In July 1863 the fortunes of war tipped decisively in favor of the Union. After months of searching for a general who would fight Lee’s army, Lincoln was at last able to savor two great military victories. For three days at the beginning of July Union troops successfully fought off Lee’s second invasion of the North, at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, sending the Confederate army scurrying back to Virginia in disastrous defeat. Out in the West, meanwhile, Ulysses Grant’s troops captured the city of Vicksburg, Mississippi, after a long siege, giving the Union uninterrupted control of the entire Mississippi River. Northern morale soared. The Confederacy never recovered from the devastating losses.
That same month, northern opposition to the war reached a dramatic climax. Ever since the beginning of the year the uproar against emancipation, against black troops, and against the draft had been swelling through the North. Antiwar rioters swept through the streets in several cities, assaulting and murdering innocent blacks. The largest and most notorious of the draft riots paralyzed New York City for three full days in late July. But the New York riots disgraced the antiwar movement; thereafter it restricted itself to legitimate political opposition. Sensing the depth of popular outrage against the rioters, Lincoln seized the moment and on July 30 issued an Order of Retaliation aimed at halting Confederate abuse of black prisoners of war. For every captured Union soldier killed by the Confederacy Lincoln ordered a rebel soldier executed. For every Union soldier enslaved or sold into slavery by the Confederates “a rebel soldier shall be placed at hard labor” and shall remain there until the Union soldier was released and treated as a proper prisoner of war.1
With northern morale buoyed by the Union’s greatest victories, with black soldiers having proved themselves in battle even as antiwar violence peaked, Frederick Douglass made his first trip to Washington, D.C. A year earlier he would have gone into print or taken to the speaker’s platform to voice his grievances. But a lot had happened since the summer of 1862, and Douglass was now satisfied enough with the Lincoln administration to choose a different course.
THE FIRST MEETING
In the early-morning hours of August 10, 1863, Douglass walked from his hotel to the office of Samuel C. Pomeroy, the senator from Kansas. Pomeroy quickly offered to serve as Douglass’s escort, easing his access to the men he most wanted to see. First was Edwin Stanton, the secretary of war. Douglass found Stanton “cold and business-like”—Stanton was that way with everybody—but sympathetic to Douglass’s concerns. They talked for half an hour. Douglass argued that heroes and cowards were distributed equally among blacks and whites, that the administration’s policy should assume no distinction at all between black and white troops—in pay, uniforms, rations, and opportunities for promotion. Stanton told Douglass that he supported equal treatment for all soldiers, that he had sent a bill to that effect to Congress, but that the Senate had refused to pass it. Stanton also said that he believed in promotion by merit and would sign off on any commission recommended to him by superior officers. He offered Douglass himself a commission as an assistant to General Lorenzo Thomas, who “was now rigorously engaged in organizing Colored Troops on the Mississippi.”2 Stanton was not trying to flatter Douglass, but he may have been trying to get rid of him. For whatever reason, the commission he promised Douglass never came.
From the War Department Douglass and Pomeroy went directly to the White House. The senatorial escort may have smoothed the way, though Douglass was by then far more prominent than the senator from Kansas. Even so, the degree to which Lincoln made himself available to visitors is astonishing; if nothing else, it reveals how far removed his was from the imperial presidency that emerged in the twentieth century. But the President’s openness also reflected his personality. Lincoln was an unpretentious man as well as a hand-clasping politician. By neither instinct nor desire did he seal himself off from the public. Douglass was but one of hundreds who got to meet with Lincoln during his four years in the White House. Still, not everyone got in. When he arrived Douglass found a large crowd of applicants lining the stairway, hoping for a moment with the chief executive. Douglass expected to wait for some time. Instead he submitted his card and within minutes one of Lincoln’s assistants appeared, called out, “Mr. Douglass,” and escorted him upstairs. “Yes, damn it,” someone grumbled as Douglass elbowed his way past the waiting crowd, “I knew they would let the nigger through.”
It was immediately evident that this was not going to be a quick, staged event in the President’s office. Lincoln was at work in a simply furnished room upstairs, papers scattered everywhere. There was no hint of formality in either the man or his surroundings. Douglass found Lincoln stretched out on a sofa reading, his long legs reaching into “different parts of the room.” As soon as he entered, “the President began to rise, and continued to rise until he stood over me.” Lincoln reached out to shake Douglass’s hand. “Mr. Douglass, I know you,” he said. “I have read about you, and Mr. Seward has told me about you.”
He quickly put Douglass at ease. “There was not the slightest shadow of embarrassment from the first moment.” The President received me, Douglass said, “just as you have seen one gentleman receive another.” For all his earlier criticism, Lincoln had always struck Douglass as a fundamentally honest man and the meeting confirmed that impression. “I have never seen a more transparent countenance,” Douglass wrote.
Douglass began by thanking Lincoln for issuing the recent Order of Retaliation for the Confederate abuse of black prisoners, hinting perhaps that it was about time. But at that point, a rare one for a man so loquacious and opinionated, Douglass preferred to hear what Lincoln had to say.
Lincoln jumped at Douglass’s tacit invitation, an equally rare move for a man so famously “shut-mouthed” and deliberate in his choice of words. With “an earnestness and a fluency of which I had not suspected him,” Douglass recalled, the President proceeded “to vindicate his policy respecting the whole slavery question and especially that in reference to employing colored troops.” Lincoln was particularly concerned to refute two charges often made by his radical critics, including Douglass. The first was that Lincoln took too long to make decisions, that he was “tardy” and “hesitating” about emancipation or about the enlistment of black troops.
But you were “somewhat slow” to issue the Order of Retaliation, Douglass chided the President.
Lincoln replied that the “country needed talking up to on that point.” He had hesitated to embark on such a policy when he thought that “the country was not ready for it.” Blacks were widely despised in America, Lincoln said, and if he ordered retaliation too quickly, “all the hatred which is poured on the head of the Negro race would be visited on his [Lincoln’s] administration.” Had he issued the order any sooner, Lincoln said, “such was the state of popular prejudice that an outcry would have been raised against the measure. It would be said—‘Ah! we thought it would come to this. White men were to be killed for negroes.’” There was “preparatory work” to be done. “Remember this, Mr. Douglass,” Lincoln added, Port Hudson, Milliken’s Bend, and Fort Wagner “are recent events; and…these were necessary to prepare the way” for the policy of retaliation.
