Prophet of Freedom
By David W. Blight
This remarkable monument, the Freedmen’s Memorial, as it became known, was many years in the making, the result of various designs and changes in purpose and meaning. In Yeatman’s lengthy remarks, he told of Ball’s “labor of love,” his “tribute to American patriotism” through the “gratitude of the freed people.” In a triumphal narrative, Yeatman described how Ball sent four photographs of his original model of a standing Lincoln and a kneeling slave to the Sanitary Commission, which in turn sent him a photograph of a former fugitive slave names Archer Alexander, whom the sculptor then depicted, with muscular torso, looking upward, his fist clenched, and in part breaking his own chains under the president’s guiding arm. Since Ball had been convinced by the commission and by the image of Alexander to alter his conception from a “kneeling slave … represented as perfectly passive” (freedom given), to an “emancipated slave [as] agent in his own deliverance” (freedom seized), Yeatman concluded that the monument was an “ideal group … converted into the literal truth of history.”
Such a ceremonial day in the spring sunshine, surrounded by the highest officials of the federal government, at a monument unveiling unlike any other that had occurred in America, was hardly an occasion for literal truth, whether in bronze or in words. But through all the pageantry would waft some powerful symbolic truths in unforgettable language. Langston stepped to the podium and asked President Grant to come forward to pull the cord and unveil the monument. As Grant stood still for a long moment, the entire crowd hushed in rapt silence. Not a good ceremonial speaker, the president delivered no remarks. As the flags and draperies fell away, the throng broke into loud applause and shouts, cannon were fired nearby in a field, and the band struck up “Hail to the Chief.” Those up close could see on the base of the monument the word EMANCIPATION, cut in large letters. Langston next read two congratulatory letters from people who had played roles in bringing about the monument. A poem, “Lincoln,” written by a young black Washington poet, Cordelia Ray, was recited. Then, as parts of the crowd had settled into chairs and others felt the spring breezes over their heads, Langston finally introduced Douglass, orator of the day.
(Blight 2018, pp.2-4)
Douglass was lucky to enjoy any boyish wanderings as a slave. As autobiographer, he sometimes portrayed himself as just out of the frame of the picture, observing, studying, accumulating the knowledge that might not only free him, but also persuade his audience of the merits of the antislavery cause. Long before the age of psychology, Douglas provided a portrait of a young slave conducting psychological warfare against slavery, as that system conspired in every way to ensnare, weaken, and ultimately destroy him. His powers of recollection, fashioned beautifully into words, became his only available weapon. In words, Douglass always fought back not only to defeat slavery, but to make sense of its extremes and work through his pain. “Why am I slave?” is an existential question that reflects as well as anticipates many others like it in human history. Why am I poor? Why is he so rich, and she only his servant or chattel? Why am I hated for my religion, my race, my sexuality, the accident of my birth in this valley or on that side of the river or on this side of the railroad tracks? Why am I a refugee with no home? Why does my color define my life? Douglass’s story represents so many others over the ages.
(Blight 2018, pp.28)
On January 1, 1834, Douglass began a year of living in a kind of wilderness of horror at Edward Covey’s dilapidated farmstead. With his few belongings wrapped in a bundle on a stick braced over his shoulder, Frederick walked seven cold miles westward from St. Michaels to a country setting overlooking the Chesapeake Bay. In the art of his autobiography, this place would be the “tyrant’s home,” the “dark night” of a strong young teenager broken and rendered a “brute” by a totalitarian regime ruled by one savage man. “Ishmael found his Ahab, the ultimate tyrant whose obsessions could never be tamed, and by whom the world could be wrecked and taken down; Douglass found his Covey, who would bludgeon and wreck the young slave, but against whom the sufferer would resurrect himself through violence and will and find another reason to live. Douglass’s pivotal year as a sixteen-year-old under Covey’s savagery is forever cloaked in some of his most beguiling and lyrical prose. The chapters on the time under Covey’s brutal rule are the longest in Douglass’s first two autobiographies. The experience is crafted to artfully that it is often discussed as little more than a literary creation, a brilliant text that lives beyond or above the barnyard, the fence posts, the oxen team, the silent corn and wheat fields, or the dense woods of that Eastern Shore landscape. But Covey was real, and Douglass left a good deal of blood in the soil of that archvillain’s farm, while also extracting a story he would one day make almost as immortal as Herman Melville’s whaling ship. Douglass’s great gift, and the reason we know of him today, is that he found ways to convert the scars Covey left on his body into words that might change the world. His travail under Covey’s yoke became Douglass’s crucifixion and resurrection.
