Ottilie Assing, c. 1871.
I am for a dissolution of the Union—decidedly for a dissolution of the Union! Under an abolition President, who would wield the army and the navy of the Government for the abolition of slavery, I should be for the Union of these States.
—FREDERICK DOUGLASS, BOSTON, DECEMBER 1860
Among the most driving compulsions of Frederick Douglass’s public life was his quest to alter, shape, or change history. He craved those moments and opportunities to gain access to real political power, to bend wills, and to be a creator of events and not merely their interpreter. Over and again he learned the limits and frustrations of such a quest. During the Civil War era Douglass spent great energy trying to discern and then affect what he frequently called the “stern logic of events.” In Life and Times, he reflected poignantly on how during America’s final road to disunion in 1859–61, he had done all in his power to convince his readers and listeners that the fate of the country depended on the “liberation of the slave.” From the safety of retrospect, Douglass expressed a certain hard-won wisdom about the nature of history: “In every way possible, in the columns of my paper and on the platform, by letters to friends at home and abroad, I did all that I could to impress this conviction upon the country. But nations seldom listen to advice from individuals, however reasonable. They are taught less by theories than by facts and events.”1
John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry, as well as the election of 1860 and the secession crisis that flowed in its wake, were just such seismic breaks in time when people were taught by events. Douglass could only react to and flee from the John Brown revolutionary moment; with time, however, he had a great deal to say about its political, moral, and religious meanings. Harpers Ferry became one of the markers of his life’s story. Ten months before the raid, in January 1859, with palpable despair, Douglass had yearned for hope and a historical clarity he could not find. “Would that this might prove the year of the jubilee to those now toiling millions!” he proclaimed in his paper. “Would that this were the day of release. But no wavering shadow of this coming event falls upon our vision. We walk by faith, not by sight.” Bleakly, Douglass admitted that his well was dry. “How long! How long! O Lord God of Sabbath! shall the crushed and bleeding bondsman wait. . . . O! who can answer—who can tell the end we long to know?”2
But exactly a year later, Douglass was living in exile in Halifax, England, in northwest Yorkshire, at the home of his old friend Julia Griffiths Crofts, and her husband, the Reverend Dr. Henry O. Crofts. On December 19, the New York Times reported Douglass safely in England, where he defended John Brown and the raid. “John Brown has not failed,” said the new exile. “He has dropped an idea, equal to a thousand bombshells into the very Bastille of slavery. That idea will live and grow, and one day will unless slavery is otherwise abolished, cover Virginia with sorrow and blood.” By then, Douglass must have read Brown’s pre-gallows dark eloquence about a land “purged with blood.” By January 1860, the orator was once again back on the British antislavery speaking circuit, delivering tributes to Brown and historical lectures on the slavery issue in America. At Bradford on January 6, an upbeat Douglass argued that American abolitionism had undergone “continual progress” since the first campaign of James Birney as the Liberty Party candidate for president in 1840; now some seventeen Northern states had become politically antislavery, and John Brown’s raid had enhanced the cause like nothing before.3
In his speeches during a six-month exile, he appropriated Brown’s raid to a new variation of a prophetic tradition Douglass had long practiced. At Edinburgh, Scotland, on January 30, Douglass used Brown’s story to entertain as well as instruct his audience, garnering “loud and prolonged cheering” with the argument that American slaveholders were the real “insurrectionists.” The huge Queen Street Hall crowd thrilled to Douglass’s radical interpretation of Harpers Ferry: “The 350,000 slaveholders, with the American Government so-called at their back, were but an armed band of insurgents against the just rights and liberties of their fellow-men. John Brown merely stepped in to interrupt and arrest this insurrection against the rights and liberties of mankind; and he did right!” The next night in Glasgow at a reception in his honor in the City Hall, Douglass heard loud applause as he delivered a similar speech in which Isaiah’s “no peace to the wicked” formed his theme. He garnered laughs with his claim against any implication on his part in Brown’s raid as he also played with double meanings for “peace.” He was “thus for peace,” Douglass maintained, but “there could be no peace between one man standing on the neck of his brother and the man who was under his heel.” The American announced that the “slave would be free, whether by peace or by war.” Douglass told his Glasgow comrades that Brown had “succeeded much better . . . by failure than he would have . . . if he had held out till this time.” Martyrdom on the gallows gave the war propagandist an unbounded way to make the old story new.4
Just before leaving Canada Douglass had written a farewell message to “My American Readers and Friends.” He betrayed great anxiety and sadness in his forced exile. “Neither the long experience of partings and meetings, nor the calmness borrowed from philosophy,” eased his fears. But he took heart in making the most of “the stern old hero” awaiting execution and martyrdom. “The Christian blood of Old John Brown,” he declared, “will not cease to cry from the ground long after the clamors of alarm and consternation” from slaveholders had ceased. Douglass announced himself “glad to use the event at Harpers Ferry” to assault with yet new fervor the “benumbed conscience of the nation.” He may have fled for his life to a temporary asylum in England, but he now had a great new story and adoring audiences that allowed him to walk by sight.5 Having saved himself from death on a gallows in a Virginia field, a living Douglass had work to do.
