While the residents of Douglass's city were trying to put their lives back together, Lincoln and his son Tad stepped ashore in the captured Confederate capital of Richmond after its fall. The first black man to see the president walking the largely deserted streets recognized him from pictures and fell to his knees, crying that the messiah was before him. Lincoln was clearly embarrassed and asked him and others to only praise God, but a crowd delirious with joy was already forming. From the waterfront, Lincoln then walked through the former Confederate capital with a mass of the formerly enslaved that only grew in size and ecstasy. Seeing how the residents responded to Lincoln, one soldier wrote, "To see the colored people, one would think they had all gone crazy."2
Black troops proudly had been the first to enter the city and these men patrolled the streets during Lincoln's crowded walk. The adulation of Richmond blacks aside, the city was a hotbed of animosity toward him, and any window could harbor a sniper. Soon Lincoln was safely back on board a Union steamboat and returned to military meetings that were now more about how to deal with the shattered pieces of the Confederacy than how to defeat it.
After Union forces took the Confederate capital, Douglass told a jubilant Boston audience in Faneuil Hall, a crucial site of the first American revolution, "I, for the first time in my life, have the assurance, not only of a country redeemed, of a country regenerated, but of my race free and having a future in this land." There were times when he had been close to giving up hope, casting his eyes toward Haiti for a moment, but he had elected to keep trust in America. The theme of regeneration he had spoken of in future terms, he now discussed in the present tense. He made a special point of noting that it had been black troops who first entered Richmond, and how the cherished vision he had nurtured seemed so close to completion. Douglass closed by saying his people were the Lazarus of the South: "Here came North, clothed in silk and in satin, and shining with gold, and his breast sparkling with diamonds—his table loaded with the good things of this world. And a certain Lazarus sat at his gate, desiring the crumbs that fell from his table." A change had taken place, for much to the rich man's chagrin, Lazarus was up and in Abraham's bosom: "But Father Abraham says, 'If they hear not Grant nor Sherman, neither will they be persuaded though I send Lazarus unto them." The crowd roared with laughter and approval. They cheered for Douglass to go on, but he resisted the urge, knowing he ended on a perfect moment.3
On April 10, only six days later, even better news reached Rochester. In the evening, word that General Lee had surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia filtered through the city. Most people had turned in for a quiet Sunday night, but Mayor Daniel Moore decided this was cause enough to wake them. At eleven, firefighters sounded City Hall's bell and continued ringing it until two in the morning. Others who owned bells contributed their own chimes of joy, victory, and peace. Residents jumped out of their beds and it was not long until the intersection of Buffalo and State Streets was flooded with celebrating residents. Cheer after cheer went up. People lit rockets that blazed through the sky while their excitement drowned out Mayor Moore's attempts to speak from the steps of Power's Banking Office. Others started bonfires in the street and a cannon was hauled out for a more powerful blast. Only daylight dawning broke up the relieved celebration.4
The next night, another happy throng gathered, this time on the lawn of the White House, demanding that the president address them. The president spoke on the process that Louisiana was experiencing to restore proper relations with the federal government. The new state constitution did not give the black man the vote, and Lincoln commented, "I would myself prefer that it were now conferred on the very intelligent, and on those who serve our cause as soldiers." However, he felt, "The question is, 'Will it be wiser to take it as it is, and help to improve it; or to reject, and disperse it?'" He asserted that it was better to readmit a former Confederate state going through chaos with a constitution ending slavery, and then look to their legislature to settle these voting questions. He asked whether black men would attain the vote sooner "by saving the already advanced steps toward it, than by running backward over them?" Lincoln seemed to be taking his usual cautious and moderate path, one that was likely to set him in conflict with the Radical Republicans and Douglass, but this time he said explicitly that he had a faith in progress and the compassion of people of these states. As he concluded, he made it clear that this was not just a speech about Louisiana, but one that would impact what many more states would undergo during the reconstruction of the nation.5
Had Douglass been among the assembly hearing Lincoln that night, he would have profoundly disagreed with his approach. There were grounds for another critical and forceful debate developing between Douglass and Lincoln. The warmth of their last encounter would not diminish this likely clash. Still, no American president had ever publicly spoken in favor of any black people having the right to vote.
There were people in the crowd that evening listening to Lincoln who were horrified that the president would voice support for black civil rights under any conditions. One such listener was Confederate sympathizer John Wilkes Booth, who despised the second inaugural address he had also witnessed, and he loathed this one more. Lincoln had said nothing on Inauguration Day of whether the black man would vote. Tonight he had crossed that line. A seething Booth uttered to his cohorts, "Now, by God, I'll put him through. That is the last speech he will ever make."6
Three nights later, on April 14, Booth entered the back of the president's viewing box in Ford's Theater and shot him. Lincoln had said just weeks before that God's will would prevail "until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword." Slumping toward his wife with a bullet through the back of his head, Lincoln too was held under that harsh fate. Under his own conception of the Civil War, Lincoln was one more casualty.