(Blight 2018, pp.59-60)
In one full year on the antislavery circuit Douglass had now collected many such badges of honor – well-publicized instances of being thrown off railcars, bricks hurled at his head, hooligans shouting “nigger” and bringing greater attention to abolitionist ideas as well as free speech. Even clearer now was that for a twenty-four-year-old black man with growing fame and an astonishing new voice, abolitionism was a dangerous business. But in this romantic age, the radical reformer who did not trouble the waters and stir the ire of his foes might be ignored. Ideas, spiritual passion, personal witness, and brazen effrontery were all part of the tactical repertoire. A fast learner, Douglass threw himself avidly into this fray, even as he traveled with a Garrisonian ideological cloak.
(Blight 2018, pp.120)
By early November Douglass joined with other lecturers on the Hundred Conventions tour and, on horseback and on occasional steamboat, moved into Pennsylvania. On one of those boats, the Michigan, riding between New Brighton and Pittsburgh, Douglass “was driven from a table as if he were a dog,” wrote a sympathetic observer. In his support, “two young ladies … rebuked this devilish spirit by leaving the table also.” By now, these Jim Crow episodes, though wounding, only seemed to put more steel in the young reformer’s soul. He regained his stride and voice, and at many stops, especially a weeklong meeting in Pittsburgh, Douglass stole the show over and over with his “Sermon,” this time with a popular political twist, drawing Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, and John C. Calhoun into his repertoire of impersonations. Here one can see that Douglass, though still a Garrisonian who could skewer political parties and their most famous leaders with withering sarcasm, only pointed to how important they nonetheless were in the great debate over slavery’s future. Moreover, everywhere he went, he was the enslaved body and mind breaking out. “DOUGLASS a SLAVE!” wrote an admiring Pittsburgh observer. “Who that heard it, did not feel his heart leap, as he [Douglass] exclaimed, ‘NO! I am no SLAVE! Your law may manacle my limbs, but it cannot enslave my spirit – GOD made it free!”
(Blight 2018, pp.135-136)
Douglass spoke not only as a returning hero from his foreign travels, but primarily as an angry young black American ready for a new kind of attack on his native land. He let it be known that, especially after his British experience, “home” and “country” were now ambivalent concepts. Douglass was excited to be back in the midst of this abolitionist community of comrades, but America was another matter. “I have no love for America, as such,” he jarringly announced. “I have no patriotism. I have no country.” Douglass let his righteous anger flow in metaphors of degradation, chains, and blood. “The institutions of this country do not know me, do not recognize me as a man, except as a piece of property.” The only thing attaching him to his native land was his family, and his deeply felt ties to the “three millions of my fellow creatures groaning beneath the iron rod … with … stripes upon their backs.” Only their “clanking … chains” and their “warm blood … making fat the soil of Maryland and of Alabama” drew him back to America. Such a country, Douglass said, he could not love. “I desire to see its overthrow as speedily as possible, and its Constitution shivered in a thousand fragments.” With loud cheers as well as hisses engulfing the entranced audience, Douglass stalked his prey.
(Blight 2018, pp.179-180)
Thus Douglass caught the scent of a potent idea – that constitutional principle could be elevated above constitutional practice and affect real power. He learned a new cast of mind – political philosophy as well as action – and he took to it eagerly. By 1849 he had already stepped beyond Garrison’s notion of th eConstitution as a “covenant with evil.” He announced himself “satisfied that if strictly construed according to its reading,” the Constitution was “not a proslavery instrument,” although the original intent of the founders had made it so. Actual provisions of the document, coupled with natural law, made the Constitution a source of antislavery principles; history, Douglass believed, had made it proslavery in practice.
By April 1850 Douglass still felt perplexed by parts of the Constitution question. “Liberty and Slavery – opposite as heaven and hell – are both in the Constitution,” he wrote in an editorial. But this was precisely its “radical defect”: it offered no resolution for the “war of elements which is now rocking the land.” Douglass gave his “sympathies” to those who envisioned the Constitution as a source of freedom and justice, but not his “judgment.” He concluded that, for the moment, the Constitution was “at war with itself,” an apt description as well of his own mind. Douglass was an elastic thinker, especially about political ideology. As James Oakes has argued, Douglass’s political thought is laced with a “series of reversals”; he would waver in response to events and to his own learning.
(Blight 2018, pp.215)
As Douglass made the Slave Power rhetoric his own, he also worried about the potential for compromise. Seeking consensus with the Slave Power, Douglass maintained, would be “thawing a deadly viper instead of killing it.” A radical pragmatist had many fences to straddle now; all he could do was to keep faith in the “monster’s” inherent tendency to overreach and destroy itself. Coining a new label in 1855, Douglass called the slavocracy the “Black Power,” arguing that it would go the way of all absolute despotisms. “While crushing its millions,” he said, “it is also crushing itself.” It had “made such a frightful noise” with the “Fugitive Slave Act … the Nebraska Bill, the recent marauding movements of the oligarchy in Kansas,” that it now performed as the abolitionists’ “most potent ally.” Douglass detected a great change in Northern public opinion. Instead of regarding the abolitionists as mere fanatics “crying wolf,” the masses now perceived the evil in their midst and themselves cried “kill the wolf.”
