Frederick Douglass / A Biography

by Charles W. Chesnutt

Ever mindful of his people and seeking always to promote their welfare, Douglass was one of those who urged, in all his addresses at this period, the abolition of slavery and the arming of the negroes as the most effective means of crushing the rebellion. In 1862 he delivered a series of lectures in New England under the auspices of the recently formed Emancipation League, which contended for abolition as a military necessity.

The first or conditional emancipation proclamation was issued in September, 1862; and shortly afterward Douglass published a pamphlet for circulation in Great Britain, entitled The Slave's Appeal to Great Britain, in which he urged the English people to refuse recognition of the independence of the Confederate States. He always endeavored in his public utterances to remove the doubts and fears of those who were tempted to leave the negroes in slavery because of the difficulty of disposing of them after they became free. Douglass, with the simple, direct, primitive sense of justice that had always marked his mind, took the only true ground for the solution of the race problems of that or any other epoch,-that the situation should be met with equal and exact justice, and that his people should be allowed to do as they pleased with themselves, "subject only to the same great laws which apply to other men." He was a conspicuous figure at the meeting in Tremont Temple, Boston, on January 1, 1863, when the Emancipation Proclamation, hourly expected by an anxious gathering, finally flashed over the wires. Douglass was among the first to suggest the employment of colored troops in the Union army. In spite of all assertions to the contrary, he foresaw in the war the end of slavery. He perceived that by the enlistment of colored men not only would the Northern arms be strengthened, but his people would win an opportunity to exercise one of the highest rights of freemen, and by valor on the field of battle to remove some of the stigma that slavery had placed upon them. He strove through every channel at his command to impress his views upon the country; and his efforts helped to swell the current of opinion which found expression, after several intermediate steps, in the enlistment of two colored regiments by Governor Andrew, the famous war governor of Massachusetts, a State foremost in all good works. When Mr. Lincoln had granted permission for the recruiting of these regiments, Douglass issued through his paper a stirring appeal, which was copied in the principal journals of the Union States, exhorting his people to rally to this call, to seize this opportunity to strike a blow at slavery and win the gratitude of the country and the blessings of liberty for themselves and their posterity.

Douglass exerted himself personally in procuring enlistments, his two sons [his youngest and his oldest], Charles and Lewis, being [among] the first in New York to enlist; for the two Massachusetts regiments were recruited all over the North. Lewis H. Douglass, sergeant-major in the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts, was among the foremost on the ramparts at Fort Wagner. Both these sons of Douglass survived the war, and are now well known and respected citizens of Washington, D.C. The Fifty-fourth Massachusetts, under the gallant but ill-fated Colonel Shaw, won undying glory in the conflict; and the heroic deeds of the officers and men of this regiment are fittingly commemorated in the noble monument by St. Gaudens, recently erected on Boston Common, to stand as an inspiration of freedom and patriotism for the future and as testimony that a race which for generations had been deprived of arms and liberty could worthily bear the one and defend the other.

Douglass was instrumental in persuading the government to put colored soldiers on an equal footing with white soldiers, both as to pay and protection. In the course of these efforts he was invited to visit President Lincoln. He describes this memorable interview in detail in his Life and Times. The President welcomed him with outstretched hands, put him at once at his ease, and listened patiently and attentively to all that he had to say. Douglass maintained that colored soldiers should receive the same pay as white soldiers, should be protected and exchanged as prisoners, and should be rewarded, by promotion, for deeds of valor. The President suggested some of the difficulties to be overcome; but both he and Secretary of War Stanton, whom Douglass also visited, assured him that in the end his race should be justly treated. Stanton, before the close of the interview with him, promised Douglass a commission as assistant adjutant to General Lorenzo Thomas, then recruiting colored troops in the Mississippi Valley. But Stanton evidently changed his mind, since the commission, somewhat to Douglass's chagrin, never came to hand.

When McClellan had been relieved by Grant, and the new leader of the Union forces was fighting the stubbornly contested campaign of the Wilderness, President Lincoln again sent for Douglass, to confer with him with reference to bringing slaves in the rebel States within the Union lines, so that in the event of premature peace as many slaves as possible might be free. Douglass undertook, at the President's suggestion, to organize a band of colored scouts to go among the negroes and induce them to enter the Union lines. The plan was never carried out, owing to the rapid success of the Union arms; but the interview greatly impressed Douglass with the sincerity of the President's conviction against slavery and his desire to see the war result in its overthrow. What the colored race may have owed to the services, in such a quarter, of such an advocate as Douglass, brave, eloquent, high-principled, and an example to Lincoln of what the enslaved race was capable of, can only be imagined. That Lincoln was deeply impressed by these interviews is a matter of history.