Douglass was in a daze.
He wandered into Rochester's City Hall and sat alone near the back. After the unthinkable news reached their city, Mayor Moore called a meeting for three in the afternoon. Bells tolled in a very different mood than they had a week before. Hundreds of citizens lined up to stand clamoring for a seat inside the memorial gathering. Douglass was here to mourn with others, to process this devastating shock and find solace in common grief.
From Washington to New York City and beyond to California, businesses closed and adults wept like children. There was a sense of deep pain, not just in America but soon enough on the other side of the ocean. From England, Julia Griffiths Crofts and Rosine Draz dashed off letters to Douglass urging him to be careful, to stay in New York, and not to go anywhere near Washington.7Black Americans felt this loss in an exceptionally deep way, as if Lincoln had been a family member or more. One soldier wrote, "God has willed it, that he has taken our beloved father, Abraham Lincoln, from us."8Douglass did not view Lincoln's death in these terms. Lincoln was no father figure to him or any kind of savior. He had not known him deeply, but well enough. Lincoln was no abstraction, no symbol. Their disagreements, the excruciating caution Douglass sensed in him, made Lincoln real, a man like any other—except fate had propelled this man from the people to being the pivot about which turned one of the greatest wars in history. Lincoln called Douglass a friend, and whether or not Douglass would use the same word, Lincoln was certainly a man with whom Douglass felt a keen bond of experience. Douglass felt a genuine personal loss as he sat stupefied in the back of the room.
No one volunteered to speak at first. The room was filled with mourners too stunned to muster words. Eventually, two ministers and a prominent judge said their piece; then Douglass's name went up from the assembly. It carried to every side and filled the room until Douglass had no choice but to rise.
Looking out into the anguish in so many faces he knew, Douglass confessed that he had not expected to speak and found this an almost impossible task. "This is not an occasion for speech making, but for silence." But a lifetime of experience drew him on, and he spoke of encounter
ing friends all this day, who took his hands and asked for words, and how he had found himself wordless. All he could relate now was what he was experiencing: "I feel it as a personal as well as national calamity; on account of the race to which I belong and the deep interest which that good man ever took in its elevation."
As so many leaders and ministers were saying across the nation this day, he wondered if there was some underlying meaning to this death and its strange and disorienting timing, coming as the war was ended. He pondered, "It may be in the inscrutable wisdom of Him who controls the destinies of Nations, that this drawing of the Nation's most precious heart's blood was necessary to bring us back to that equilibrium which we must maintain if the Republic was to be permanently redeemed."
Douglass granted them a glance into his heart when he said, "How I have to-day mourned for our noble President, I dare not attempt to tell. It was only a few weeks ago that I shook his brave, honest hand, and looked into his gentle eye and heard his kindly voice uttering those memorable words." Douglass then quoted a long passage of the second inaugural from memory. As Douglass tried to unite the crowd, to translate sorrow into hope, he would once more return to the theme of national regeneration through brutal sacrifice that he had used for the last four years. If there was a lesson here, Douglass believed it to be "that the blood of our beloved martyred President will be the salvation of our country."
Their president had been killed not just by Booth, but by a society still infected with slavery. Redemption, not just reconstruction, meant, "wherever there is a patriot in the North or South, white or black, helping on the good cause, hail him as a citizen, a kinsman, a clansman, a brother beloved!" In this moment, Douglass's plea was "Let us not remember our enemies and disenfranchise our friends." He asked, "For the safety of all, let justice be done to each." As Douglass stepped down, he had gone from struggling for words to making one of his greatest speeches. "I have heard Webster and Clay in their best moments," one witness wrote, "Channing and Beecher in their highest inspirations; I never heard truer eloquence! I never saw profounder impression. When he finished, the meeting was done."9
Douglass had made many astonishing speeches, touched the hearts of hundreds of audiences, but he had never felt more connected to one. Through the cheers, the complete reversal of mood in the room, from shock and deep pain to a hopeful determination, he had taken a journey with them. Douglass remembered, "We shared in common a terrible calamity, and this 'touch of nature' made us more than countrymen, it made us 'kin.' "10
After the armies had spiked the cannons, staked their arms, and held their last Grand Processions, the Civil War truly ended on December 18, when—despite Delaware, Kentucky, New Jersey, and Mississippi's rejection— twenty-seven states approved the Thirteenth Amendment. The ratification outlawed slavery forever.