(Blight 2018, pp.273)
Douglass further defended his turnabout by arguing that he would do his best to uphold the Radical Abolition platform within the ranks of the Republicans. Moreover, all the depredations of the Slave Power demanded a forceful response. He wanted abolition politics to be the “aggressor” at the ballot box, instead of always on the fringe. With “slavery extension,” Dourlass argued, slaveholders had given abolitionists an invitation to battle, and he understood just how much Republicans, with their capacity to win high offices, threatened the South. Douglass urged his radical friends to “take them [Republicans] … not merely for what they are but for what we have good reason to believe they will become.” Republicans were millions of peaks of the moral world.” Douglass urged a vote for Fremont as the path to do “a possible good thing” while larger aims could wait. Stop seeking purity, he told his critics among radicals, and start with what is possible. “The Ethiopian can change his opinion,” he wrote during the fall campaign, “if not his color, and yet be perfectly true to the great cause of his life.”
Douglass’s 1856 endorsement of the Republican Party conformed to a pattern he had established in 1848 and 1852 when he supported the Free Soil Party. In the Liberty Party and its doctrinal successor, the Radical Abolitionists, Douglass always had a party for his principles, but in the Republicans, as with the Free Soilers before, he found a party for his hopes. In late August 1856 he wrote to Gerrit Smith, hoping his mentor would understand if not approve: “I support Fremont as the best thing I can do now, but without losing sight of the great doctrines and measures, inseparable from your great name and character.” It would hardly be the last time Douglass cast his vote for hope in general elections, then in off-year contests retreated to his principles among the radicals. Byt the fall of 1857, in the wake of Fremont’s defeat by James Buchanan, Douglass changed his tune markedly about the Republicans, charging them with “culpable imbecility” and “narrow, contracted conservatism.” Because it had not embraced any form of black quality and sought only power in numbers, the Republican Party had become “rotten,” Douglass maintained, and did not “deserve success.”
(Blight 2018, pp.275-276)
That summer and fall of 1860, Douglass threw himself back into his journalism and into the most transformative election in the nation’s history. Hope and principles were at war, and even serving each other, as never before. Since the Democrats tore themselves into two sectionalized parts, one supporting Stephen A. Douglas for president and the other John C. Breckinridge of Kentucky, and since the Republicans’ nomination of Abraham Lincoln, who despite being apparently more moderate than his chief rival, William H. Seward, threatened the South in unprecedented ways, Douglass felt inspired by the pending election campaign. Assuming his election-year pose, he girded up for another walk along the thin line between endorsement and denunciation of Republicans. “The Republican party,” he told his British friends, “is … only negatively antislavery. It is opposed to the political power of slavery, rather than to slavery itself.” But it possessed what no previous political force had because it could “humble the slave power and defeat all plans for giving slavery any further guarantees of permanence.”
(Blight 2018, pp.321)
Excited and wary, Douglass did not merely await election returns in the fall of 1860. In the thirty-two hundred words of editorials and the seven thousand words of a major speech on the west Indian emancipation anniversary in August alone, Douglass delivered a remarkably astute political analysis of the 1860 election, a journalist’s first draft of history if ever there was one. With informed precision and a propagandist’s zeal, Douglass depicted the Republican coalition’s diverse attitudes toward slavery in five parts: one, because it was an expensive and wasteful “system of labor”; two, because it created an “aristocratic class who despise labor,” which in turn led to a broader “contempt” for all others who “work for an honest living”; three, because a small Southern oligarchy had become “masters of the United States” and the “governing class” of the nation’s institutions; four, because it led some whites with an “aversion to blacks” to deny them all rights and liberties and to exclude them from new territories; and five, because the genuine “abolition element” saw slavery as the “most atrocious and revolting crimes against nature and nature’s God,” a system of inhumanity to be destroyed out of a “mighty conviction.” The only group missing from Douglass’s characterization of the Republican coalition were the nativists, the former Know-Nothing, anti-immigrant PRotestant white Northerners who had made huge inroads into American politics in the early 1850s. By 1860, they too found a place under the Republicans’ broad tent.