If we can credit Douglass’s autobiographical account of the meeting, published almost twenty years later, Lincoln disliked the very idea of retaliation. He said that it was “a terrible remedy,” that “it was very difficult to apply—that, if once begun, there was no telling where it would end—that if he could get hold of the Confederate soldiers who had been guilty of treating colored soldiers as felons he could easily retaliate, but the thought of hanging men for a crime perpetrated by others was revolting to his feelings. He thought that the rebels themselves would stop such barbarous warfare—that less evil would be done if retaliation were not resorted to.”3
Years later Douglass remembered having raised the issue of equal pay for black and white soldiers as well as more opportunities for black soldiers of proven ability to earn promotions. Lincoln’s answer, as recorded by Douglass, is suspiciously precise for an eighteen-year-old memory. But it is perfectly plausible that Douglass would have raised the issue—he had been speaking out against such discrimination for months—and the reply he puts into Lincoln’s mouth is likewise in character. It confirms how sensitive Lincoln was to the racial prejudices of white Americans, even if he himself did not share those prejudices. Stanton had told Douglass that he would sign off on promotions for any black soldiers recommended to him by their superior officers; Lincoln in turn promised that he would “sign any commission” for a black officer that Stanton recommended to him. But on the matter of equal pay, Douglass remembered that Lincoln’s answer was more expansive.
He began by saying that the employment of colored troops at all was a great gain to the colored people—that the measure could not have been successfully adopted at the beginning of the war—that the wisdom of making colored men soldiers was still doubted—that their enlistment was a serious offense to popular prejudice—that they had larger motives for being soldiers than white men—that they ought to be willing to enter the service upon any condition—that the fact that they were not to receive the same pay as white soldiers seemed a necessary concession to smooth the way to their employment at all as soldiers, but that ultimately they would receive the same.4
Lincoln had often admitted that his concern to prevent a popular backlash sometimes caused him to move slowly, in this case more slowly than Douglass would have liked. But the President was not willing to admit the validity of another line of criticism about his policies: that he vacillated. This he flatly denied.
“I think the charge cannot be sustained,” Lincoln insisted. “No man can say that having once taken the position I have contradicted it or retreated from it.”
For Douglass this was “the best thing” Lincoln had to say. It was the President’s way of assuring Douglass “that whoever else might abandon his anti-slavery policy President Lincoln would stand firm to his.” Because of Lincoln’s assurance, Douglass left the meeting more certain than ever that “slavery would not survive the war and that the Country would survive both slavery and the War.”
Douglass was impressed. Not because he was persuaded by all of Lincoln’s answers: He could not countenance the idea that the President had to tailor his policies so as not to rankle prevailing racial prejudices, no matter how politically necessary Lincoln believed it to be. Rather, Douglass was struck by the patience with which the President listened, the sincerity and humaneness of his replies, and the decency with which he treated a longtime critic. Abraham Lincoln, Douglass concluded, although “wise, great and eloquent,” will nevertheless “go down to posterity, if the country is saved, as Honest Abraham.” Throughout the world his name will be spoken “side by side” with that of Washington.5
But as always with Douglass, there was still more to be done. Not even the greatest captain can rescue a beleaguered ship on his own. If Lincoln was to succeed, if the country was to be saved, it was up to the crew to pitch in. Emancipation had been declared. Black troops had been enlisted. Retaliation had been proclaimed. But these were battles in a war that had yet to be won, skirmishes in a revolution that was still incomplete. The Confederacy had to be defeated, surely, but just as surely emancipation had to be secured.
REDEFINING THE UNION
Lincoln never stopped saying that his first priority was to restore the Union. Douglass was suspicious of such talk; it sounded too much like those calls for compromise that would guarantee slavery’s future. But it meant something different for Lincoln. He thought slavery was an anomaly in a Union founded on the principle of universal freedom. A Union with slavery was inherently unstable, a house so divided against itself that it could not stand that way forever. So when he called for the restoration of the Union, Lincoln did not necessarily imagine the restoration of slavery as well. For Lincoln the Union, properly understood, was incompatible with slavery, and he began to say so very early in his presidency.
This was “essentially a People’s contest,” Lincoln declared in his first major statement after the inauguration, a special message to Congress on July 4, 1861. The Union the North was struggling to maintain was a rare and important form of government, he said, a form whose “leading object, is to elevate the condition of men—to lift artificial weights from all shoulders—to clear the paths of laudable pursuit for all—to afford all, an unfettered start, and a fair chance, in the race of life.”6 Lincoln had used similar language often during the 1850s. Slavery was evil, he said, because it deprived blacks of their equal right to the fruits of their labor. Now he was saying that the very same right was the “leading object” of the Union he was struggling to preserve. There was no place for slavery in a Union such as that.
Later that year Lincoln elaborated on the argument in his most successful outing into the thicket of political economy. In his first annual message to Congress he set about to answer the “mudsill” theory of some of slavery’s defenders, the theory that defined labor as naturally and necessarily inferior to capital. Because capital is nothing more than the fruit of human labor, Lincoln answered, labor is in fact superior to capital and must necessarily be so. Under a “just and generous” system of government, such as prevailed in the North, those who begin their adult lives working for wages have every opportunity to advance to economic independence. Freedom thus “opens the way to all—gives hope to all, and consequent energy, and progress, and improvement of condition to all.”7 Once again Lincoln spoke of freedom as universal, something that applied to all and thereby gave hope to all. It was the very opposite of slavery. This made it easy for Lincoln to continue to claim, even after the Emancipation Proclamation, that his first goal was to restore the Union, for the Union of which he dreamed was the home of universal liberty. In the months and years that followed Lincoln became more explicit about this: The restored nation would be a Union without slavery. But he also abandoned the emphasis on economic opportunity that had crept into his speeches between 1859 and 1861. Instead he returned to the core principle of fundamental human equality that had animated his great antislavery speeches in the 1850s. Nobody since Jefferson himself had invested such eloquence in the ideal of human equality, and Lincoln never more so than in November 1863 at Gettysburg.
