There were times that fall when strong hearts quailed. Criticism against Abraham Lincoln mounted. Finally it became clear that Lincoln would not be re-elected by the politicians, the bankers, big business, or the press. The campaign of 1864 was, therefore, waged in country stores, at crossroads, from the backs of carts driving along city streets, in public squares and on church steps.
The young Republican party now had to face a completely united Democratic party which came forward with the story that the war was a failure. They chose the dismissed General George B. McClellan as their candidate and wrapped him in the ambiguous mist of an abused hero. But they reckoned without the inspired tactics of his successor, Ulysses S. Grant. The tide turned. “Lincoln’s man” was doing the job. Now Sherman was “marching to the sea,” and the backbone of the Confederacy was broken.
The people returned Abraham Lincoln to the White House.
With Lincoln safe, Douglass took the stump for the strengthening of the Emancipation Proclamation. The next step was to pass the Thirteenth Amendment, abolishing slavery by law.
In October, Douglass and John Langston called a National Convention of Colored Men for a four-day session in Syracuse. People still could not believe that the war would end in complete emancipation of all slaves. Douglass called upon this convention of free artisans, craftsmen and laborers in the free Northern states to take their place inside the governmental framework.
“Events more mighty than men—eternal Providence, all-wide and all-controlling,” he told them, “have placed us in new relations to the government and the government to us. What that government is to us today, and what it will be tomorrow, is made evident by a very few facts. Look at them, colored men. Slavery in the District of Columbia is abolished forever; slavery in all the territories of the United States is abolished forever; the foreign slave trade, with its ten thousand revolting abominations, is rendered impossible; slavery in ten states of the Union is abolished forever; slavery in the five remaining states is as certain to follow the same fate as the night is to follow the day. The independence of Haiti is recognized; her minister sits beside our “Prime Minister,” Mr. Seward, and dines at his table in Washington, while colored men are excluded from the cars in Philadelphia ... a black man’s complexion in Washington, in the presence of the Federal government, is less offensive than in the City of Brotherly Love. Citizenship is no longer denied us under this government.”
The minutes of the convention were sent to President Lincoln. In December Lincoln laid the Thirteenth Amendment before Congress, and in January, 1865, slavery was forever abolished from any part of the United States “or any place subject to their jurisdiction.”
Tirelessly, ceaselessly, Lincoln weighed every move he made. No harsh words, no condemnation—he recognized human weakness. “Our responsibility,” he said. Not the South’s alone, not merely the slaveholder’s. He did not cant of “sins” and “virtues.”
He read the appeal addressed to Governor Shepley by the “free men of color” in New Orleans, asking to be allowed to “register and vote.” They reminded him of their defense of New Orleans against the British under General Jackson, and declared their present loyalty to the Union. In March he wrote the following letter to the newly elected Governor Hahn:
Executive Mansion, Washington
March 13, 1864