All Douglass could do was wearily thank Johnson for his time. But before he and his entourage left the room, he issued a subtle challenge, "The President sends us to the people, and we go to the people."
"Yes sir," President Johnson remarked, "I have great faith in the people. I believe they will do what is right."4
Once they were gone, Johnson showed that his emotions for Douglass and his people were even rawer. No doubt, Johnson's mind had centered on Douglass, whom he deemed a man who "would sooner cut a white man's throat as not."5
Since President Johnson had not been open to their thoughts, the delegation drafted a public document in answer to him, deeming "the views and opinions you expressed . . . entirely unsound and prejudicial to the highest interest of our race as well as to the country at large." They rejected the idea that southern prejudices against black people were grounds to not push for enfranchisement. They advised, "Peace between the races is not to be secured by degrading one race and exalting another; by giving power to one race and withholding it from another; but by maintaining a state of equal justice between all classes." The anger in their letter in reply to Johnson is clear: After having fought a war, they believed that they had earned the right to be citizens.6
This ill-fated call to the White House put into perspective the amazing promise of Douglass's three Lincoln visits, as well as capturing the disappointment that Douglass would become greatly familiar with in the years to come. Though the visit with President Johnson was exceptional in its intolerance, subsequent presidents never listened to Douglass in the respectful way that Lincoln had. President Ulysses Grant appointed Douglass secretary of the Santo Domingo Commission, charged with evaluating whether the United States should annex the Dominican Republic. On the ship traveling home, however, Douglass, barred from the dining room, was forced to take his meals in his cabin. Grant knew of this and did nothing. When Grant invited the commission to dine at the White House, Douglass was not allowed to attend.
President Rutherford Hayes effectively ended Reconstruction by removing troops protecting black rights in the South, and he would not hear Douglass's anguished advice. Then President Grover Cleveland asked for Douglass's resignation as Recorder of Deeds of Washington, D.C., in 1886, a symbolic end to a largely symbolic position that finished Douglass's government career. It was a muted culmination to the way that Lincoln's successors took for granted Douglass and the counsel he could have given.7
Thus Lincoln, imperfections and all, continued to hold a special place in Douglass's life. A mark of his continued respect for Lincoln was displayed not only in his popular lectures on his relationship with the Civil War president, but in the prominent placement on his parlor wall in his Anacostia home, Cedar Hill, of a portrait of Abraham Lincoln. At times, the Lincoln-Douglass relationship was remembered; as the Rochester Union and Advertiser wrote in 1886, "Mr. Douglass held the most intimate and friendly relations with the late President, having been specifically invited to the White House by Mr. Lincoln."8
More often, however, this rare and unusual relationship was a bothersome and neglected fact for a nation erasing the reality and memory of black progress in the Civil War and immediately after. The attitude President Johnson demonstrated to Douglass's delegation was indicative of attitudes exhibited by both North and South during Reconstruction, in which old patterns reasserted themselves and the revolutionary aspects of the late war were muted and often reversed. Through new Black Codes, voting restrictions, and the advent of the Ku Klux Klan, black lives were restricted and hemmed in. Slavery was gone, but the old structures found creative and inventive ways to bind the future of black citizens.
Yet, these profound reversals and disappointments did not make the Civil War any less of a transformation in American life. Extraordinary times of hope and change are often followed by countermovements pushing against what has been achieved. These reactions can be strong, as the harsh close of Reconstruction moving into a long Jim Crow era certainly proved. Sometimes a people can almost forget just how much they have accomplished, but not quite and not forever. As much damage as Andrew Johnson did during the crucial months and years after the war, he did not and could not halt all the progress of the Civil War era.
