass was in a bind. It was not every day the president requested one's company, and he understood the power of having access to that man's ear. With Reconstruction looming, there were many more battles to wage, either as allies or contestants. More than that, his later writings about Lincoln make clear that however frustrated this president made him politically, Douglass did feel a personal connection to him and would have enjoyed having tea with him. On the other hand, Douglass respected his audiences and chose never to break a speaking engagement, not wanting to disappoint people desiring to hear him.
The president's invitation was an honor and Douglass gave it considerable thought that afternoon before deciding not to go. His relationship with Lincoln was growing, and Douglass concluded there would be ample time for more conversations in the coming years.
1865
CHAPTER 15
Sacred Efforts
Douglass needed this war to end. Emotionally and physically, his last reserves of energy were close to being exhausted. The constant traveling from place to place began to wear on his iron constitution. He lagged in responding to letters of old friends, obsessed with only his work. Mary Carpenter in England still wrote to him "in the hope of extracting a reply from you." Looking about him, he could see that most of the longstanding antislavery orators were no longer on the road.l
After all the years of travel, he dreamed of a quiet, bucolic farm, where he would set down roots and stay. His fatigue in the latter part of the war was such that when he spoke of the future, he believed he wanted no part of a public life in its aftermath.
However tired his body felt, Douglass knew that this was no time to let up if the abolition war was to result in an abolition peace. In the North, everyone could feel that the war was about to end. In the South, that chilling realization was about to descend upon a hard-pressed populace. For any Confederate who imagined the war could still be won, William Sherman's relentless March to the Sea and capture of Savannah on Christmas put a resounding end to the argument. As Sherman turned his army northward to link up with the stalemated Army of the Potomac outside of Petersburg, the end would not be long in coming.
So Douglass pressed on, spreading this hope in the early part of 1865 from Troy to Albany, New York; Salem to Worcester, Massachusetts; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Wilmington, Delaware; and Hoboken, New Jersey (which he used often as a place of winter rest at Ottilie Assing's home) along the way. When he spoke again at the Cooper Union Institute to around two thousand people, a quarter of them black, he told them of his recent emotional return to Maryland. It had taken nearly four years of war for Maryland, although yoked to the Union as it had been, to finally outlaw slavery. He wanted to share what that return had meant to him personally and in relation to all that this war was about.
His return had been sentimental, but he realized it represented changes that were also historic and world-changing. The Boston address, given when the brutal northeastern weather seemed to miraculously give way to a beautiful night, was entitled, "What the Black Man Wants." Men like Wendell Phillips and William Lloyd Garrison were at the time debating whether their old antislavery organizations should be disbanded at the end of the war or should press on for civil rights. Garrison, who had mostly supported the president during the war, believed his life's work was over when the war was over.
Douglass sided with Phillips on the issue of advocating for full suffrage, telling the crowd, "if Abolitionists fail to press it now, we may not see, for centuries to come, the same disposition that exists at this moment." In a time that could have been celebratory, Douglass never underestimated the risks at hand.2
Douglass asked, "Shall we be citizens in war, and aliens in peace? Would that be just?"3He was acting as a conscience to his nation, refusing to let them forget what black people had achieved. Like Garrison, he was nearly at the end of his mission to kill slavery. He was beginning to sense that slavery would not completely die if the war's conclusion meant that blacks could not vote, serve on a jury, hold political office, or in any sense be a full citizen.
People could be free and yet not equal.
Douglass's mission now included a vision of a nation healed—not just the wounds of North and South, but a new reality of citizens truly part of one nation. This was the only end to the war that could possibly justify the horrific deaths so many had suffered. All had paid the heavy price of the Founding Fathers' failure to end slavery when they could have, before the South began to fully, and fatally, identify its essence with a flawed system of enforced labor.