Douglass supported vigorously the nomination of Lincoln for a second term, and was present at his [March 4] inauguration. And a few days later, while the inspired words of the inaugural address, long bracketed with the noblest of human utterances, were still ringing in his ears, he spoke at the meeting held in Rochester to mourn the death of the martyred President, and made one of his most eloquent and moving addresses. It was a time that wrung men's hearts, and none more than the strong-hearted man's whose race had found its liberty through him who lay dead at Washington, slain by the hand of an assassin whom slavery had spawned.

X.

With the fall of slavery and the emancipation of the colored race the heroic epoch of Douglass's career may be said to have closed. The text upon which he so long had preached had been expunged from the national bible; and he had been a one-text preacher, a one-theme orator. He felt the natural reaction which comes with relief from high mental or physical tension, and wondered, somewhat sadly, what he should do with himself, and how he should earn a living. The same considerations, in varying measure, applied to others of the anti-slavery reformers. Some, unable to escape the reforming habit, turned their attention to different social evils, real or imaginary. Others, sufficiently supplied with this worlds goods for their moderate wants, withdrew from public life. Douglass was thinking of buying a farm and retiring to rural solitudes, when a new career opened up for him in the lyceum lecture field. The North was favorably disposed toward colored men. They had acquitted themselves well during the war, and had shown becoming gratitude to their deliverers. The once despised abolitionists were now popular heroes. Douglass's checkered past seemed all the more romantic in the light of the brighter present, like a novel with a pleasant ending; and those who had hung thrillingly upon his words when he denounced slavery now listened with interest to what he had to say upon other topics. He spoke sometimes on Woman Suffrage, of which he was always a consistent advocate. His most popular lecture was one on "Self-made Men." Another on "Ethnology," in which he sought a scientific basis for his claim for the negro's equality with the white man, was not so popular—with white people. The wave of enthusiasm which had swept the enfranchised slaves into what seemed at that time the safe harbor of constitutional right was not, after all, based on abstract doctrines of equality of intellect, but on an inspiring sense of justice (long dormant under the influence of slavery, but thoroughly awakened under the moral stress of the war), which conceded to every man the right of a voice in his own government and the right to an equal opportunity in life to develop such powers as he possessed, however great or small these might be.

But Douglass's work in direct behalf of his race was not yet entirely done. In fact, he realized very distinctly the vast amount of work that would be necessary to lift his people up to the level of their enlarged opportunities; and, as may be gathered from some of his published utterances, he foresaw that the process would be a long one, and that their friends might weary sometimes of waiting, and that there would be reactions toward slavery which would rob emancipation of much of its value. It was the very imminence of such backward steps, in the shape of various restrictive and oppressive laws promptly enacted by the old slave States under President Johnson's administration, that led Douglass to urge the enfranchisement of the freedmen. He maintained that in a free country there could be no safe or logical middle ground between the status of freeman and that of serf. There has been much criticism because the negro, it is said, acquired the ballot prematurely. There seemed imperative reasons, besides that of political expediency, for putting the ballot in his hands. Recent events have demonstrated that this necessity is as great now as then. The assumption that negroes—under which generalization are included all men of color, regardless of that sympathy to which kinship at least should entitle many of them—are unfit to have a voice in government is met by the words of Lincoln, which have all the weight of a political axiom: "No man can be safely trusted to govern other men without their consent." The contention that a class who constitute half the population of a State shall be entirely unrepresented in its councils, because, forsooth, their will there expressed may affect the government of another class of the same general population, is as repugnant to justice and human rights as was the institution of slavery itself. Such a condition of affairs has not the melodramatic and soul-stirring incidents of chattel slavery, but its effects can be as far-reaching and as debasing. There has been some manifestation of its possible consequences in the recent outbreaks of lynching and other race oppression in the South. The practical disfranchisement of the colored people in several States, and the apparent acquiescence by the Supreme Court in the attempted annulment, by restrictive and oppressive laws, of the war amendments to the Constitution, have brought a foretaste of what might be expected should the spirit of the Dred Scott decision become again the paramount law of the land.

On February 7, 1866, Douglass acted as chief spokesman of a committee of leading colored men of the country, who called upon President Johnson to urge the importance of enfranchisement. Mr. Johnson, true to his Southern instincts, was coldly hostile to the proposition, recounted all the arguments against it, and refused the committee an opportunity to reply. The matter was not left with Mr. Johnson, however; and the committee turned its attention to the leading Republican statesmen, in whom they found more impressionable material. Under the leadership of Senators Sumner, Wilson, Wade, and others, the matter was fully argued in Congress, the Democratic party being in opposition, as always in national politics, to any measure enlarging the rights or liberties of the colored race.