At the end of the war, black troops numbered almost two hundred thousand, roughly a fourth of the entire army, and a tenth of all those who served; thirty-eight thousand black men gave their lives, a mortality rate that was 35 percent higher than white soldiers, an extraordinary number considering that they began to fight only in the latter half of the war.9
Even with the considerable setbacks felt by black America with the rise of Jim Crow laws, the war's impact on black America has often been underestimated. Illiteracy among black Americans stood at 90 percent when the war ended, but was down to 70 percent by 1880 and 50 percent by the turn of the century. Half of all blacks did not experience the minimal social changes Douglass had wished for, but it was an undeniable change from a dire situation. Black land-owning in the South went from almost nothing in 1865 to a quarter of all black farmers owning land in 1910. Numerous black men, some of whom were born slaves, served in Congress and the highest state offices in that era, and although these black politicians were largely forgotten within a hundred years, the black men and women who hold political office today carry on their tradition.10
What was written into the Constitution after the Civil War would be footing upon which future freedom fighters could stand and proclaim justice. In the immediate aftermath of the war, the Thirteenth Amendment's ratification abolished slavery. Congress approved the Fourteenth Amendment in 1866, which made all people born in the country full citizens and promised that the government would protect their rights equally. Ratified in 1868, though its pledge was often betrayed, the amendment would be tested in the twentieth century and beyond for civil rights advancement. Finally, the Fifteenth Amendment of 1869, ratified in 1870, was a further attempt to ensure citizens would not be barred from voting because of their race.
On April 14, 1876, with a great ceremony attended by all of official Washington, the Freedman's Monument was dedicated as a memorial to the martyred president. For more than a decade, a freed black woman named Charlotte Scott had collected money, starting with her own hard-earned contribution of five dollars. Thousands of black citizens contributed small amounts in order to erect a twelve-foot-high bronze statue of Lincoln.
Near Seventh and K Streets, spectators leaned out of windows and packed the square and streets radiating into it to observe the ceremony. Flags were at half-mast in honor of Lincoln. A procession of mounted police, politicians, black soldiers and bands traveled down Pennsylvania Avenue and along East Capital Street to Lincoln Park. President Ulysses Grant sat on the stand in front of his cabinet, Supreme Court justices, and scores of senators and congressmen. As the president officially unveiled the monument, a loud combination of gasps and claps went up from the crowd.11
The famed sculptor Thomas Ball had been commissioned to make a bronze Lincoln standing over a kneeling black man. The man whose picture was used for the black figure, Archer Alexander, had actually escaped slavery in Missouri during the war, bringing vital information to Union lines. Alexander's former owner had pursued him, but Alexander found safety in Alton, Illinois. His son Tom would give his life to the Union cause. Alexander certainly represented the best of the roles his people had assumed during the war.12
Only one man had been considered to deliver the dedicatory address. As Frederick Douglass climbed the platform, he looked over a park packed with bands and banners. No black speaker had ever commanded such an audience, and the profound effects of the war could hardly have been better symbolized. The irony is that Douglass had severe misgivings about the Freedman's Monument itself, with its depiction of a serene president clutching the Emancipation Proclamation in one hand and reaching toward a black slave crouched before him. Douglass hated seeing his people portrayed on their knees.
Freedman's monument (Emancipation by
Thomas Ball, Lincoln Park,
Washington, D.C., 1876)
For Frederick Douglass, the Civil War had been the central event of his life. Douglass had been forty-eight when the war ended. Though the annihilation of slavery had been triumphant, Douglass had felt a strange melancholy concerning what his purpose in the world would be, as abolition had defined his life for as long as he could remember. Douglass wrote, "I felt that I had reached the end of the noblest and best part of my life." He had rejected his dream of bucolic retirement, however, and soon was back on the road. Nothing in his later years would match the impact of this day's speech. It was no surprise that it largely dealt with the enigmatic and inscrutable politician who had so unexpectedly affected his life.