The founders, Lincoln said, had set out to establish a nation “conceived in Liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” A nation without slavery: That, Lincoln said, is what this civil war is all about. For that the soldiers buried beneath them at Gettysburg had given their lives. It was “the cause for which they gave their last full measure of devotion.” But their work was unfinished. It was left to the living—“we here”—to complete their work by resolving “that this nation shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.” America reborn, a nation redeemed, could now stand before the world, Lincoln said only a few months later, as “the home of freedom disenthralled, regenerated, enlarged, and perpetuated.”8 The “new birth of freedom” was genuinely new; the restored Union would not be a mere duplicate of its antebellum predecessor.
CONSOLIDATING THE REVOLUTION
In choosing a battlefield, Gettysburg, to reassert the highest ideals of the Union, Lincoln could make no starker demonstration of the intermingled fates of slavery and the war. By late 1863 he firmly believed that emancipation would help end the war more quickly. Reviewing the remarkable events of the year, he recalled how tenacious the rebellion had seemed only twelve months before. The army had been bogged down, commerce had stalled, and European states were threatening to recognize the Confederacy. But the proclamation turned everything around. “The policy of emancipation, and of employing black soldiers, gave to the future a new aspect,” Lincoln said. One hundred thousand former slaves were already serving in the U.S. military, and “it is difficult to say they are not as good soldiers as any.” And thanks to the decisive military victories of the summer there was no longer any prospect that a major European state would intervene or recognize the Confederacy. Moreover, emancipation, once proclaimed, was quickly proving impossible to restrict to the disloyal South. By late 1863 Lincoln saw evidence of an abolition juggernaut pressing inexorably into areas well beyond the proclamation’s reach. “Influential citizens” in Tennessee and Arkansas, “owners of slaves and advocates of slavery at the beginning of the rebellion, now declare openly for emancipation in their respective States.” Maryland and Missouri, jealous to protect slavery only months before, “only dispute now as to the best mode of removing it within their own limits.”9 This was not quite the scenario that either Lincoln or Douglass had imagined earlier in the war. Lincoln had hoped a voluntary emancipation in the border states would propel the destruction of both slavery and the Confederacy. Douglass had thought that forcing emancipation on the border states would do the same thing. But it happened the other way around: It took military emancipation in the Confederacy to force voluntary emancipation onto the border states. No matter. By the end of 1863 Lincoln was pleased to report to Congress on the progress of both war and emancipation.
But even as he was reviewing the past, Lincoln was forced to look ahead. Southern Louisiana had come under Union control the year before and Lincoln pressed his generals, first Benjamin Butler and then Nathaniel Banks, to begin the reconstruction process. Lincoln saw this as an extension of the war and thus the President’s responsibility, but Congress was itching to put its own stamp on the process. In an attempt to preempt the legislators Lincoln issued a Proclamation of General Amnesty and Reconstruction, laying out his tentative plan for bringing the defeated southern states back into the Union. Lincoln would pardon most Confederates, excluding high civil and military officials, those who had resigned civil or military positions in the Union to support the Confederacy, and anyone who had participated in the abuse of Union prisoners of war, specifically including black prisoners of war. Those who qualified for amnesty would be required to swear an oath of loyalty to the United States and to uphold that oath in practice. To such persons Lincoln promised the restoration of property, “except as to slaves.” When 10 percent of the state’s electorate, measured by the number of those who had legally voted in the 1860 presidential election, had sworn the loyalty oath, those persons would be permitted to organize a new state government that conformed to the requirements of the U.S. Constitution. This was the so-called 10-Percent Plan. In addition to its formal requirements, Lincoln suggested that the new state governments legally recognize the “permanent freedom” of the slaves, provide for their education, and establish, if necessary, a “temporary arrangement” for putting the freed slaves back to work. This was an oblique reference to the disreputable Banks Plan, under which freed people were forced to sign contracts and return to work for their former masters.10
In both his annual message to Congress and his reconstruction plan Lincoln addressed the troubling question of the legal status of men and women who had been freed as an act of war. What would happen to them when the war ended? To ensure that presidential proclamations of freedom survived the peace, Lincoln said that “there had to be a pledge for their maintenance” from the returning southern states. In addition, thousands of slaves serving in the U.S. military had run to Union lines from parts of the South not covered by the second Confiscation Act or the Emancipation Proclamation. They “have aided, and will further aid,” in the restoration of the Union, Lincoln said. “To now abandon them would be not only to relinquish a lever of power, but would also be a cruel and an astounding breach of faith.” It was for this reason—to ensure the freedom of emancipated blacks—that Lincoln’s plan required adherence to provisions of the Emancipation Proclamation as a precondition for readmission to the Union. And what about those who remained enslaved, those not technically covered by the proclamation itself? Besides continuing to press the border states to emancipate the slaves on their own, Lincoln urged Congress to enact any measure that would facilitate the final and complete emancipation of every slave in America.11
Primarily because of its provision for making emancipation permanent, Lincoln’s plan for reconstruction satisfied most Republicans, including the radicals. But it did not satisfy the freed people of Louisiana, who resented being sent back to the harsh labor regime of their former masters. Nor did it satisfy the large and vocal Free Colored community of New Orleans, whose members wanted to vote and participate in the reconstruction of the state. As a result, Lincoln’s plan angered several Republican radicals and many abolitionists. They thought that requiring only 10 percent of the rebels to swear a loyalty oath was too lenient, that General Banks’s labor system was too harsh, and that the absence of voting rights for blacks was an outrage. Among those who were upset, none was more so than Frederick Douglass.
Lincoln spelled out his plans in December 1863; in January Douglass resumed his criticism of the President. At Gettysburg the President had eloquently invoked “our Fathers” to reassert the founding principle of fundamental human equality. Douglass now turned that language back against Lincoln to demand racial equality along with abolition. Slavery “had received its death-blow when our fathers—I say our fathers—emphatically declared that all men were created equal.” But the founders’ hopes were foiled by a long history of compromise by those who refused to treat blacks and whites as equals. In the government’s continued failure to pay black soldiers or to promote them equally with whites Douglass saw the egalitarian legacy of the American Revolution insulted once more. So hostile was Douglass to the merest recognition of racial distinction that he objected even to the word white in laws passed by Congress. “I dread that word,” Douglass declared. “It is unlike nature, it is unlike God.” Looking beyond emancipation, Douglass demanded “the complete, absolute, unqualified enfranchisement of the colored people of the South.”12 Nothing else, he argued, would protect the freed people from the vengeance of their former masters.