EPILOGUE
America's Stepchildren
A few weeks after the assassination, Mary Lincoln, although prostrate with grief, gathered herself enough to send a few mementos of her husband to several people who had been important to him. She remembered him saying that he wanted to extend to Douglass some token of his regard. A long package arrived in Rochester addressed to Frederick Douglass, and when he opened it, he saw that the widow had sent him Lincoln's "favorite walking staff." Douglass wrote back to her, "this inestimable memento of his Excellency will be retained in my possession while I live—an object of Sacred interest—a token not merely of the kind consideration in which I have reason to know that the President was pleased to hold me personally, but as an indication of this human interest in the welfare of my whole race."1
Years later, when Mrs. Lincoln's financial problems worsened, Douglass offered to lecture to raise money for her, but Mrs. Lincoln was too proud to accept this offer. He took genuine concern in her welfare, writing to Mrs. Lincoln's seamstress Elizabeth Keckley in 1867, "I would gladly see Mrs. Lincoln, if this could be done in a quiet way without the reporters getting hold of it, and using it in some way to the prejudice of that already much-abused lady." Mrs. Lincoln wrote back to Keckley that when Douglass was in Chicago, "Tell him, for me, he must call and see me; give him my number." For his efforts to see that she lived a dignified life, Mrs. Lincoln wrote that Douglass would "always have my most grateful thanks."2
Abraham Lincoln would often be in the thoughts of Douglass in the remaining thirty-seven years of his life, and in hundreds of speeches, articles, interviews, and one final autobiography. However, Douglass's relationship with Lincoln's successor was problematic. On February 7, 1866, Douglass joined a delegation of black men, including his son Lewis, to greet the new president. As Douglass stepped inside the White House for the fourth time, the building had not changed, just the man occupying it. Less than a year earlier, Douglass had walked into this house to be treated by its resident with esteem and respect. He was about to find out how much had changed in that year.
President Andrew Johnson was a man who took great pride in having risen in society from being a tailor and former Tennessee slaveholder to being part of a Union party ticket with Lincoln, and he now presided over a nation at peace. Andrew Johnson slouched in his chair, waiting for the delegates. He did not seem pleased to be greeting them into his office.3
George Downing of Rhode Island spoke first, asking Johnson to see them as friends. Then he appealed for better enforcement of the Thirteenth Amendment, as oppressive Black Codes were cropping up all over the South and new measures were needed to ensure that all could vote.
Douglass spoke next and immediately invoked Lincoln. He reminded Johnson, "Your noble and humane predecessor placed in our hands the sword to assist in saving the Union." Now Johnson had the power to put the ballot in their hands. Douglass declared, "The fact that we are the subjects of the Government and subject to bear the burdens of the State, makes it not improper that we should ask to share in the privileges of this condition."
Johnson began a meandering tirade, speaking of his days as a slaveholder, calling himself a friend to their people because he had never sold a slave, only acquired them. Johnson did little that day to mask his pride at having risen high enough in southern society to be a slaveholder. He told the delegation that he had treated his slaves well before and after emancipation. For this reason, Johnson took as an affront that they would question him on these matters. As he spoke, he moved toward Douglass, standing close to him, laying out each insult. That look of loathing in Johnson's eye that Douglass thought he had seen during the inauguration was now blatant.
The president said he did not like "to be arraigned by some who can get up handsomely-rounded periods and deal in rhetoric, and talk about abstract ideas of liberty, who never periled life, liberty or property. This kind of theoretical, hollow, unpractical friendship amounts to very little." Johnson pronounced that he would not support their efforts toward the voting booth because this would only lead to a race war resulting "in the extermination of one or the other. God forbid that I should be engaged in such a work!" He was pleased that he could call himself a "Moses" to their people, but what he did for them would not be at the expense of the poor whites who resented them.
Johnson accused blacks of being ungrateful for the freedoms the Civil War had brought, especially since it had been poor white southerners who had truly suffered. The president believed that if more was to be given, meaning the ballot, it should come from these new state governments. For him to force anything more would be a catalyst for racial wars of unprecedented bloodshed.
With that, Johnson tried to end the meeting with his visitors by thanking them for their presence, but Douglass would not be bullied out of the White House. He would not leave without some kind of dialogue.
"If you will allow me," Douglass persisted, "I would like to say one or two words in reply." He wanted Johnson to understand "enfranchisement of the blacks as a means of preventing the very thing which your Excellency appears to apprehend—that is a conflict of races."
"I repeat," Johnson curtly spoke, "I
merely wanted to indicate my views in reply to your address, and not to enter into any general controversy." Johnson reiterated his belief that "the colored people can live and advance in civilization to better advantage elsewhere than crowded right down there in the South."
Douglass could not let these assertions go unquestioned by a man with such power over their future. He pushed back again, pointing to the former masters writing harsh Black Codes, which when enacted meant "we cannot get away from the plantation."
Johnson feigned ignorance, "What prevents you?"
"We have not the simple right of locomotion through the southern states now."
"Why not?" Johnson claimed the government "furnishes you with every facility."
Douglass tried to convey the present realities of the South, where "his master then decides for him where he shall go, where he shall work, how much he shall work—in fact, he is divested of all political power. He is in the hands of those men."
Johnson conceded nothing and retreated to a familiar idea: "There is this conflict, and hence I suggest emigration. If he cannot get employment in the South, he has it in his power to go where he can get it." After a war in which his own sons had fought to save a nation, Douglass was back to having a president tell a black delegation that they could leave the country.
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