He commenced an hour-long oration upon Lincoln, the man he had long pondered, sometimes praised, often condemned. Douglass first lulled his listeners with a noble setting of the scene, reminding them that this would not have been possible under "The spirit of slavery and barbarism, which still lingers to blight and destroy . . . " He employed his considerable skills as a powerful public speaker to relax the crowd with a sense that Union tri-umphalism would be praised this day, but then came words that his esteemed audience did not expect.
"It must be admitted, truth compels me to admit, even here in the presence of the monument we have erected to his memory, that Abraham Lincoln was not, in the fullest sense of the word, either our man or our model. In his interests, in his associations, in his habits of thought and in his prejudices, he was a white man." Douglass was now entering uncharted social territory, with the wounds of war so fresh, with the nation's acute need to transform Lincoln into a figure nearly Christ-like in humble saintliness—for had not the president been killed on a Good Friday?
Douglass went on: "He was preeminently the white man's President, entirely devoted to the welfare of white men. He was ready and willing at any time during the first years of his administration to deny, postpone and sacrifice the rights of humanity in the colored people in order to promote the welfare of the white people of this country. In all his education and feeling he was an American of the Americas."
He then stated what was obvious but seldom said about the execution of the Civil War. "The race to which we belong were not the special objects of his affection . . . First, midst, and last, you and yours were the objects of his deepest affection and his most earnest solicitude. You were the children of Abraham Lincoln. We are at best only his step-children; children by adoption, children by force of circumstances and necessity." When it came to the enslaved, Douglass reminded the crowd that Lincoln had been ready to recapture those escaping and put down those rebelling. Lincoln had told them they should leave the country, then discouraged their military service. Douglass told his listeners, "Our faith in him was often taxed and strained to the uttermost, but it never failed."
Douglass was taking the chance to speak his truth, and he dared those in attendance to hear things they did not want to consider. Reconstruction was failing precisely because they would not. Douglass began to talk about the vast historical forces that the president had transformed through his grim determination to save the Union. Lincoln had eventually enrolled near two hundred thousand of them in the armed services and played the essential role in outlawing slavery in the capital and then in every inch of the country. Douglass recounted, "His great mission was to accomplish two things; first, to save his country from dismemberment and ruin, and second, to free his country from the great crime of slavery."
The first was true, but the second was more a reflection of Douglass's initial mission, one that was taken up over time by Lincoln. In the most incisive estimation of Lincoln that Douglass was ever to make, the speaker reminded his audience that at the time of the beginning of the war, abolitionists (including Douglass) had seen him as "tardy, cold, dull, and indifferent," but when Douglass measured him against the rest of the country at the time, Lincoln was "swift, zealous, radical, and determined." Douglass now fully understood what Lincoln had gone through, balancing public opinion and justice.
In the end, Douglass's people had come to love this president, and for a simple reason: "We came to the conclusion that the hour and the man of our redemption had somehow met in the person of Abraham Lincoln."13
This vital address was skilled and subtle in what it conveyed. Douglass, in emphasizing Lincoln's racist attitudes, actions, and propensities, did not do so in a tone of accusation, blame, or even regret. In the end, Douglass wanted the crowd to know that Lincoln was, in fact, not different from them; even in his evident greatness, he was one of them, sharing the limited views and blindness born of the nation's burden of race—and yet he had done marvelous acts to move this country forward and to give justice to African-Americans. They could do the same.