(Blight 2018, pp.323)
Americans, Douglass believed, instinctively and culturally watched history and preferred not to act in it. Douglass summed up his bitter complaint as “this terrible paradox of parring history” rooted in a distinctively American selfishness. “Whoever levies a tax upon our Bohea or Young Hyson [two forms of Chinese tea], will find the whole land blazing with patriotism and bristling with bayonets.” If some foreign power tried to “impress a few Yankee sailors,” Americans would go “fight like heroes.” Douglass fashioned a withering chastisement of Americans would go “fight like heroes.” Douglass fashioned a withering chastisement of American self-centeredness that would match any modern complaint about the culture’s hyperindividualism. “Millions of a foreign race may be stolen from their homes, and reduced to hopeless and inhuman bondage among us,” he complained, “and we either approve the deed, or protest as gently as ‘sucking droves.’ “ His “wickedly selfish” Americans loved to celebrate their “own heritage, and on this condition are content to see others crushed in our midst.” They lived by the “philosophy of Cain,” ready with their bluntly evil answer to the famous question “Am I my brother’s keeper?” Douglass’s use of the Cain and Abel parable is all the more telling if we remember that, unlike the more sentimental ways the “brother’s keeper” language is often employed today,, Cain had just killed his brother, and to God’s query as to Abel’s fate, Cain replies in effect, why should I care? Douglass wanted the indifferent Americans, with blood on their hands as well, to read on further in Genesis and know Cain’s fate as “a fugitive and a vagabond in the earth.”
(Blight 2018, pp.324)
Twenty years of pent-up personal travail and abolitionist struggle now flowed through Douglass’s pen in Rochester. He believed, as many reasonable Americans have ever since, that the significance of any exercise of states’ rights doctrine is in the issue for which it is employed. To Douglass, civil war was frightful, but by January and February 1861, he cast the prospect in positive and apocalyptic language. The “God in history everywhere pronouncing the doom of those nations which frame mischief by law,” he declared, had caused a “concussion … against slavery which would now rock the land, and send us staggering about as if shaken by an earthquake.” National will and institutions had not solved the problem. “If there is not wisdom and virtue enough in the land to rid the country of slavery, then the next best thing is to let the South go … and be made to drink the wine cup of wrath and fire, which her long career … [of] barbarism and blood shall call down upon her guilty head.”
(Blight 2018, pp.331)
For Douglass the road to war had been emotionally and intellectually crooked. With great anticipation he awaited President Lincoln’s inaugural address, a historical moment dominated, said Douglass, by fear that the Government had been allowed by the previous Buchanan administration to “float to the very edge of destruction.” On February 18, Douglass joined a throng of fifteen thousand people who gathered at the Rochester train station to get a glimpse of Lincoln as the president-elect passed through on his storied, whistle-stop journey to Washington, DC, for the inauguration. Douglass did not record whether he waved and cheered the Illinoisan as he stepped out on the rear balcony of the presidential train, or whether Douglass merely reflected with anxiety on the festive occasion. Under threat of assassination and with military preparations minimal and unstable, Lincoln entered Washington in secrecy and in the dark of the night only a few days before the March 4 inauguration. Douglass exploited the ironies for all they were worth, writing, “Mr. Lincoln entered the Capital as the poor, hunted fugitive slave reaches the North, in disguise, seeking concealment, evading pursuers, by the underground railroad … not during the sunlight, but crawling and dodging under the sable wing of night.” Douglass welcomed Lincoln to the status of fugitive slave.
(Blight 2018, pp.336)
A discouraged, even floundering Douglass all but reversed one of his long-standing positions by the spring of 1861. He considered emigrating from America. The Scottish-born abolitionist, former support of John Brown, and peripatetic radical James Redpath had been leading a campaign for African American emigration to Haiti since early 1860. Douglass not only ran frequent advertisements for the company, but warmed to the idea himself by early 1861. In January he declared that he could “raise no objection” to the Haitian emigration movement, his opposition to earlier schemes of relocation to West Africa notwithstanding. The Republic of Haiti was in the Western Hemisphere, closer for black Americans to their cousins enslaved in the United States, and officially welcoming immigrants. For once, Douglass maintained, the Haitian alternative might provide a means for some of emigrating without “appealing to our enemies for the means of getting out of the way of their hatred.” Further, it meant that blacks were not “conceding that Africa is our only home, and that we have no right to remain in America.” Douglass despised the idea of emigration when it merely confirmed the racist notion that blacks and whites could never live together in equality. For a time, Haiti seemed to provide him a means of still detesting colonization as fashioned by white enemies, while acknowledging a basic human right to leave for brighter climes. That winter he gave his best wishes to twelve Rochester African American families who followed their Baptist minister in moving to Haiti.
