Frederick Douglass - Charles Waddell Chesnutt
In the work of assisting runaway slaves Douglass found congenial
employment. It was exciting and dangerous, but inspiring and
soul-satisfying. He kept a room in his house always ready for
fugitives, having with him as many as eleven at a time. He would keep
them over night, pay their fare on the train for Canada, and give them
half a dollar extra. And Canada, to her eternal honor be it said,
received these assisted emigrants, with their fifty cents apiece, of
alien race, debauched by slavery, gave them welcome and protection,
refused to enter into diplomatic relations for their rendition to
bondage, and spoke well of them as men and citizens when Henry Clay
and the other slave [pro-slavery] leaders denounced them as the most
worthless of their class. The example of Canada may be commended to
those persons in the United States, of little faith, who, because in
thirty years the emancipated race have not equalled the white man in
achievement, are fearful lest nothing good can be expected of them.
In the stirring years of the early fifties Douglass led a busy life.
He had each week to fill the columns of his paper and raise the money
to pay its expenses. Add to this his platform work and the underground
railroad work, which consisted not only in personal aid to the
fugitives, but in raising money to pay their expenses, and his time
was very adequately employed. In every anti-slavery meeting his face
was welcome, and his position as a representative of his own peculiar
people was daily strengthened.
When Uncle Tom's Cabin, in 1852, set the world on fire over the wrongs
of the slave,--or rather the wrongs of slavery, for that wonderful
book did not portray the negro as the only sufferer from this hoary
iniquity,--Mrs. Stowe, in her new capacity as a champion of liberty,
conceived the plan of raising a fund for the benefit of the colored
race, and in 1853 invited Douglass to visit her at Andover,
Massachusetts, where she consulted with him in reference to the
establishment of an industrial institute or trades school for colored
youth, with a view to improving their condition in the free States.
Douglass approved heartily of this plan, and through his paper made
himself its sponsor. When, later on, Mrs. Stowe abandoned the project,
Douglass was made the subject of some criticism, though he was not at
all to blame for Mrs. Stowes altered plans. In our own time the value
of such institutions has been widely recognized, and the success of
those at Hampton and Tuskegee has stimulated anew the interest in
industrial education as one important factor in the elevation of the
colored race.
In the years from 1853 to 1860 the slave power, inspired with divine
madness, rushed headlong toward its doom. The arbitrary enforcement of
the Fugitive Slave Act; the struggle between freedom and slavery in
Kansas; the Dred Scott decision, by which a learned and subtle judge,
who had it within his power to enlarge the boundaries of human liberty
and cover his own name with glory, deliberately and laboriously
summarized and dignified with the sanction of a court of last resort
all the most odious prejudices that had restricted the opportunities
of the colored people; the repeal of the Missouri Compromise; the John
Brown raid; the [1855] assault on [Massachusetts antislavery U.S.
Senator] Charles Sumner,--each of these incidents has been, in itself,
the subject of more than one volume. Of these events the Dred Scott
decision was the most disheartening. Douglass was not proof against
the universal gloom, and began to feel that there was little hope of
the peaceful solution of the question of slavery. It was in one of his
darker moments that old Sojourner Truth, whose face appeared in so
many anti-slavery gatherings, put her famous question, which breathed
a sublime and childlike faith in God, even when his hand seemed
heaviest on her people: "Frederick," she asked, "is God dead?" The
orator paused impressively, and then thundered in a voice that
thrilled his audience with prophetic intimations, "No, God is not
dead; and therefore it is that slavery must end in blood!"
During this period John Brown stamped his name indelibly upon American
history. It was almost inevitable that a man of the views, activities,
and prominence of Douglass should become acquainted with John Brown.
Their first meeting, however, was in 1847, more than ten years before
the tragic episode at Harpers Ferry. At that time Brown was a merchant
at Springfield, Massachusetts, whither Douglass was invited to visit
him. In his _Life and Times_ he describes Brown as a prosperous
merchant, who in his home lived with the utmost abstemiousness, in
order that he might save money for the great scheme he was already
revolving. "His wife believed in him, and his children observed him
with reverence. His arguments seemed to convince all, his appeals
touched all, and his will impressed all. Certainly, I never felt
myself in the presence of stronger religious influence than while in
this man's house." There in his own home, where Douglass stayed as his
guest, Brown outlined a plan which in substantially the same form he
held dear to his heart for a decade longer. This plan, briefly stated,
was to establish camps at certain easily defended points in the
Allegheny Mountains; to send emissaries down to the plantations in
the lowlands, starting in Virginia, and draw off the slaves to these
mountain fastnesses; to maintain bands of them there, if possible, as
a constant menace to slavery and an example of freedom; or, if that
were impracticable, to lead them to Canada from time to time by the
most available routes. Wild as this plan may seem in the light of the
desperate game subsequently played by slavery, it did not at the time
seem impracticable to such level-headed men as Theodore Parker and
Thomas Wentworth Higginson.
Douglass's views were very much colored by his association with
Brown; but, with his usual prudence and foresight, he pointed out the
difficulties of this plan. From the time of their first meeting the
relations of the two men were friendly and confidential. Captain Brown
had his scheme ever in mind, and succeeded in convincing Douglass and
others that it would subserve a useful purpose,--that, even if it
resulted in failure, it would stir the conscience of the nation to a
juster appreciation of the iniquity of slavery.