Everyone in the crowd knew that Lincoln had invited Douglass to the White House to speak with him. He had not given Douglass all he wanted, or all his people deserved, but he had listened. He even did Douglass the courtesy to disagree, to gently argue, to treat him simply as a man. Douglass told white America that their instinctual prejudices were forgivable if their actions reflected an openness to listen and to grow, as Lincoln had. W. E. B. Du Bois took the same meaning from Lincoln's life that this speech reflects: "I love him not because he was perfect, but because he was not and yet triumphed . . . The world is full of folk whose taste was educated in the gutter. The world is full of people born hating and despising their fellows. To these I love to say: See this man. He was one of you and yet became Abraham Lincoln."14
In the meetings of black activists and our presidents, there has more often than not been an edge of conflict and distrust. Theodore Roosevelt invited Booker T. Washington to dinner in the first month of his presidency, though he argued, "As a race and in the mass they are altogether inferior to the whites."15When Woodrow Wilson met with William Monroe Trotter in the White House, they fell into a heated forty-five-minute argument in which the Virginian informed the civil rights leader, "Your tone, sir, offends me."16 John F. Kennedy, who refused to appear in person at the famed March on Washington, met with Martin Luther King Jr. and other black leaders at the White House later in the day, after the speeches at the Lincoln Memorial. He had been reluctant to make a national observance of the anniversary of the emancipation, which may be one reason why King made a special point to use Lincoln's proclamation as a theme in his great speech that day. As usual with Kennedy, he was polite but cool to King; within a week, his brother, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, would approve the FBI's secret tapings of the civil rights leader. Yet, this kind of pained dynamic, despite all the hard and harsh words Douglass had poured on Lincoln, had been singularly absent when Douglass decided he should confront the president face-to-face about "complaints of my people."
Across our long racial chasm, Lincoln and Douglass courageously talked. Douglass's Civil War mission was predicated on white and black realizing that they needed each other. Lincoln could not win the Civil War without utilizing the whole country, which meant calling on the bravery of black people, but these men could not fight without Lincoln's approval and his actions curbing discrimination against them. Lincoln and Douglass offered an example that a rebuilding nation could heed.
Indeed, no matter what shortcomings Lincoln possessed as a reformer, Douglass felt that thankfulness toward the president was well earned: he had been "the first American President who . . . rose above the prejudice of his times." Lincoln had shared in much of this prejudice, but had not, in the end, been paralyzed by it. He had entered the war not intending to free the slaves, but he had not stepped away from the challenge or the opportunity when the tide of war demanded it. And he had done so with wisdom and sure political skill. A lesser man in Lincoln's position could never have accomplished the imposing and unlikely task of freeing the slaves in the midst of four years of total war. Certainly, a less skilled and astute politician might have been swamped by the conflicting painful demands of that war, and a headstrong radical wo
uld never have survived those whipsaw currents.
He never intended to end slavery—this was something Lincoln stated plainly many times. Still, Lincoln's innate distaste for slavery created an equally clear reality: He never regretted for a moment ending slavery, or having become by circumstance an active agent in its demise. Lincoln never saw any conflict in having been thrust by history into ending an institution he abhorred, even as he was frank in admitting that he had never harbored any intention to be that agent of world-historic change.
A hundred years on, Martin Luther King Jr. stood before Washington's immense memorial to Lincoln and directly referred to the Emancipation Proclamation as a "bad check," a promissory note still not delivered upon.17What remains for us is a pervasive racial divide so great that black and white still hesitate to become friends, to live alongside one another, and to educate their children together. The nation's laws have changed, but the heart's willingness to live out a reasonable common life has not shifted much.
We are still enslaved by distrust. The three meetings of Lincoln and Douglass were, admittedly, small moments in the centuries-old unfolding of the trial of race in America. Their relationship, in its complexity and honesty, still offers an example of engagement, argument, and honesty. There is no need to sentimentalize the relationship, to claim they were friends, or to falsely claim that Douglass somehow made Lincoln into "the Great Emancipator."
They met not as friends but as men able to talk. This relationship, exactly in its twists and even its frustrations, ought not be left behind, but remembered, instructive for a divided America today. The greatness of Lincoln is that he did, through patience, skill, and unwavering firmness, accomplish his mission—to save our country from fragmenting. Disunion not only would have left behind in that resulting chaos a legacy of racial brutality, it would have made our nation's experiment in democracy an irrelevance in the world. He saved the nation, and freed nearly four million people as a necessary condition in doing so. In saving the Union, Lincoln preserved the soul of democracy.
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