• • •
Douglass’s exile had landed him among friends. In March 1859, Julia Griffiths had married Henry O. Crofts, a Methodist minister and missionary who had served from 1839 to 1851 in Canada and whom she had met in 1857. They provided a welcome landing for the newly fugitive Frederick. When Douglass came ashore in Liverpool on November 24, he traveled immediately to Halifax where he “found my old friend Julia quite glad . . . to see me—and what was of equal importance, her husband too.” Douglass had earlier described the Reverend Crofts as an “excellent antislavery man” who had worked among fugitive slaves in Canada. They all had much in common, not least of which was still coping with the residue of Garrisonian scandalmongering about Frederick and Julia. After Griffiths’s return to England in 1855, the Garrisonians (namely Parker Pillsbury while touring) had tried to monitor her activities, believing absurdly that Douglass had dispatched Julia to raise money not only for his paper and his mortgage but to forge rival abolition groups in Britain. Pillsbury wrote in 1856 that the two alleged lovers had “been mortgaged to each other and both to the devil.”6 Garrisonian orthodoxy reached far beyond US borders.
But no such rumors deterred Griffiths in the least from her new career of organizing women’s antislavery societies in England and Scotland, nor from writing her extraordinary public letters to Douglass’s paper. By February 1859 she reported that she had succeeded in organizing twenty new antislavery groups among her British sisters, and in reorganizing many older ones. Griffiths was a brilliant publicist and activist who, as a woman alone, crisscrossed England, Scotland, and Ireland raising consciousness and money for Douglass’s paper, as well as for the Rochester ladies’ antislavery fairs and for supporting fugitive slaves in New York State. She was the driving force behind the Edinburgh Ladies New Anti-Slavery Association and reported memberships of thirty-one in Wakefield and forty-one in her own town of Halifax. Such heroic efforts did not go unnoticed publicly by her friend; in April 1858 Douglass wrote to the Halifax women, “I wish your society could have seen the twenty fugitives we have helped on their way to Canada during the past week. . . . Every example leaves the system weaker.” Griffiths’s women even sent $10 for John Brown’s widow in late 1859. As Douglass hit the circuit in England and Scotland, Julia stepped in seamlessly as his manager. Her friend’s presence had fostered a “highly successful” fund-raising campaign, she reported in March 1860. Invitations poured in from all over England and Scotland, and Julia served as agent. “It has been a great pleasure to his friends,” she said, “to see him once again safe in Old England, and to welcome him to their . . . firesides.”7
During his second British sojourn, and well beyond, Douglass had many other rumors and accusations to face as well. The tales of his alleged betrayal of promises to Brown and his men refused to die, and a US Senate committee spent six months engaged in a somewhat hapless investigation of the Harpers Ferry conspiracy. The stories about Douglass’s abandonment of Brown referred back to an unconfirmed rumor that at their Detroit meeting in March 1859, Brown had accused Douglass of cowardice to his face because of his refusal to enlist in the Harpers Ferry scheme. But over time the complaints about Douglass’s role emanated largely from Brown’s surviving children, Anne, Salmon, Ruth, and John Jr. In the summer of 1859, some of Brown’s men, especially John Kagi, apparently felt convinced Douglass would personally join them in Maryland. In June, Kagi wrote to Douglass to congratulate him on his decision to join and told the editor that his name was magic in recruiting other black men. According to Franklin Sanborn, a group of Philadelphia blacks wrote a letter to Douglass pledging support for his family in Rochester should he not return from the invasion of Virginia. Yet another unsubstantiated rumor had it that Douglass had escorted Shields Green to Chambersburg to join Brown’s band as his own “paid substitute.” An interview conducted in 1909 by Katherine Mayo, Oswald Garrison Villard’s research assistant on his biography of John Brown, turned up a reminiscence from a Mrs. Russell, a Bostonian who had visited Brown in his jail cell before the execution. She claimed that Brown “had no fondness for Fred Douglass” and stated that his “defeated plan . . . we owe to the famous Mr. Frederick Douglass!”8
Such claims were always much more ex post facto bitterness than reality. Someone had to be blamed for the Old Hero’s folly, especially after he walked so gracefully to the hangman’s noose to die for the nation’s sins. It is a rather pointless speculation to suggest, as one scholar has done, that Douglass’s opposition was “detrimental” to the raid. Brown himself seemed fully aware that his own faulty strategy and indecision had led to defeat. In famous letters from jail while awaiting the gallows, he wrote to his brother Jeremiah: “I am worth inconceivably more to hang than for any other purpose.” And to his wife, Mary, Brown offered this agonizing self-epitaph: “I have been whipped as the saying is; but am sure I can recover all the lost capital occasioned by that disaster; by only hanging a few moments by the neck; & feel quite determined to make the utmost possible out of a defeat.” With a culture of martyrdom emerging around “John Brown’s Body,” blaming Douglass for the defeat at Harpers Ferry seems strange in retrospect.9 This Jesus and his glorious cross needed no Judas, and soon his cause grew vaster than even the Old Man might have imagined.