The Kansas troubles, however, turned Brown's energies for a time into
a different channel. After Kansas had been secured to freedom, he
returned with renewed ardor to his old project. He stayed for three
weeks at Douglass's house at Rochester, and while there carried on
an extensive correspondence with sympathizers and supporters, and
thoroughly demonstrated to all with whom he conversed that he was a
man of one all-absorbing idea.
In 1859, very shortly before the raid at Harpers Ferry, Douglass met
Brown by appointment, in an abandoned stone quarry near Chambersburg,
Pennsylvania. John Brown was already an outlaw, with a price upon his
head; for a traitor had betrayed his plan the year before, and he had
for this reason deferred its execution for a year. The meeting was
surrounded by all the mystery and conducted with all the precautions
befitting a meeting of conspirators. Brown had changed the details
of his former plan, and told Douglass of his determination to take
Harpers Ferry. Douglass opposed the measure vehemently, pointing out
its certain and disastrous failure. Brown met each argument with
another, and was not to be swayed from his purpose. They spent more
than a day together discussing the details of the movement. When the
more practical Douglass declined to take part in Brown's attempt, the
old man threw his arms around his swarthy friend, in a manner typical
of his friendship for the dark race, and said: "Come with me,
Douglass, I will defend you with my life. I want you for a special
purpose. When I strike, the bees will begin to swarm, and I shall
want you to help hive them." But Douglass would not be persuaded. His
abandonment of his old friend on the eve of a desperate enterprise was
criticised by some, who, as Douglass says, "kept even farther from
this brave and heroic man than I did." John Brown went forth to meet
a felon's fate and wear a martyr's crown: Douglass lived to fight the
battles of his race for years to come. There was room for both, and
each played the part for which he was best adapted. It would have
strengthened the cause of liberty very little for Douglass to die with
Brown.
It is quite likely, however, that he narrowly escaped Brown's fate.
When the raid at Harpers Ferry had roused the country, Douglass, with
other leading Northern men, was indicted in Virginia for complicity in
the affair. Brown's correspondence had fallen into the hands of
the Virginia authorities, and certain letters seemed to implicate
Douglass. A trial in Virginia meant almost certain death. Governor
Wise, of Virginia, would have hung him with cheerful alacrity, and
publicly expressed his desire to do so. Douglass, with timely warning
that extradition papers had been issued for his arrest, escaped to
Canada. He had previously planned a second visit to England, and the
John Brown affair had delayed his departure by some days. He sailed
from Quebec, November 12, 1859.
After a most uncomfortable winter voyage of fourteen days Douglass
found himself again in England, an object of marked interest and in
very great demand as a speaker. Six months he spent on the hospitable
shores of Great Britain, lecturing on John Brown, on slavery and other
subjects, and renewing the friendships of former years. Being informed
of the death of his youngest daughter, he cut short his visit, which
he had meant to extend to France, and returned to the United States.
So rapid had been the course of events since his departure that the
excitement over the John Brown raid had subsided. The first Lincoln
campaign was in active progress; and the whole country quivered with
vague anticipation of the impending crisis which was to end the
conflict of irreconcilable principles, and sweep slavery out of the
path of civilization and progress. Douglass plunged into the campaign
with his accustomed zeal, and did what he could to promote the triumph
of the Republican party. Lincoln was elected, and in a few short
months the country found itself in the midst of war. God was not dead,
and slavery was to end in blood.
IX.
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.
In September, 1866, Douglass was elected a delegate from Rochester to
the National Loyalists' Convention at Philadelphia, called to consider
the momentous questions of government growing out of the war. While he
had often attended anti-slavery conventions as the representative of a
small class of abolitionists, his election to represent a large city
in a national convention was so novel a departure from established
usage as to provoke surprise and comment all over the country. On
the way to Philadelphia he was waited upon by a committee of other
delegates, who came to his seat on the train and urged upon him the
impropriety of his taking a seat as a delegate. Douglass listened
patiently, but declined to be moved by their arguments. He replied
that he had been duly elected a delegate from Rochester, and he would
represent that city in the convention. A procession of the members
and friends of the convention was to take place on its opening day.
Douglass was solemnly warned that, if he walked in the procession, he
would probably be mobbed. But he had been mobbed before, more than
once, and had lived through it; and he promptly presented himself at
the place of assembly. His reception by his fellow-delegates was not
cordial, and he seemed condemned to march alone in the procession,
when Theodore Tilton, at that time editor of the _Independent_, paired
off with him, and marched by his side through the streets of the
Quaker City. The result was gratifying alike to Douglass and the
friends of liberty and progress. He was cheered enthusiastically all
along the line of march, and became as popular in the convention as he
had hitherto been neglected.
A romantic incident of this march was a pleasant meeting, on the
street, with a daughter of Mrs. Lucretia Auld, the mistress who had
treated him kindly during his childhood on the Lloyd plantation. The
Aulds had always taken an interest in Douglass's career,--he had,
indeed, given the family a wide though not altogether enviable
reputation in his books and lectures,--and this good lady had followed
the procession for miles, that she might have the opportunity to speak
to her grandfather's former slave and see him walk in the procession.
In the convention "the ever-ready and imperial Douglass," as Colonel
Higginson describes him, spoke in behalf of his race. The convention,
however, divided upon the question of negro suffrage, and adjourned
without decisive action. But under President Grant's administration
the Fourteenth Amendment was passed, and by the solemn sanction of the
Constitution the ballot was conferred upon the black men upon the same
terms as those upon which it was enjoyed by the whites.