In January 1863 Douglass had said that the Emancipation Proclamation made the abolition of slavery inevitable—but not necessarily right away. One year later he reiterated his concern. The proclamation had been indispensable and praiseworthy, but by itself “it settles nothing.” This was true, and no one understood the problem better than Lincoln himself. But Douglass also claimed to “detest the motive and principle” upon which the proclamation was based, for it implied that “the holding and flogging of Negroes is the exclusive luxury of loyal men.” Douglass had not always been hostile to the “motive and principle” of the Emancipation Proclamation; once upon a time “military necessity” had struck him as a compelling rationale. Now he was confusing the legal basis of emancipation with the moral imperative behind it, a mistake he had accused others of making only a year earlier. He had his reasons: As 1864 opened, he was fighting another fight—this time to secure voting rights for emancipated slaves, a struggle that mattered a good deal more to Douglass than the intellectual consistency of his arguments from one year to the next.13 He even revived his sarcasm about those who would carry on the war “within the limits of the Constitution.”14 This was not the rhetoric of someone who had taken an oath to uphold the Constitution. It was the polemical strategy of a reformer.
Yet Douglass was by now sufficiently attuned to political realities to tone down his criticism in public. There were no such restraints when he talked privately among his fellow abolitionists. Douglass outdid himself in an astonishing letter he sent to an English correspondent in June 1864. He denounced Lincoln in the most vehement terms he had ever used. He complained once more about the unequal treatment of black soldiers. He assailed Lincoln’s lenient plans for Reconstruction, especially his failure to support black voting rights in Louisiana. In an especially intemperate outburst Douglass characterized Lincoln’s position as “Do evil by choice, right from necessity.” None of his complaints had to do with emancipation as such; all of them had to do with racial equality. Blacks were good enough to fight for the government, Douglass wrote his friend, but not good enough to vote for the government. The government had invited slaves to rebel against their former masters, to take up arms against their former masters, thereby infuriating their former masters, and now the government expected the freed people to subject themselves to the political authority of their former masters. Lincoln’s reconstruction policy was as good as sending sheep to their slaughter. “No rebuke of it can be too strong from your side of the water,” Douglass advised.15
Grant that this was a private letter with words Douglass would not have used in public. Grant also that this was one radical talking shop with another, saying things he would not dare put into print. Still, he said it. The question is why? What could possibly explain this sudden eruption of hostility on Douglass’s part? Curiously enough, Douglass was playing politics.
THE ELECTION OF 1864
As the 1864 presidential election year got under way, a handful of radical Republicans began working behind the scenes to deny Lincoln their party’s renomination and replace him with someone more firmly committed to their agenda. Lincoln’s treasury secretary, Salmon P. Chase, trusted by the radicals for no good reason, was hoping to win the nomination for himself. Another candidate with even shakier radical credentials, John C. Frémont, ran openly against Lincoln. But Frémont’s candidacy was designed chiefly to split the party’s vote, thereby opening the way for Chase. Douglass took sides. He reopened his indictment of Lincoln’s failures, hoping to replace the President with a more reliably radical Republican. In effect, Douglass had plunged himself into the nineteenth-century equivalent of a primary campaign. For the first time in his life Frederick Douglass was beginning to behave like a calculating politician, although not necessarily a skillful one.
Douglass knew perfectly well that Lincoln was not the most threatening political prospect of 1864. His real fear was the Democrats. They were gearing up for a campaign of unrelieved racial invective. They were claiming Lincoln’s decision to free the slaves had unnecessarily prolonged the war. “Peace Democrats” in particular wanted to offer the South a restoration of the Union that would leave slavery in place wherever it still existed. Naturally Douglass was horrified by the prospect. “While the Democratic party is in existence,” he said at the beginning of the year, “we are in danger of a slaveholding peace, and of Rebel rule.”16 Faced with the possibility of a Democratic victory, Douglass convinced himself that the Republicans had to nominate someone with a sturdier antislavery backbone. Notwithstanding the faith he had recently expressed in Lincoln’s unwavering commitment to emancipation, Douglass now professed to fear “a slaveholding compromise” that would end the war before the war ended slavery. To prevent that from happening he joined forces with those hoping to replace Abraham Lincoln as the Republican Party’s presidential nominee.
There was never much doubt that Lincoln would be that party’s candidate. He was widely popular among Republicans. Leading party radicals like Charles Sumner supported Lincoln’s renomination, and even abolitionists were split over the move to replace him. At the annual meeting of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society in early 1864, Wendell Phillips put forward a resolution denouncing the government for pursuing a “sham peace” that would leave the former slaves at the mercy of their former masters. But William Lloyd Garrison argued that radicals had a moral obligation to support Lincoln’s reelection. Moreover, Lincoln was now popular even among black northerners. In 1860 they had been suspicious of the Republicans and largely indifferent to Lincoln. Four years later Lincoln drew strong support from black leaders and editors.
There was never any danger that Lincoln or the Republicans would compromise with slavery, certainly not by 1864, if not much sooner. Once Lincoln had skillfully lined up all the votes he needed to flick away Chase’s bungling challenge and secure his renomination, the only active role Lincoln took in the Republican Party’s convention was to insist that the platform endorse a constitutional amendment abolishing slavery everywhere in the United States. The convention assembled in Baltimore on June 7 and gave Lincoln what he asked for. A few weeks afterward Lincoln accepted Chase’s resignation, but later appointed him to succeed the hated Roger B. Taney on the Supreme Court. With two strokes Lincoln removed an irritant from his cabinet and put him where he could do the most good by upholding the constitutionality of wartime emancipation.
Douglass had to know from the start how quixotic the effort to remove Lincoln was. But even if he took the move seriously, there was something different about 1864: He was engaged in a struggle for power within the Republican Party. He renewed his criticism of Lincoln in January, when the effort to replace him first got under way. But after Lincoln had secured the Republican nomination and—even more important—after the Democrats had nominated George B. McClellan as their presidential candidate in late August, Douglass made it clear that he strongly favored Lincoln’s reelection. This was a far cry from 1860, when Douglass had withdrawn his support for Lincoln and voted instead for a radical third-party candidate. For all the venom he spilled on Lincoln in the first six months of 1864, Douglass was now maneuvering within the Republican Party, something he had never done before.