From England, Douglass monitored the investigation conducted in the Senate by a committee chaired by James Mason of Virginia. The Mason Committee met with regularity from December 16, 1859, to June 14, 1860. Consisting of Senators Mason, Jefferson Davis of Mississippi, and G. N. Fitch of Indiana for the majority Democrats, and Senators Jacob Collamer of Vermont and James R. Doolittle of Wisconsin for the Republican minority, the hearings, with Davis serving as chief inquisitor, interrogated many witnesses to ascertain whether any “subversive organizations” had been involved in Brown’s exploits. But during this volatile election year, the Mason Committee turned into more of a political exercise, with the Democrats seeking to identify and blame Republican congressmen as culprits and with most Republicans striving to keep distance between themselves and Brown’s radicalism. The committee interviewed Republican luminaries William H. Seward, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, Henry Wilson and John Andrew of Massachusetts, and Representative Joshua Giddings of Ohio. Correspondence from Giddings had been found in Brown’s trunks after the raid. The hearings also included the questioning of two members of the group of Brown supporters known as the Secret Six, George Luther Stearns and Samuel Gridley Howe, but the Mason Committee seemed less interested in proving a legal conspiracy than in eventually putting the whole affair behind the nation before the election. Since Douglass was out of the country, the indictment against him, as well as nearly all others, was abandoned. Only four arrest warrants were issued, and those because they had refused to testify: John Brown Jr., James Redpath, Franklin B. Sanborn, and Thaddeus Hyatt. Only Hyatt was jailed—for three months in Washington, DC, before being released when the committee issued its reports.10
In the end the Mason Committee, despite Jefferson Davis’s personal ire for Seward, Giddings, and all abolitionists, chose not to delve into the reality of Brown’s conspiracy. Its legal work seemed dictated more by the much-anticipated Democratic Party nominating convention to be held in Charleston, South Carolina, in April and the Republican convention in Chicago early that summer. The Mason Committee’s majority report delivered special censure for all the New England financial and military support for Brown’s Kansas crusade, as well as for abolitionists’ belief in “higher law” doctrines. But it seemed convinced that Brown’s invasion was the work of a relatively lone, deranged outlaw striving to incite “servile insurrection.” Hovering over the Mason Committee’s deliberations was that Virginia had already created one martyr, the consequences of which had produced a toxic political environment, and it had no wish to create any more.11
Too much was at stake politically for all concerned in 1860 for the committee to seek anything resembling the deeper truth. Douglass was one beneficiary of an incompetent congressional inquiry into America’s deepest dilemma; he never had to face the future president of the Confederacy in a Senate hearing. It would not be the last time Douglass found himself first trapped by and then offered the open opportunity to exploit his country’s refusal to face its past or present. Soon, he could return to the United States, relatively comfortable knowing that he did not face arrest or execution for the crime of conspiracy in which he now declared great pride.
While in England, Douglass, as usual, buried his personal anxieties in travel and lecturing. He remained on the defensive about his flight to Canada and Britain, as well as his family’s fate. Douglass felt under scrutiny about his choices, as he wrote to an old Irish friend, Maria Webb. He had to escape arrest and trial in Virginia. “I could never hope to get out of that state alive,” he told Webb. “If they did not kill me for being concerned with Dear old Brown they would have done so—for my being Frederick Douglass.”12 Being Frederick Douglass is what he did in England to overflow crowds and with the stirrings of controversy.