(Blight 2018, pp.337)
In a struggle Douglass and many others on both sides saw increasingly as a “holy war” over slavery and freedom, blame had to be precisely assigned to foment sufficient fervor and bloodlust to fight it. In a homespun set of metaphors Douglass provided clear images about responsibility for the war. And he thus unveiled his apocalyptic sense of history – a belief in the occasional cosmic collision of forces, necessary endings and bloodlettings when God chose to enter history and overturn it for the creation of a new age. In an April 1861 editorial, “Who Killed the American Eagle?,” Douglass seemed confident at least that the old Union was dead. “By an old agreement … between Mr. South and Mr. North, the eagle was to be raffled off between the contracting parties every four years, and whichever got the highest number, was to take the bird for the next four years. For many years Mr. South had regularly won the eagle, and enjoyed its services. He had trained it to hunt slaves, to protect slave-traders … to steal from Mexico, to tear the flesh of offensive strangers, to guard, protect and extend slavery.” Mr. North had always coveted this bird of prey, and he “determined that if he should ever get possession of the eagle, he would teach him better manners, and train him to better habits.” At last, in 1860, Mr. North won the eagle, but “before handing it over, as in honor bound, the treacherous Mr. South filled the unsuspecting bird with a heavy dose of secession powder so that our once majestic bird was as good as dead.”
(Blight 2018, pp.341)
Before any major battles were fought, Douglass called for a long and merciless war that would not only root out and destroy secession but the “monster” of slavery itself. He continued to grouse about the potential for compromises that might still be struck between cowed Northern politicians and Confederate leaders. “The spirit of compromise is still abroad here,” he wrote in a June column. Fear seemed to rule most people in the North, who, he contended, “cherish no deeper feeling against slavery than that which arises from a sense of mischief it does to the white race, and the troubles and dangers it brings upon the country.” From England, Julia Crofts agreed and wrote for the Monthly of her own struggles to explain the reactions to secession in the North to her English friends: “The Southerners, of the two, are far better understood by us all. They act more … straightforward in their course – bad as it is.” But Northern reactions to potential war puzzled her, as she wielded adjectives as floridly as her Rochester colleague. “For the poor, timid, cowardly, servile, dishonest North, I can find no words to express the contempt I feel. They cannot be made to see the power they … might wield in the sacred cause of human freedom.” Northerners did not yet grasp that they had been visited, as Douglass contended, with a “glorious opportunity” at destruction and reinvention.
(Blight 2018, pp.343)
The primary aim of Confederate diplomacy was to secure European and especially British recognition and, if possible, intervention on their behalf. In September, the Confederate government appointed James Mason of Virginia and John Slidell of Louisiana as ministers plenipotentiary to Britain and France respectively. The two slipped through the Union blockade. But when they stopped in the harbor of Havana, Cuba, to switch to a British ship, the Trent, they were seized as “contraband of war.” The capture quickly became a diplomatic crisis. The London government cried foul, and Prime Minister Palmerston ordered troops to Canada, strengthened the British Atlantic fleet, and sent an ultimatum to the Lincoln administration demanding an apology and the release of the Confederate envoys. After much saber rattling on both sides, the United States saved face on December 25, 1861, by allowing Mason and Slidell to continue on to the Foreign capitals.
(Blight 2018, pp.358)
Lincoln’s temperament, as well as this set of deeply honed political instincts, racial views, and strategies, collided head-on in historic proportions with increasingly all-out war. Lincoln began to think constantly about slavery by early 1862, and in March he began to act. Until then, Lincoln’s approach to slavery had emerged as an assortment of floating ideas and incoherent policies. But he possessed a remarkable capacity to adapt, grow, and change on this most crucial question. On March 6, the president sent a message to Congress recommending that it authorize funding for gradual and compensated emancipation for the border slave states still in the Union. He stressed that this would merely be an initiation of a “gradual and not sudden” process and stated that he would not threaten slave property “within state limits,” meaning in the Confederacy. The message was subject to the “free choice” of those northernmost border states, who might, if they accepted, send a signal to the seceded states to the south that they would never join them. In unveiled language, Lincoln declared it “impossible to foresee” what further consequences the war would bring for slavery and the South if it continued.