But all such maneuvering was a minor distraction beside the very real threat Lincoln and the Republicans faced in 1864, the Democratic Party’s ability to exploit rising war-weariness in the North. It was bad enough that the war went on and on. But in the spring and early summer of 1864 Grant and Lee had squared off in Virginia in a series of unspeakably bloody battles that shocked civilians and shook Lincoln terribly. Every day northerners opened their morning papers to find a long new list of the names of soldiers killed and wounded in action. But beyond the sheer volume of blood shed there was the apparent senselessness of it all. No real ground was taken; neither army seemed on the verge of surrender; the battles augured no new prospect of peace. Morale plummeted, and the Democrats jumped at their chance. They launched a relentless assault on Lincoln’s handling of the war, in particular his decision to fuse the restoration of the Union to the emancipation of the slaves.
Frederick Douglass himself became a minor issue in the campaign when Democrats publicized the meeting he had with Lincoln the previous year. The American Anti-Slavery Society had printed the text of Douglass’s December 3 address, with its brief but glowing account of his visit to the White House. The Democrats seized on Douglass’s words, churning them back in a pamphlet entitled Miscegenation Indorsed by the Republican Party, published at the height of the presidential election campaign. Thus was coined a repulsive new word, miscegenation. The Democrats took particular note of Douglass’s claim that the President had received him “as one gentlemen receives another.” This kind of thing made a lot of Republicans cower in fear and their cowering made Douglass nervous. He still equated racial prejudice with the defense of slavery. “While a respectable colored man or woman can be kicked out of the commonest street car in New York—where any white ruffian may ride unquestioned—we are in danger of a compromise with slavery.”17 If the Republicans were soft on racism, Douglass reasoned, they had to be soft on slavery as well. It was something he always suspected about Abraham Lincoln.
But this time Lincoln did not flinch. At that very moment, when the Democrats were ruthlessly hounding him for having met with the notorious Frederick Douglass, Lincoln invited Douglass to the White House for a second meeting.
THE SECOND MEETING, AUGUST 25, 1864
Douglass found Lincoln in an “alarmed” state, disturbed by the calls for a negotiated peace sounded not only by Democrats but by moderates in Lincoln’s own party. Even Horace Greeley, a strong advocate of emancipation, was calling on Lincoln to broker a speedy end of the war by sending emissaries to Niagara Falls to meet with representatives of the Confederacy. Lincoln had issued a public letter making it clear that he would not consider any restoration of the Union that did not also include the complete emancipation of the slaves. That letter had provoked another wave of Democratic denunciations of Lincoln, but even skittish Republicans were pressuring the President to reverse himself. That Lincoln would not do, but he was considering issuing a public statement clarifying his position. In it Lincoln suggested that it would be impossible for him to wage a war purely for the purpose of abolition; the public would not stand for it, and Congress would not authorize it. He showed Douglass a draft of the statement and asked whether it should be publicized. No, Douglass said. It would be misconstrued, by friends and enemies alike, as an indication that Lincoln was not as committed to emancipation as he actually was. Lincoln did not publish the letter.18
But there was another reason for asking Douglass to the White House. Lincoln was afraid that if the Republicans lost the election there would be no constitutional amendment abolishing slavery in the United States. If the Democrats won, they would swiftly negotiate a peace that might leave millions of blacks enslaved. As of August 1864, the only legal basis for emancipation in the Confederate states was Lincoln’s proclamation, the force of which rested on the willingness of the slaves to run for their freedom to Union lines. Several hundred thousand slaves had already done just that, but they constituted no more than 10 or 15 percent of all the slaves in the Confederate South. Lincoln was fairly certain that slaves already freed could not be reenslaved, but he could not be sure about the millions still on farms and plantations across the South. Emancipation was not inevitable after all.
“The slaves are not coming so rapidly and so numerously to us as I had hoped,” Lincoln told Douglass.19
The masters had ways to keep news of the proclamation away from slaves, Douglass pointed out.
“Well,” Lincoln said, “I want you to set about devising some means of making them acquainted with it, and for bringing them into our lines.” Douglass quickly agreed to organize a band of black scouts to move through the southern states, informing the slaves of their emancipation.
Douglass was bemused by Lincoln’s request that he spread word of emancipation throughout the slave South. It reminded him of “the original plan of John Brown.” Actually it was closer to the opposite. Disdainful of politics and politicians, Brown imagined that he could overthrow slavery by launching an attack on a federal arsenal. With no political or military support Brown’s invasion was doomed before it began. Five years later it was the U.S. government that was attacking slavery. Lincoln was using his skills as a politician and his authority as commander in chief to impose emancipation on the rebel states. Douglass’s group was supposed to move through the South acting on behalf of the U.S. government. They would spread the word among the slaves that the President had issued an Emancipation Proclamation and that their freedom would be guaranteed by the invading U.S. Army. Under those circumstances even John Brown might have succeeded in freeing a few slaves.
Twice during their conversation a secretary interrupted to remind the President that the governor of Connecticut was waiting, Lincoln sent the secretary away.
“Tell Governor Buckingham to wait,” said Lincoln. “I wish to have a long talk with my friend Douglass.” Lincoln and Douglass continued talking for “a full hour after this, while the Governor of Connecticut waited without for an interview.”20
How could Douglass—how could anyone—not be flattered? “In his company I was never in any way reminded of my humble origin, or of my unpopular color.” Once again Douglass was impressed by Lincoln’s sincerity and lack of pretension. More important, he realized that all his ideas about reconstructing the defeated South would not mean much if the war ended with millions of blacks still enslaved. Douglass had already expressed concerns that the Emancipation Proclamation might not have freed all the slaves by the time the war ended. But once he saw how disturbed Lincoln was by the prospect of slavery’s survival, Douglass’s long-standing suspicions of the President’s commitment to emancipation vanished. He saw in Lincoln “a deeper moral conviction against slavery than I had ever seen before in anything spoken or written by him.” Only weeks earlier Douglass had denounced Lincoln as a man who did evil by choice and right by necessity. But he came away from his second meeting persuaded that Lincoln had issued the Emancipation Proclamation out of deep moral convictions, not “merely as a ‘necessity.’”21
The second meeting changed forever the way Frederick Douglass viewed Abraham Lincoln, beginning with his position on the upcoming presidential election. In some measure Douglass’s revised sentiments had nothing to do with Lincoln. His Democratic opponent, McClellan, was committed to a military victory and the restoration of the Union, but he was not committed to emancipation. Worse still was the Democratic platform calling for immediate negotiations with the Confederacy with no stipulation that the South repudiate slavery as a precondition to truce. Here was the very nightmare that, Douglass now knew, he shared with Abraham Lincoln.