Douglass appealed to the religious and national pride of his Scottish audiences. “The Christianity of Scotland,” he said, “had no sanction for chains or slavery,” whereas in the American South “the clank of the fetter might be heard along with the chime of the bell that called to prayer. Men might be seen going to prayer on one side of the street, and chain gangs on the other side.” In Scotland he sang the old songs about Christian hypocrisy with new urgency. In Glasgow in February 1860, Douglass delivered a remarkable historical lecture on how America had descended from two distinct societies, one born among the Bible-inspired believers in the Magna Carta aboard the Mayflower in 1620, and the other aboard a “Dutch galley” slave ship landing in Virginia in 1619. One society led to “light” and the other “darkness”; the first brought “Christ” and the other “Belial,” or the Old Testament conception for evil and Satan. This dichotomous simplicity gave way to a narrative of how the country had collapsed into the “most trying crisis in her history,” bounded by the enactments of the Fugitive Slave Act and the Dred Scott decision, which Douglass called the “moral assassination” of his “whole race.”13
At the same time, in Glasgow, Newcastle, and other cities, Douglass got into a nasty scrap with British Garrisonians, especially the famed George Thompson, over disunionism and the antislavery interpretation of the Constitution. Douglass plied old waters, but he seemed eager for another go at his old nemeses. Thompson responded with public rebuttals and specially published addresses denouncing Douglass’s views and his harsh style. The Glasgow Emancipation Society reported that an April 3 address in the City Hall by Thompson had been a “refutation . . . lucid and triumphant” against “the charges that F. Douglass had brought against the lecturer.”14
But Douglass loved these public squabbles, and his well of resentments and supply of sarcasm against Garrisonians seemed bottomless. He even made a vigorous case for the potential antislavery power of the Republican Party in America, appropriating it to his natural-rights conception of the Constitution. Although he gladly engaged in a personalized fight with Thompson over their respective readings of the Constitution, Douglass believed the time had passed for arcane argument. His Scottish audiences liked a vaguer kind of eloquence. “Slavery is essentially a dark system,” he declared in Glasgow in March 1860; “all it wants is to be excluded and shut out from the light. If it can only be boxed in where there is not a single breath to fall upon it. . . . It dreads the influence of truth.”15 By his own circuitous route, Douglass may have landed on the central truth of why the Republican Party posed such a threat to Southern slavery. Such a political force could use parts of the Constitution, should it gain power, to bring slavery to an ultimate destruction.
Douglass also faced new issues in England as he found traction with older arguments. His own large audiences and Griffiths’s extraordinary labors to revive antislavery societies notwithstanding, the British abolition movement appeared in decline. Many in the British public had soured on the question of West Indian emancipation, arguing that it had failed and that Africans and their descendants were proving incapable of free labor. Worse, increasingly American forms of racism that Douglass had not seen in 1846–47 appeared now on British streets, in theaters, and even in social discourse. A new roiling of racism in Britain disturbed him immensely. In his speech “British Racial Attitudes” in Newcastle, Douglass reminisced about encountering “not the slightest ill feeling toward me because of my complexion” in 1846. But now, “American prejudice might be found in the streets of Liverpool and in nearly all our commercial towns.” He especially blamed “that pestiferous nuisance, Ethiopian minstrels,” who “brought here the slang phrases, the contemptuous sneers all originating in the spirit of slavery.” He made it clear that he hated seeing “the negro represented in all manner of extravagances, contented and happy as a slave.” Groups of touring minstrels were indeed common in England by 1860, entertaining large audiences with exaggerated dialects and grotesque caricature. A Newcastle paper reported that Douglass experienced personal “hostility to his color” as never before, and that in a speech he condemned both American ministers as well as the minstrels alike for pouring “the leprous distilment of their proslavery poison into the ears and hearts of the British people.”16 British abolition dearly needed a revival; for at least a brief time, Douglass gave it his voice and energy.