(Blight 2018, pp.363)
As the bloody summer of 1862 dragged on, Douglass followed every development from Rochester and from the speakers’ circuit. He was at first thrilled with the Second Confiscation Act, reprinting its primary emancipation provisions, but then declared it “significant or insignificant only as the President himself shall determine.” He also reprinted in full Lincoln’s formal exchange from July with the border-state congressmen. Douglass’s heart sank as he read the president’s forthright final appeal for gradual and compensated abolition in the four states to be followed by some degree of black removal. Such an appeal was especially unnerving given the historical precedent of Indian removal accomplished a quarter century earlier. “How much better to do it while we can,” Lincoln had said, “lest the war ere long render us pecuniarily unable to do it. How much better for you, as seller, and the nation as buyer, to sell out and buy out that without which the war could never have been, than to sink both the thing to be sold and the price of it in cutting one another’s throats.” After this business advice about how and when to profit from their slaves, Lincoln appealed to the one issue that would animate and anger Douglass the most. “Room in South America for colonization can be obtained cheaply and in abundance,” the chief executive lectured his recalcitrant guests, “and when numbers shall be large enough … the freed people will not be so reluctant to go.” Douglass would soon be lecturing the president about just how much he should presume to know the intentions and spirits of black people for leaving their own country to satisfy the demands of white supremacy.
(Blight 2018, pp.366-367)
“We are only continuing the tremendous struggle, which your fathers and my fathers began eighty six years ago”
In this sobering critique of the Union war effort, one new and important element emerged. In the shade of a beautiful grove, the floor of the natural arena strewn with pine needles, Douglass’s deep baritone called out an honest abolitionist’s patriotism. Contrary to his magnificent jeremiad for the Fourth of July in 1852, where the orator rang down a hailstorm separating himself and “your fathers,” “your” Declaration of Independence, and “your” Fourth of July, this time at Himrods Corners, ten years later and in the midst of a war that now showed vivid signs of becoming a struggle against slavery, Douglass suddenly altered the pronouns: “The claims of our fathers upon our memory, admiration and gratitude are founded in the fact that they wisely, and bravely, and successfully met the crisis of their day.” This time he took ownership in the special day and gave it new meaning. “If the men of this generation would deserve well of posterity, they must like their fathers, discharge the duties and responsibilities of their age.” It was not his age, his duty, and especially his country. They had gathered this time, said the black Jeremiah in softer tones, to draw a new meaning “around the birth of our national independence.” Douglass linked past to present as he instructed the throng sitting on wagons and leaning on trees. “We are only continuing the tremendous struggle, which your fathers and my fathers began eighty six years ago” (italics added). Douglass had never before called the American founders his “fathers.” For him, a second American revolution was under way – more bloody, but perhaps more enduring and important than the first. He claimed his place among the founders of the second republic.
(Blight 2018, pp.368)
Colonization had deep and complex origins in the early American republic. What some historians call the phase of “benevolent colonization,” especially from roughly 1816 to the 1840s, stemmed from a complicated set of motives on the part of some white Americans. They advocated emigration as an ancient right of peoples to seek new beginnings so that blacks (like other migrants) could develop their own independent societies unburdened by white racism, in a quest for equality apart from a stronger or dominant race, and as an abiding part of the biblical Exodus narrative. The story of Exodus has long driven the attraction of emigration schemes, especially in times of crisis, among black Americans.
(Blight 2018, pp.369)
Lincoln shockingly blamed the war on the presence of blacks. “But for your race among us there could not be war, although many men engaged on either side do not care for you one way or another.” The host acknowledged that blacks, slave or free, were enduring “the greatest wrong inflicted on any people,” but racial equality of any kind, in his view, could never be possible in America. “On this broad continent,” said Lincoln, “not a single man of your race is made the queal of a single man of ours.” He did not wish to debate this inequality, since it was “a fact, about which we all feel and think alike, I and you.” With one astonishing presumption after another, he argued that slavery had “evil effects on the white race” as well. “See our present condition – the country engaged in war! – our white men cutting one another’s throats.” Lincoln beseeched the five black representatives, who must have felt more than a little bewildered , to swallow their wishes for a future in the land of their birth and lead their people to a foreign colony. He did not wish to seem “unkind,” but for them to reject his plea to lead in voluntary repatriation would be “an extremely selfish view of the case” and not in the best interest of their race. “It is exceedingly important that we have men at the beginning capable of thinking as white men,” he bluntly continued, “and not those who have been systematically oppressed.”
(Blight 2018, pp.371)
The war, contended Douglass, emerged from the “cruel and brutal cupidity of those who wish to possess horses, money, and Negroes by means of theft, robbery, and rebellion.” Douglass slammed Lincoln’s affirmation of white supremacy, calling him “a genuine representative of American prejudice and Negro hatred.” Douglass had no interest in acknowledging Lincoln’s need to assuage white fears or to appeal to border-state sensitivities. Douglass felt betrayed by Lincoln’s stark appeal to blacks to leave the country for white people’s reasons. The tenor of Lincoln’s address especially hut: “The tone of frankness and benevolence which he assumes in his speech to the colored committee is too thin a mask not to be seen through. The genuine spark of humanity is missing in it. … It expresses merely the desire to get rid of them [blacks] and reminds one of the politeness with which a man might try to bow out of his house some troublesome creditor or the witness of some old guilt.” An embittered Douglass laid bare the fullest meaning in colonization schemes.