At about the same time the Democrats nominated McClellan, William Lloyd Garrison provided Douglass with an occasion to explain his views on Lincoln. Somehow Garrison had gotten his hands on the letter to an English correspondent that Douglass had written the previous June; he published excerpts from the letter as part of his own never-ending campaign to impugn the character of Douglass the apostate. Duly embarrassed, Douglass was compelled to explain himself. He wrote that letter a long time ago, he said. It was “flung off in haste.” It was not intended for publication. In any case, the circumstances had changed. Since he wrote that letter three months earlier, the Democrats had nominated McClellan to run against Lincoln on a peace platform. He admitted that his earlier remarks were borne of a desire to spur the nomination of the most ardent antislavery man possible. “That possibility is now no longer conceivable,” Douglass wrote. A victory for McClellan and the Democrats “would be the heaviest calamity of these years of war and blood.” Accordingly “all hesitation ought to cease, and every man who wishes well to the slave and to the country should at once rally with all the warmth and earnestness of his nature to the support of Abraham Lincoln.”22
Beneath Douglass’s embarrassment lay genuine conviction. He now knew, from firsthand knowledge, that Lincoln was resisting pressure to reach a slaveholding compromise and that the pressure was coming not merely from the Democrats but from Lincoln’s fellow Republicans. In a lengthy October speech analyzing the upcoming election, Douglass repeated his now-familiar charge that Lincoln should have moved against slavery at the outset of the war, that he was too slow in enlisting black soldiers, too slow in issuing his Order of Retaliation, too indifferent to the discrimination against African Americans serving in the Union army. But he mentioned such things only in passing, for the larger burden of his speech was to defend Lincoln by distinguishing him from his nervous Republican allies. Lincoln was not the problem, Douglass argued. The problem was the two-pronged threat coming from proslavery Democrats, on the one hand, and compromising Republicans, on the other. Indeed Douglass listed seriatim the tremendous achievements of the previous four years—everything from emancipation and the enlistment of black troops to the diplomatic recognition of Haiti and Liberia and more—every one of which could be reversed by a Democratic victory or a Republican betrayal. Lincoln had to win this election, Douglass insisted, not simply to squelch the Democrats but to strengthen his hand against the appeasers in his own ranks.
Douglass had other reasons to separate Lincoln from the general lot of Republican politicians. Republican leaders had asked Douglass to keep his mouth shut during the campaign despite his passionate conviction that Lincoln’s reelection was a necessity. They “do not wish to expose themselves to the charge of being a ‘N—r’ party,” Douglass complained a few weeks before election day. As far as most Republicans were concerned, “[t]he Negro is the deformed child, which is put out of the room when company comes.”23 Meanwhile Lincoln was inviting Douglass to tea. If Lincoln’s lack of racial prejudice now stood out in sharp relief, so too did his honesty. Douglass always said that Lincoln was an honest man, but it took on added meaning after his second visit to Washington. He had revisted Secretary of War Edwin Stanton on the same trip, and as usual he found Stanton in a sour mood. “He thinks far less of the President’s honesty than I do,” Douglass wrote. “I have not yet come to think that honesty and politics are incompatible.”24
After his second meeting with the President, Douglass wrote up a memo to Lincoln detailing his plans to spread word of emancipation as broadly as possible in the Confederate South. But the plans proved unnecessary when the fortunes of the war shifted decisively in favor of the Union. Weeks before election day the city of Atlanta was captured by Union forces after a successful siege by General William T. Sherman. Having taken Georgia’s capital, he then turned his army eastward to begin its spectacularly destructive march to the sea. Farther north, the Union cavalry did further damage to the Confederacy by sweeping through the Shenandoah Valley, destroying the breadbasket that had been feeding Lee’s army at Petersburg. By election day the Union armies were no longer stalled; within months they would be converging on the increasingly desperate Army of Northern Virginia. The end of the war was in sight. Lincoln’s reelection was now assured, military and political power would remain safely in antislavery hands.
Douglass breathed a gargantuan sigh of relief. The recent presidential contest had been “the most momentous and solemn” in the republic’s history, he said. The question at issue “was whether we should, with our own hands, scuttle the ship and send her to the bottom.”25 All those who had labored so long for the overthrow of human bondage should feel “the profoundest gratitude…that he has not labored and prayed in vain.” 1864 was “the final test of our national fitness for self-government…We have passed the test,” Douglass rejoiced, “and have come out of it like pure gold.” Nevertheless, he cautioned, “the war is still upon us, and is very properly the all absorbing and all controlling thought of the nation.” Douglass was now echoing the sentiments Lincoln had expressed to him a few months earlier.
But the danger soon passed. By early 1865 Sherman had completed his devastating march through Georgia and was making hell in the Carolinas. In Virginia Grant broke through the Petersburg defenses and had Lee’s army on the run. There was no more reason to fear that the war would end with a slaveholding compromise. Nor was there any reason to fear that the end of the war would halt the emancipation process before it was completed. Two border states at long last capitulated to the inevitable. Maryland ratified a “Free Constitution.” In Missouri the state legislature abolished slavery. And in Washington, D.C., the Republicans, aided by Lincoln’s strenuous arm-twisting, passed and sent to the states a Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, permanently abolishing slavery throughout the United States. “I was not among the first to give in that slavery was dead,” Douglass said in January 1865. “But I believe,” he added, “we may look upon it as certain to die by this great struggle in which we are engaged.”26 And he was now prepared to give Lincoln whatever credit he deserved for this turn of events.