• • •
In January 1860, while Douglass was in England, Ottilie Assing’s German translation of My Bondage and My Freedom appeared. According to her biographer, Maria Diedrich, Assing sought to “invent a Douglass that was all hers.” Indeed, that was the case, although with only the slimmest evidence via a third-party source, Diedrich maintains that Assing planned to join Douglass for a secret romantic holiday in France. Douglass did seek to travel to France by his own account, but could not go because the American government denied him a passport. Douglass openly blamed the racism of the Democratic Party’s minister to the Court of St. James’s, George Dallas.17
Assing may have dreamed of joining Douglass on his new “European career,” as Diedrich suggests, but nothing from Douglass’s hand or voice ever indicated such intentions. Assing’s designs on Douglass’s heart and career come to us entirely by her own telling of the tale. All he later admitted to was a “long-cherished desire to visit France.” That he and Assing conducted an on-and-off intimate and important relationship seems certain from Assing’s letters. It appears that Douglass had begun to study German at Assing’s behest. Assing was utterly infatuated with Douglass and saw him as a romantic hero as well as, according to Diedrich, the “legitimate heir” of John Brown to lead the antislavery revolution. Assing’s breathless hagiography of Brown and Douglass in the wake of Harpers Ferry knew no bounds. Diedrich rightly declares that Assing “feared neither contradiction nor inconsistency” in her writing. Her hopes and grandiosity halted abruptly, however, as did Douglass’s second British sojourn, when news arrived in early spring while he was visiting Glasgow that his daughter Annie, just short of her eleventh birthday, had died in Rochester on March 13, 1860, of an extended illness.18
A grief- and guilt-stricken Douglass made haste to sail home to the United States despite lingering concerns over his legal fate. He may have received the news of Annie’s death from Rosetta, who was now an occasional correspondent with her father. Annie herself had written the faraway parent in December 1859, telling of her joys and successes in school, especially her “German lessons.” “I am the first reader and I can read,” she told the exiled Douglass. Assing had taken a sincere interest in the education of Douglass’s daughters. Anna Douglass was devastated by the loss of her namesake and final child of her marriage to the peripatetic world citizen she had once known as the lonely and ambitious boy from the Baltimore docks. A letter from Rosetta to Douglass’s adopted sister, Harriet (Ruth Adams), opens a small window into Anna’s bleak but courageous bereavement. “I have just asked Mother what I should say for her,” said Rosetta to Harriet. “She sends her love to you and thanks you as heartily as myself for your sympathizing letter, and as she is unable to write will allow my letter to be in answer for both. . . . She is not very well now being quite feeble though about the house.” Then Anna asked her daughter to tell Anna’s sister-in-law to, politely, “if you desire,” write to her famous brother and tell him to come home to Rochester. Along with her adult daughter and teenage sons, Anna would have seen to the burial of Annie. How horribly conspicuous Douglass must have seemed to all of them by his absence. Thirty-five carriages rolled along Rochester streets and roads to Annie’s burial, according to a report in Douglass’ Monthly. The “disease was one of the brain” that had baffled the doctors. During the funeral observances, wrote the observer, “frequent allusions were made to the father of little Annie, so far away, who would be so sad to be present, and yet more sad to be absent.”19
Douglass wrote few public words about his daughter’s death. He later called Annie “the light and life of my house.” As he rode the trains from Glasgow to Halifax, said good-bye to Julia and Henry Crofts, then hurried on to Liverpool, his lonely burden numbed him. The cheering had stopped; those huge and engaging audiences in the ornate halls of Edinburgh and Glasgow were suddenly a world away from his personal reality. The helpless self-made man headed home to face events he could not control. In one of Rosetta’s letters to Harriet she told of receiving letters from her father (which do not survive) indicating that “his grief was great” and hoping for another message with “more composure of mind.” Douglass took a steamer to Portland, Maine, remaining inconspicuous as he returned to Rochester via Canada. After a seventeen-day voyage he was home by late April, where he would remain off the lecture circuit for nearly four months, still wary of the Senate investigation and doing his best to help Anna grieve and to provide a father’s presence for Annie’s four siblings. The youngest son, Charles, reminiscing many years later, said this sequence of events left them all a “dismembered family.” “Thus at the age of 16,” he wrote, “I left my father’s house never to return again only as a visitor.”20
They needed him; in a public letter to his “British Anti-Slavery Friends” of May 26, 1860, Douglass told of his “sorrow-stricken family” and how his presence felt “sacredly beneficial.” But then he all but politicized Annie’s death, thanking his English friends for their sympathy and suggesting that her demise resulted “from overanxiety for the safety of her father, and deep sorrow for the death of dear old John Brown, upon whose knee she had often sat only a few months before.” All of this tenderness of sentiment and memory presaged Douglass’s appeal about the never-ending problem of “receipts” and “expenses” of his newspaper. The Douglass’ Monthly was broke again, political antislavery desperately needed his voice, and he enticed his British network with the news that ten more fugitive slaves had passed under his own roof in the mere month he had resided back in Rochester.21 The public letter was a common genre in this era, but rarely had Douglass or anyone else in his abolitionist orbit mixed such private sorrow with fund-raising.