(Blight 2018, pp.372-373)
The president’s intentions with colonization have long been the subject of rigorous debate in Lincoln scholarship. One recent biographer has called his August 14 White House meeting the “puzzling … low point” in Lincoln’s race relations, while another has analyzed it as part of the president’s larger “strategic racism.” Yet another writer has oddly complimented Lincoln for his “remarkable racial candor” and stressed that his brand of colonization only naked for volunteers, as opposed to the expulsion of blacks advocated by the harsher members of the administration. Still another biographer, while thoroughly quoting the most racially insensitive lines of Lincoln’s address, concludes that it should be seen as the chief executive “trotting out colonization to smooth the way for emancipation.” Some Lincoln scholars have long chosen to believe that the president was never truly serious about colonization and used it as a trial balloon to condition public opinion for his larger rendezvous with history – the Emancipation Proclamation. Over time, many have chosen to see their Lincoln as morally whole, from 1865, rather than back in the volatile, revolutionary moments of 1861-62. Still other scholars have forcefully argued that Lincoln was a true believer in colonization and never relinquished it as a policy option until he had to. As Eric Foner has written, “there is no reason to doubt the sincerity of Lincoln’s” ten years of public support for colonization; it had always been one part of a larger vision of how slavery might end.
(Blight 2018, pp.374)
For Charles, and for so many of the other young government workers, black and white, baseball was a personal and community outlet. The war was over, and despite the tremendous political conflicts of Reconstruction, Washington was a burgeoning new city, with nearly forty thousand black residents and over eighty-eight thousand whites. Black baseball clubs, not unlike fraternal orders and churches in black communities, took on a social-political function. In these years the goal was never to gain full integration into white teams and leagues, but to achieve full access to the best playing grounds and to book matches with the best clubs, such as the famed Washington Nationals. In Washington, that meant getting to play official games on the “White Lot,” the huge space eventually laid out in baseball fields between the White House and the Washington Monument. Charles, anc occasionally his brothers, spent many a late afternoon hurrying from their jobs to the field to play a game. Black ballplayers of the late 1860s played with or against white players and clubs, a small part of the great experiment in racial democracy that Reconstruction wrought. It did not last, however; by 1876, the first formal “National League” was formed by white entrepreneurs, players, and coaches determined to keep the game segregated, a goal they by and large accomplished for the next seventy-five years. Charles Douglass was part of a huge throng of former slaves, Union soldiers, and black men born free who created a game forever embedded in the fabric of American democracy.
(Blight 2018, pp.508)
“The sins of the fathers descend to the children even unto the third and fourth generation.”
In Elmira, New York, on August 3, 1880, at a West Indian Emancipation Day celebration, Douglass delivered a typical campaign address. The large outdoor audience in Hoffman’s Grove included hundreds of blacks. The orator spoke for two hours from a prepared manuscriplt, a formality he employed more and more in his older years. He remnided the audience that at this hour the “fourteenth and fifteenth amendments … are practically of no force or effect” in the South. The canvass, he maintained, was not about personalities; it was about the “merits of parties.” Trust the Republican Party and its history, he especially uyrged the black voters, whatever they thought of the candidates. He did honor Garfield as a man of intellect, “devoted to art and science.” Douglass made distinctions between the soldier Hancock, who was the product of West Point, and Garfield, who was a patriotic volunteer during the war. Douglass spoke of history – of the war – as a past his listeners must summon. Democrats were the party, said Douglass, of slavery, secession, treason, and rebellion. Their history was “hoary with years and gory with crime.” They had dragged the nation through war and opposed the abolition of slavery and the enfranchisement of the freedmen in peace. With his black audience he drew upon biblical sanction: “The sins of the fathers descend to the children even unto the third and fourth generation.” And lest they entertain any doubts, Douglass declared that each black voter must remember his sacred obligation laid down in his version of Psalm 137: “May my hand forget its cunning and my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth if ever I raise my voice or give my vote for the nominees of the Democratic party.”
(Blight 2018, pp.616)
In December, again at Metropolitan AME, Douglass delivered a more formal speech about his European tour. This celebrity tourist had clearly taken to the idea of travel as a philosophical as well as a narrative challenge. The whole species followed a kind of destiny. “Man is by nature,” said Douglass, “a migratory animal. It does not appear that he was intended to dwell in any one locality. He is a born traveler.” Douglass even predicted air travel. “When lightning shall take the place of steam, he imagined, as it will do, just as steam has taken the place of wind, when men shall navigate the air just as freely as they now navigate the sea, travel will cease to be the exclusive privilege and luxury of the few and the wealthy.” But Douglass had now become one of the privileged.