Even as Douglass turned his attention to the future, campaigning tirelessly for black suffrage, his speeches contained no criticism of the recently reelected President. He was characteristically sharp in his condemnation of all proposals for southern reconstruction that did not include voting rights for the former slaves. His attacks on General Banks’s repressive labor system in Louisiana were particularly ferocious. But Lincoln was spared any further assaults.
REDEMPTION
Shortly after their second meeting Lincoln invited Douglass to join him for tea at the Soldiers Home, a place where the President often went to relax, a bit removed from the immediate pressures of politics and the war. If the August summons to the White House had indicated the measure of Lincoln’s respect for Douglass, the subsequent invitation to tea at the Soldier’s Home hinted at something more. It seems that Lincoln really did think fondly of Douglass, that he genuinely enjoyed Douglass’s company. They had a lot in common, after all, and they shared the rare capacity to admire each other without ever descending into flattery and without ever withholding their honest convictions. Both felt a deep hatred of slavery and an overriding concern for the outcome of the war, but they shared more than that. Both were uncommonly intelligent. Each was a brilliant orator whose greatest speeches fused razor-sharp logic to soaring idealism. Even their differences meshed. If Douglass was quick to take offense at even the smallest slight, Lincoln was instinctively sympathetic and careful not to give offense. And they seem to have felt a common bond in the fact that each had risen to greatness out of poverty and obscurity. They respected self-made men, and so each respected the other. But whatever the basis of their connection, there is every reason to believe that Lincoln invited Douglass to the Soldier’s Home because he enjoyed Douglass’s company as much as he valued Douglass’s opinion. At least that is what Douglass believed when he recalled the invitation some years later. But we will never know, because Douglass had committed himself to speak somewhere else that evening and was unable to accept the President’s offer.
Having turned down the invitation to the Soldier’s Home, Douglass made a special effort to go to Washington for Lincoln’s second inauguration. He was thus witness to one of the greatest speeches, perhaps the greatest speech, ever delivered by an American President. Even if Lincoln’s words had been prosaic, the day itself would have been memorable. By then everyone knew that the war was almost over even though Lee had not yet surrendered. Four years earlier the President-elect had entered Washington, D.C., in stealth, his country collapsing and his life threatened. Now, in March 1865, the rebellion itself was collapsing, but the fears for Lincoln’s life were more alive than ever. From the platform Lincoln spotted Douglass in the crowd and pointed him out to a scowling Andrew Johnson. Whatever impression Johnson had made upon him, Douglass’s thoughts were soon riveted on Lincoln’s remarkable words.
In its startling invocation of divine providence, the second inaugural was unlike any speech Lincoln had ever given. In 1862 he had undergone something like a spiritual conversion. It was not the rebirth experienced by so many American evangelicals, but a reversion to the sterner dogma of Lincoln’s childhood. He had been reared in a strict Calvinist household. He knew his Bible well. But he had grown into something akin to an Enlightenment deist with a strong skeptical streak. As a young man Lincoln had earned a slightly scandalous reputation for the way he poked fun at biblical inconsistencies and the foibles of the ministry. He put such theological rebelliousness aside once he entered politics, and as a public speaker he developed a special talent for citing scripture in apt and eloquent ways. But an element of skepticism remained. The abolitionists often said that the slaveholders were sinners, but Lincoln doubted it. The slaveholders cited the Bible in their defense, but Lincoln scoffed at that idea as well. He wondered whether God would even bother to take sides in the struggle over slavery. But shortly after Willie’s death, as he was making the decision to proclaim emancipation, Lincoln began searching for evidence of divine approbation. When Lee invaded the North in September 1862, Lincoln made a pact with himself: If the rebel army was turned back, he would take it as a sign from God that the time had come to issue the Emancipation Proclamation. Evidence of a deepening faith crept into Lincoln’s words. But the tone of those words never smacked of triumphalism. It was Calvin’s God who invaded Lincoln’s thoughts, the God of his parents, the God who did not hesitate to dispense bloody justice to a sinful nation, the God who made his spectacular appearance in Lincoln’s second inaugural address.
Douglass himself was receptive to the rhetoric of divine retribution. As a boy he had had no religious instruction to speak of, but as a teenager in Baltimore Douglass experienced a religious conversion. His initial enthusiasm waned, however, as he noticed that Christian conversion seemed to make slaveholders meaner rather than gentler, less disposed to question slavery and more inclined to defend it vigorously. The hypocrisy of slaveholding Christianity disgusted Douglass for the rest of his life, and although he never abandoned the church, he was never again a faithful churchgoer. Nevertheless, as the sectional crisis heated up during the 1850s, Douglass’s words became tinged with the theme of divine retribution. The slaveholders would burn in hell for the sin of slavery. A just God would surely crush the life out of the Confederacy. During the war, whenever he fretted about weak-kneed politicians and untrustworthy generals, Douglass’s faith in the inevitability of emancipation was sustained by his belief in a vengeful God who would smite the enemies of freedom. This wasn’t quite the message Lincoln had to tell in his second inaugural address, but it bore a strong enough family resemblance for Lincoln’s words to ring loudly in Douglass’s sympathetic ears.
Lincoln did not try to review the details of the war that had consumed the nation for four years. Neither he nor anyone else had wanted this war, he said, and nobody could have imagined that once the war came it would be as enduring and destructive as it had been. Everyone did know, from the very beginning, that slavery was, “somehow, the cause of the war.” But no one anticipated that the war would destroy the very thing that had caused it. “Each looked for an easier triumph,” Lincoln said, “and a result less fundamental and astounding.” Such were the mysteries of divine providence. Both sides read the same Bible, both prayed to the same God, “and each invokes His aid against the other.” We may find it odd that southern men “ask a just God’s assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces; but let us judge not that we be not judged.” The Lord could not have answered the prayers of both sides, and the prayers of neither side had been answered fully. “The Almighty has His own purposes,” not least of which is to punish men for their “offences.” If we suppose slavery to be such an offense, perhaps the Lord had inflicted “this terrible war” as punishment on “both the North and the South.” We can only hope and pray that “this mighty scourge of war” would come to a speedy end. “Yet, if God wills that it continue, until all the wealth piled by the bond-man’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash, shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said, ‘the judgments of the Lord, are true and righteous altogether.’”27
Douglass sensed immediately the greatness of Lincoln’s second inaugural address. In the months and years to come he often quoted “these solemn words of our martyred President.” But on that day he wanted to congratulate Lincoln personally. He decided to break all precedent by going to the inaugural reception at the White House, though no African American had ever dared such a thing. That evening he joined the procession heading toward the executive mansion, only to be stopped at the door by guards claiming they had been instructed “to admit no persons of color.” Douglass did not believe them.28
“No such order could have emanated from President Lincoln,” Douglass believed. If Lincoln knew Douglass was there, he told the guards, Lincoln would certainly wish to see him. They then resorted to trickery, escorting Douglass through the door only to steer him toward the exit.