• • •
In July of 1860 Ottilie Assing came for a somewhat extended visit to Rochester, where among other activities she took an oath of allegiance to the United States and became an American citizen. According to her biographer she tried hard during this time to persuade Douglass away from his religious faith and biblical literary voice, but to no avail. Assing often had exquisitely bad timing and judgment. Whatever else they shared in affection and ideas, her atheism and his Christian worldview and millennial sense of history clashed, ultimately fatally. Douglass had planned a return visit to Britain that September to resume his effort to revive British abolitionism, but called it off because of the American presidential election campaign and his desire to affect it. “He who speaks now,” he wrote in the Monthly, “may have an audience. We wish . . . to strike while the iron is hot.” He further expressed great confidence in his “ever faithful friend and coadjutor, Mrs. Dr. Crofts” in forging a new antislavery sentiment in Great Britain.22
Moreover, Douglass continued to clash openly with Garrisonians, exchanging nasty counteraccusations in October and November over whether he sought the demise of the American Anti-Slavery Society, which he vehemently denied. During this season of intense public furor in the land, he and Garrison made sure not to appear in the same physical space. Douglass also found time in late September to attend a “Seventh Annual Clam Bake,” a large social gathering of free African Americans, held that year in Fort Lee, New Jersey, on the Hudson River. Conceived by the New Yorker Peter A. Williams in 1853, this “grand rural banquet” drew people to days of entertainment and reunion from Boston, Newport, Providence, New York, Philadelphia, Hartford, and other towns. After a feast at Fort Lee, speeches were made, and Douglass, as usual, was front and center. The Anglo-African reported that as guests found their places, “a form arises towering head and shoulders over the whole company, it is Frederick Douglass, thenceforth as ever the lion of the occasion.” Douglass knew how to work a crowd. In his own report on the occasion he maintained that his people should never lose their “heart for amusement. . . . We like to study our people at play as well as at prayer.”23 Soon they were back to work that needed their prayers.
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.”24
Douglass promised to work for the Republicans even as he expressed contradictory cautions. Despite being disappointed by the Chicago platform, in a June 1860 editorial he praised Lincoln. “Untried” and without claim to “any literary culture beyond the circle of his practical duties,” the Illinois lawyer was nevertheless “honest,” possessed a “well balanced head,” and “great firmness of will.” Douglass decided the Republicans really did nominate, in Lincoln, a “radical . . . fully committed to the doctrine of the ‘irrepressible conflict.’ ” Although Douglass regretted the Republicans’ lack of moral abolitionism and would have preferred the “brave and inspiring march of a storming party,” in its absence he would settle for “the slow processes of a cautious siege.”25 It was the political season indeed, and Douglass had never known a political persuasion that he could not both cheer and attack depending on the audience and purpose. His observations about Lincoln proved astute in the long run; at this tense juncture, however, Douglass tilted in political crosswinds.
On July 2, he wrote in a confused tone to Gerrit Smith, who struggled with a mental breakdown in the wake of Harpers Ferry. “I cannot support Lincoln,” Douglass asserted, “but whether there is life enough in the Abolitionists [Radical Abolition Party] to name a candidate, I cannot say. I shall look to your letter for light on the pathway of duty.” Then in August Douglass wrote in the Monthly that the “vital element” of the Republican Party was its “antislavery sentiment.” “Nothing is plainer,” Douglass argued, “than that the Republican party has its source in the old Liberty party.” It would live or die, he contended, “as the abolition sentiment of the country flourishes or fades.” Vexed by his commitments to moral principle and political action, Douglass announced that he would vote for what historian Richard Sewell rightly called the remnant of Gerrit Smith’s “miniscule” radical party, while assiduously working for Lincoln’s election.26
Douglass’s political fluctuations in 1860 were hardly unique; his public editorials were the searching efforts of a black leader to comprehend an amalgam of political interests and a party that seemed to both despise and champion his people. The American party system was undergoing a revolution, and the nation now teetered on the brink of a potential disunion that both worried and thrilled Douglass. His political positions in 1860, as in 1856, reflected a personality trait historian James Oakes has called “impulsive and voluble,” a tendency to “sharp reversals” as he rushed his ideas into print each month in his paper. But Douglass’s critiques of Lincoln and the Republicans were less rushed than representative of his lack of leverage and his isolation outside of the party’s inner circles. The only prominent Republican with whom Douglass had any regular correspondence was Massachusetts senator Charles Sumner, whom Douglass deeply admired as a radical, the “Wilberforce of America” with the daring and nerve to denounce the “barbarism of slavery” on the floor of the Senate.27
Sumner was what Douglass wished the Republican Party would become—a force that would “grapple with the hell-born monster itself.” But he knew it was a coalition of interests, and he found an uncomfortable foothold among some of its guiding ideas, especially the “denationalization” of slavery, a theory advanced most prominently by Salmon P. Chase that sought to turn slavery in upon itself, where it would suffocate and die. Wherever federal jurisdiction existed—the District of Columbia, the territories, foreign and interstate commerce, the postal service, the Fugitive Slave Act—Republicans would either deny slavery protection or attack it. Douglass saw this variation on nonextensionism as merely the first step in a constitutional plan to restrict slavery geographically and then ultimately to eradicate it by federal action. He absolutely disagreed with Lincoln’s and the Republicans’ idea that they could not constitutionally end slavery in the states where it already legally existed; Douglass had been arguing the opposite for nearly a decade. “It will be a great work accomplished,” a newly encouraged Douglass wrote in June, “when this Government is divorced from the active support of the inhuman slave system.” He wanted to “turn the tide of the National Administration against the man-stealers of this country.”28 Thus Douglass found his own way to fold radical rhetoric into moderate methods and, at least most of the time, sing hosannas to the Republicans.