On this December night Douglass talked into late hours and only got through the tour of England and to Paris. A text survives of an even longer address he wrote carrying the story all the way to Egypt and Greece. These public lectures were laced with more hostile reaction to the “religious shows” of Rome and elsewhere, but also wonderful anecdotes. Douglass remembered going in Paris to the Bibliotheque Nationale, “the largest library in the world,” where he took a seat in the vast reading room and quietly inquired whether they might have any of his writings. In only minutes a librarian appeared at his desk with a copy of My Bondage and My Freedom, as well as a copy of a public letter Douglass had published in 1846. The unschooled author was clearly moved; he had just done what most writers do in seeking a kind of immortality in the stacks of libraries.
(Blight 2018, pp.676)
After more pomp and introductions, one by the distinguished AME bishop Daniel Alexander Payne, Douglass finally took the lectern, smiling amid “deafening applause.” He used some of his old self-effacing jokes: he feared he could only offer his “poor job-trot eloquence” compared to the good bishop’s. Douglass’s address, only one among several he was asked to give at the exposition, was a vintage combination of post emancipation hope and progress with jeremiadic warnings about the fragile nature of black freedom. Sometimes speaking in a Southern black dialect, he wrapped his message in occasional self-deprecating humor, as well as laughs gained at the expense of the old masters. Douglass stressed the “vast and wonderful change” since the 1860s. He marveled that he could “live to see the day when I could with safety to my person, to my liberty, tread the soil of Florida, of South Carolina, of Georgia.” For so long the very names of those states “sent a shudder through me.” But now, Douglass declared via Isaiah, “We see … a new heaven and a new earth.” Many whites were in the audience that day as well, and the guest orator drew them in. “Even the old masters shall rejoice that they are liberated in our deliverance.”
But Douglass urged the freedmen and their sons and daughters to not overrate their progress. He urged remembrance of the blood and terror in the crucible of emancipation; they had not been “emancipated by moral convictions,” but “in the tempest and whirlwind of civil rebellion.” Then in a refrain, he argued that blacks had not been freed so much as “turned loose to the open sky.” “Turned loose!” Douglas roared to the rear of the huge crowd. But he left this celebratory crowd laughing. He told of how the old masters desperately needed their black laborers and begged them to come back after 1865. “They found they had sent away the hands and left the mouths; they had sent away the muscle and had left the stomachs.” He chided any old slaveholders present about their naming habits for their slaves. “Come back, Pompey, and come back, Caesar!” Douglass shouted in mimicry of the former master class. How honored blacks should have been, he said mockingly, that slaveholders “never called us by any other than those great names of the Greeks.” He further ridiculed the old idea that with freedom blacks would begin to die out as a race. “If slavery could not kill us, liberty will not,” he announced to great laughter and cheering. Douglass broke into dialect to proclaim how blacks and whites must learn to live with one another. Speaking to whites, he said, “Bre’dren, I has been wid you, and is still wid you, and mean to be wid you to de end.” But as entertainer he was not finished. To show how blacks should be “measured from the depths from which we came,” Douglass gave the holing audience almost a piece of minstrelsy (at least as portrayed by a reporter). “Did you ever think of a man like myself, who has grown up to weigh 235 pounds, that I have had to fight with a dog named Nep under my master’s table for crumbs of bread? Well, I did. I had to skirmish with old Nep for a share of the Johnny-cakes. I used to fight for them; and now my friends, see how fat I am!”
(Blight 2018, pp.686-687)
After the festival in Jacksonville, on his journey north, Douglass stopped to speak to freedmen in Thomasville, Georgia. There, he again delivered stern advice about self-reliance to an audience of freedmen and had some exchanges in dialect. One black farmer kept interrupting the speaker with “Dat’s so!” Before leaving Thomasville, Douglass went to a local bank and had his host convert the honorarium check from $150 down to $125 because the night’s proceeds did not cover the full fee. A local paper expressed astonishment at the famous man’s generosity. The wandering lecturer arrived back in Washington to deliver his usual annual address on April 16, DC Emancipation Day. In that effort, fraught with controversy again and much attacked by some black papers, Douglass used his recent Southern tour to argue forcefully that blacks in the former Confederacy were in dire danger for their rights and their lives. He also sought to banish the idea of a “negro problem.” To Douglass this question was always and everywhere the “great national problem.”
(Blight 2018, pp.689)
References
Blight, David W. 2018. Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom. N.p.: Simon & Schuster.
ISBN 978-1-4165-9031-6
Benjamin’s Book Joural 
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