“You have deceived me,” Douglass declared, “I shall not go out of this building till I see President Lincoln.” Douglass then noticed someone he knew and asked him to convey a message. “Be so kind as to say to Mr. Lincoln that Frederick Douglass is detained by officers at the door.” Within moments Douglass entered the East Room.
Lincoln, visible above all his guests, quickly spotted Douglass moving toward him. “Here comes my friend Douglass,” he exclaimed to the crowded room. Lincoln took Douglass by the hand. “I am glad to see you,” he said. “I saw you in the crowd today, listening to my inaugural address; how did you like it?”
“Mr. Lincoln,” Douglass replied, “I must not detain you with my poor opinion, when there are thousands waiting to shake hands with you.”
“No, no,” Lincoln said. “You must stop a little[,] Douglass; there is no man in the country whose opinion I value more than yours. I want to know what you think of it.”
“Mr. Lincoln,” Douglass answered, “that was a sacred effort.”
“I am glad you liked it!”
Douglass wrote later that anybody, no matter how distinguished, would “regard himself honored by such expressions, from such a man.” He went home to Rochester, honored.
Six weeks later, on April 15, 1865, a crowd of citizens called upon Douglass to deliver a spontaneous eulogy for Abraham Lincoln. The President had died early that morning, having been shot by John Wilkes Booth the previous evening at a theater in Washington, D.C. Douglass was stunned. “I have scarcely been able to say a word to any of those friends who have taken my hand and looked sadly in my eyes to-day.” Daniel Moore, the mayor of Rochester, called a memorial service for three o’clock that afternoon in City Hall. So many people showed up that large numbers were turned away. But Douglass managed to get in and found a seat at the rear. The mayor spoke first, followed by several others, including a judge, the rector of St. Luke’s Episcopal Church, and the president of the Rochester Theological Seminary. Douglass himself had not been invited to speak, but once he was noticed “his name burst upon the air from every side, and filled the house.” Pressed by the crowd, Douglass rose to speak, and although he began his remarks by claiming that he found it “almost impossible to respond” to the invitation, by the time he had finished he had delivered a eulogy that was among the most heartfelt and moving speeches of his life.29
“A dreadful disaster has befallen the nation,” Douglass said. “It is a day for silence and meditation; for grief and tears.” No doubt the people of Rochester were shaken by the death of their President “and feel in it a stab at Republican institutions.” There was some consolation in the fact that “though Abraham Lincoln dies, the Republic lives; though that great and good man, one of the noblest men [to] trod God’s earth, is struck down by the hand of the assassin, yet I know that the nation is saved and liberty is established forever.” It was natural on such occasions, Douglass added, to struggle through “tears and anguish, to catch some gleam of hope—some good that may be born of the tremendous evil.” For Douglass this desperate search through “the blinding mists that rise from this yawning gulf” gave him a glimpse of the great promise of freedom and “hope for all” that Lincoln had given them.
He then evoked Lincoln’s second inaugural address to make a more salient point. He noted with dismay the recent impulse to lionize Robert E. Lee and to forget the crimes of “treason and slavery” for which Lee fought. He warned against rushing to reconcile with our southern foes while forgetting our southern friends, the freed people who had so recently proved their loyalty to the Union cause. Douglass suggested that Lincoln’s martyrdom might serve to reawaken the nation to its true mission. “It may be in the inscrutable wisdom of Him who controls the destinies of Nations,” Douglass said, “that this drawing of the Nation’s most precious heart’s blood was necessary to bring us back to that equilibrium which we must maintain if the Republic was to be permanently redeemed.” He then quoted from memory the already familiar passage from the Second Inaugural in which Lincoln, though praying for a speedy end to the war, yet promised if need be to fight on until the blood shed by generations of slaves was at last repaid by the blood of thousands of soldiers in battle. “If it teaches us this lesson, it may be that the blood of our beloved martyred President will be the salvation of our country.” Douglass had incorporated Lincoln’s death into the redeeming bloodshed of the war and invoked it as a challenge to fulfill the promise of freedom for which the President had given his life. There was work to be done. It was the eulogy of a reformer.
But it was also the eulogy of a friend. Douglass felt Lincoln’s death “as a personal as well as a national calamity.” Personal because “of the race to which I belong and the deep interest which that good man ever took in its elevation.” But personal also because of the genuine affection he had come to feel for Abraham Lincoln. How deeply he had this day mourned for “our noble President, I dare not attempt to tell. It was only a few weeks ago that I shook his brave, honest hand, and looked into his gentle eye and heard his kindly voice” as Lincoln delivered his second inaugural address, “words which will live in immortal history, and be read with increasing admiration from age to age.” We called Lincoln a good man, Douglass said, and a “good man he was.” But if “an honest man is the noblest work of God,” he added, “we need have no fear for the soul of Abraham Lincoln.”
A few months after the funeral a parcel arrived at Douglass’s Rochester home along with a note from Mary Todd Lincoln. My husband considered you a special friend, she wrote, and before he died, he said he would like to do something to show his regard for you. She had decided, therefore, to send Douglass her late husband’s walking stick as both a memento of the public man and an expression of Lincoln’s personal regard. Douglass was moved by Mrs. Lincoln’s gesture and told her that he would treasure the cane for as long as he lived. He accepted it not merely as a token of the “kind consideration” in which he knew Lincoln held him personally but also as “an indication of his humane interest in the welfare of my whole race.”30