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 crime 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.29 By 1860, they too found a place under the Republicans’ broad tent.
Douglass gloated over the splitting of the Democrats into Northern and Southern factions. The Democrats, argued Douglass, had historically surpassed all others in “heartless cruelty” toward blacks; their division now opened a floodgate for the Republican waters to rush through, and he sent up “a jubilee shout over the fact that the wisdom of the crafty had been confounded . . . the counsels of the wicked . . . brought to nought.” But in a different mood in the same brief period, the enthusiastic political junkie turned into a dark moral philosopher. Douglass knew the political calculus indicated that Lincoln and the Republicans would win in November, but the previous decade had taught him not to trust the American “national character.” For his people slavery had always been experienced as “grim and bloody tragedies . . . rehearsed day by day.” But most Americans, including Northerners about to vote Republican, were but “spectators in a theatre” watching the slavery crisis “as a grand operatic performance.”30
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 passing 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 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 doves.’ ” 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.”31
On the eve of such a new and encouraging election, Douglass’s gloom seems odd at first glance. But this radical was still trying to comprehend just how to be a Republican; his writings were the reflections of a hardened abolitionist not certain whether the impending political collisions augured the liberation or the sacrificial doom of his people. The cynic in Douglass left him saying, “Heaven help the poor slave, whose only hope for freedom is in the selfish hearts of such a people.”32 But the radical pragmatist kept one eye trained on just how to apply that American self-interestedness to the cause of abolition.
That fall Douglass never found peace on either side of his self-imposed divide between pure abolition and antislavery politics. Personally, he threw his vote away in 1860; then as a social reformer he prepared to help push the new anti-Southern, antislavery politics along the course of abolition. In an August 1860 speech, he tried to clarify his position: “I would gladly have a party openly combined to put down slavery at the South. In the absence of such a party, I am glad to see a party in the field against which all that is slaveholding, malignant and Negro-hating, both in the North and the South, is combined.” Whatever aroused the ire of the Slave Power was the friend of the slave. “The slaveholders know that the day of their power is over,” Douglass declared, “when a Republican president is elected.” At the very least, Southern fears of Lincoln’s potential victory served as “tolerable endorsements of the antislavery tendencies of the Republican Party.”33 More than anything else, the editor wanted to hasten a decisive conflict, a rupture in the body politic that would force everyone to be taught by the events.
On Election Day, November 6, 1860, Douglass was in Rochester, working from morning until night at the polls. His most immediate concern was a proposal on the New York State ballot to abolish the $250 property requirement for black voters (no such requirement existed for whites). This movement for equal suffrage had attracted the racist scorn of Democrats and only limited endorsement from Republicans, but for black leaders it was the object of a vigorous campaign. Coordinated from Albany by the black lobbyist and Underground Railroad activist Stephen A. Myers, and from New York City by McCune Smith—Douglass managed western New York efforts—the campaign distributed thousands of copies of a tract, The Suffrage Question in Relation to Colored Voters in the State of New York. The effort also created dozens of local suffrage clubs and auxiliaries of their New York State Suffrage Association (with some fifty-six in New York City and Brooklyn alone). In the two months before the election, Douglass barnstormed western New York and distributed twenty-five thousand copies of the tract.34
A constitutional amendment providing equal suffrage had passed the New York legislature in 1857 but was never brought to a referendum. In 1860 the measure reemerged with almost unanimous Republican support and solid Democratic opposition. In the campaign, however, most Republican newspapers and speakers quietly ignored or opposed the referendum, fearing that it might hurt Lincoln’s chances of winning the state. In October, Douglass wrote a brilliant editorial lambasting Democratic papers such as the New York World that denounced equal suffrage on the grounds that it caused blacks and whites to be “intermingled in the same community.” This position was not merely “mean and base,” and a “gross injustice,” but ultimately lacked “saneness,” said the wry editor. The World was at least largely honest with its racism. But in a passage that would fit perfectly into an early-twenty-first-century American debate over voter-suppression measures, Douglass forcefully asked, “What is The World afraid of? Does it fear that with equal protection Negro blood would prove more than a match for Anglo-Saxon blood in the race of improvement? Does it apprehend the departure of the reins of Government out of the hands of the white race, and for this reason is in favor of continuing extra weight and an additional disability upon the Negro?”35
Douglass worked exhaustively for equal voting rights that autumn; but the result left him bitter and disillusioned. While Lincoln carried New York by 50,000 votes, the suffrage measure met a resounding defeat, 337,985 to 197,503. What Republican legislators had enacted they treated with disdain at the polls. Here was proof of Douglass’s August reflections on American selfish individualism in the face of basic human rights. A large number of Republican voters had simply abstained on black suffrage as they voted for Lincoln. Douglass felt betrayed by Republican silence on the suffrage issue: “The blow is a heavy and damaging one. Every intelligent colored man must feel it keenly.” The defeat cut to the bone with its message of black political powerlessness. “We do not even wring from this vote the poor consolation that anybody was afraid of our influence or power,” Douglass lamented. “The victory over us is simply one of blind ignorance and prejudice.”36 The man who believed he could somehow change history by his pen, his voice, and now his vote felt inaudible.