While Douglass's speaking schedule kept him moving, it was an exciting time in Washington, an
d his son Charles was taking it all in. He was working in a Freedman's Hospital, as Washington had huge encampments of black people fleeing the South and waiting for the opportunities that were supposed to come with freedom. Charles had not been born in bondage, but he too saw more hope for the days ahead than he had ever felt before. He was thinking about going South with a friend interested in the cotton business around Savannah or Nashville. He was sensitive to being reliant on his wealthy father, proclaiming, "I will not return home a beggar," but the sentiment was as much about the optimism he and many other black people felt with the war drawing to a close. The dreams Douglass had for the America his children would live in must have felt near when Charles wrote to him, "I can see that a black man can be something now . . . all he has to do is make a start.4
But with the war not yet over, Charles was still pursuing justice for the black soldier. He and Lewis, along with eight other men, had written a petition asking the government to create black regiments with exclusively black officers. He was frustrated by Lewis's lack of responses to his letters, grumbling to his father, "I never do any of the boys that way." Lewis was now back home in Rochester where Anna and Rosetta could take care of him and the baby Annie. Rosetta reported, "He still has his sick times though not as violent as in the early part of winter." She anxiously hoped he would go back to his regiment in South Carolina, which he said he was willing to do. Even without his brother's affirmation by mail, Charles wished to move this project forward. He and his colleagues had obtained signatures from senators, congressmen, generals, men such as Sumner, Greeley, James Garfield, Nathaniel Banks, and, of course, his father. Charles hoped to follow his father's example by meeting with President Lincoln to present the document, though there is no evidence that he succeeded.5
The efforts of Douglass and so many others had not been in vain. Policies regarding black men in the military were finally improving. In June of 1864 President Lincoln had asked Attorney General Edward Bates his opinion on what the government legally owed these men in terms of equal payment. That same summer, a House and Senate conference had hammered out language that assured equal payment for black soldiers who had been free men at the start of the war. Senators such as Sumner were indignant that while it was fully retroactive for those who were free at the start of the war, it would only compensate back to the start of 1864 for those who had fled slavery for a Union uniform. Nonetheless, men in the field found a clever solution in the "Quaker oath."6
When asked to swear if they had been free on April 19, 1861, they appealed to a law higher than the government. Those who had been enslaved were asked, "You do solemnly swear that you owed no man unrequited labor on or before the 19th day of April, 1861. So help you God." Former slaves felt justified in simply testifying that they were never anyone else's property, which in their heart, they knew they never were. As men in Lewis's old 54th Massachusetts Regiment stepped out of the paymaster's office with the desperately needed money so long denied to them, they shouted in the air and sang joyous songs.7
These important changes were represented by the experience of Martin Delany, a doctor and writer (and briefly, assistant editor of Douglass's North Star), who had become one of the most prominent black leaders in the country. A strong advocate of black emigration from America, he and Douglass had both collaborated and clashed in the years before the war. Delany met with Lincoln in early February to propose that a group of black men should go into the South to proclaim emancipation and to arm the former slaves, enlarging this black army with black officers. Ironically, Delany's account of the meeting presents Lincoln as never having heard of such an idea when, in fact, he himself had proposed a strikingly similar one to Douglass.8
If some of the details of the meeting, which Delany described to a biographer three years later, may be puzzling, the essence of the meeting corroborates Lincoln's support of the kind of plan he discussed with Douglass. It also shows that Douglass had opened the door of Lincoln's office for other black leaders. Perhaps Delany's open interest in emigration made him a voice in the black community that the Lincoln administration was open to cultivating. He was appointed an officer in the Union army, but by the time he was in the field and actively putting together his regiment, the war had ended.
Change was definitely in the air in Washington. Most notable was the intense lobbying to fulfill the Baltimore convention's stated goal of a Thirteenth Amendment that would finally and completely eradicate slavery. This effort to sway Congress was drawing the newly reelected president's full attention and effort.9The amendment had already passed the Senate easily the previous spring, but the two-thirds majority needed in the House was going to be a challenge. This effort was in line with other evidence of profound growth in Lincoln's views on race as the war neared closure. He signed bills allowing black people to testify in federal courts, to end discrimination in the capital's streetcars, and to raise the pay of black troops, finally settling an issue that had first brought Douglass to his office. When General Sherman issued Special Field Order Number 15, giving freedmen "possessory" rights to forty acres for each family inland stretching from Charleston to Jacksonville, Lincoln did not raise a finger to undo this radical redistribution of land.10
On January 31, the House would try to make this the day to approve the amendment. In the gallery was Ottilie Assing, who described the scene: "From the very start, the visitor galleries are filled, and unusual excitement and tension are in the air." Last-minute converts to the effort and those still holding out for the amendment's defeat gave speeches that Assing found agonizingly boring. Men had been debating slavery in this room for years and she thought the time for this had now passed. Yet, for three long hours, it continued. Assing watched senators enter the hall, along with Supreme Court justices, government officials, and free blacks, who, of course, had the most invested in what was about to happen. The press of prominent citizens pushing their way in and journalists fiercely defending seats they were in danger of losing gave the occasion an unusual intensity.
There was a movement on the floor to table the measure, but Republicans blocked the attempt. Democrats tried to move the vote to the next day, hoping to buy time, to no avail. Finally, Speaker Schuyler Colfax called the vote, reading, "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction."
The House clerk called the roll, name by name. For Democrats with the courage to vote in favor of passage, a special applause went up from the crowd. Then, above the anxious silence, Colfax announced the amendment had passed 119 to 56. With the three-fourths approval in the states not in doubt, the meaning of the moment was unmistakable. Thunderous applause erupted. The elated room was full of clapping, hugging, handkerchiefs waving, crying, and shouting.11
From outside came the sound of a hundred cannons. Charles Douglass heard these batteries giving their endorsement of what had occurred, echoes of the battles that had been fought to make this day even conceivable. The animated reactions of white people wholeheartedly in support of the amendment shocked Charles. Writing to the father he wished was there to share the moment, he saw "such rejoicing I never before witnessed." He thought, "if they will only give us the elective franchise and shoulder straps which is only simple justice, that will be all I ask."12
At the start of this war, Congress had debated a thirteenth amendment to preserve slavery forever. Four years later, this Thirteenth Amendment could not have been more different. This was the distance the United States had traveled in the crucible of four years of conflict. From England, Rosine Draz wrote in disbelief to Douglass, "your people are free, forever free!"13
Douglass was not in Washington for the amendment's passage, but he would not miss Lincoln's second inauguration in March, as it was sure to be a day to remember. The night before Lincoln would be sworn in, Douglass had tea with a man suffering from decidedly mixed feelings. Salmon Chase was the
new chief justice of the Supreme Court, but the next morning he would swear in Lincoln to the job he had really wanted.
Chase's life had been one of political triumph (excluding the presidency) and stunning personal tragedy. He had had the excruciating fate to bury three wives and four children along his rise to power. Only his daughter Kate survived. Douglass had known him for years, as Chase had "welcomed me to his home and his table when to do so was a strange thing in Washington, and the fact was by no means an insignificant one."14
Chase's creditability in the abolitionist movement began with his life-threatening defense of a Cincinnati antislavery publication. The mob of slavery's advocates he faced down while clinging to the doorway of the printer's building would be the first of many who would not make Chase back down. He defended fugitives in court, advocated civil rights in Ohio, and opposed slavery as a national leader. In the Senate, he and Charles Sumner were the black citizens' eloquent defenders. His consistent and noble stances are often undervalued because he was stiff, slightly pompous, and lacking in the charisma and personal grace of a Lincoln. Chase's greatness and contribution to the success of the war have been obscured by comparison to Lincoln, but Douglass knew well the power of Chase's actions through the years and held him in great respect.
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