• • •
But as before, Douglass converted the election of Lincoln, and the threats of secession from the Deep South, into a performance of his duty of hope, albeit a hope tinged with anger and exhausted cynicism. By December, from his Rochester desk, an ambivalent Douglass gave his best interpretation of the meaning of the election. Despite carrying only approximately 40 percent of the total vote, Lincoln’s victory in the four-way, sectionalized contest had altered the balance of power in America. But to what end no one could yet know, especially a black editor in his western New York outpost. The Republicans’ rise to federal power might discredit the Fugitive Slave Act as well as extinguish the South’s efforts to revive the foreign slave trade, Douglass posited. Abolitionist ideas had been thoroughly disseminated by the campaign, he reasoned, and therefore the “chief benefit” may simply have been the “canvass itself.” Lincoln’s election had at least broken the “enchantment” too many Northern politicians had felt toward the Slave Power; a new political force had finally ended the “perpetual bondage to an ignoble fear.”37 But these were hardly celebratory words for the victors of 1860. In the immediate wake of the election Douglass hedged all of his bets.
On the eve of South Carolina’s secession, Douglass was not convinced that enough radical disposition existed on either side to cause an open split, especially one that would lead to war. He reprinted nearly three full pages of reactions from Southern newspapers, what he called “Southern Thunder,” but interpreted it as largely bluster. Despite all the secessionist rhetoric, he contended that the South had overreacted to Lincoln’s threat and misinterpreted his intentions. Because of his high office and essential moderation, Douglass argued, Lincoln could even become the abolition movement’s most powerful enemy. Disappointingly, Douglass saw “no sufficient cause for the dissolution of the Union”; indeed, he feared that the Union might now be saved—through compromises—for all the wrong reasons, thus blunting if not destroying the abolitionists’ voice and leverage. Although slaveholders might not realize it, Douglass predicted that slavery would be “as safe, and safer, in the Union under such a President [Lincoln] than it can be under any President of a Southern Confederacy.” Under the stress and strain of just what secession would mean, amid days and weeks of great confusion over what a silent Lincoln would do, Douglass argued that the election had taught the country the “possibility of electing if not an Abolitionist, at least an antislavery reputation to the Presidency of the United States.” While the editor possessed the “pen, voice and influence of only one man,” he would stay his course and “join in no cry . . . less than the complete and universal abolition of the whole slave system.”38 Douglass took solace from simply wielding his pen in the service of the old cause as he awoke every day for the news in a crisis like no other.
Douglass found little encouragement in the behavior of the Northern public during the secession crisis. The bulk of white Northerners had always viewed abolitionists with suspicion or contempt, and with the threat of disunion in the air, hostility to antislavery agitators rose to new levels of violence. By December 1860, Northern workingmen, along with merchants, shipowners, and cotton manufacturers, were deeply worried about the impact of potential disunion, while bankers and industrialists squirmed as the prices of stocks declined markedly. The specter of financial ruin caused the spirit of political reconciliation to revive, and the conservative and the Democratic press teemed with pro-compromise sentiment as well as incendiary attacks on abolitionists. While Southern state conventions debated secession, mob violence against antislavery speakers raged in several Northern cities in the first two months of 1861. A revolution was afoot, but no one quite knew its course or consequences. Abolitionists provided ready scapegoats for mobs engulfed by economic and political panic.39
Douglass and many of his comrades faced just such a mob in force on December 3, 1860, at a gathering in Tremont Temple in Boston, called to commemorate the first anniversary of the execution of John Brown. Freed from the remoteness of his editor’s desk, Douglass seemed to welcome a fight, verbal or otherwise. That is exactly what he got. As the abolitionists gathered to address the broad topic of “How can American slavery be abolished?,” a well-dressed crowd, what Douglass called “a gentlemen’s mob,” quickly outnumbered them and physically overtook the platform. For three hours this daytime meeting was nothing less than a shouting, chaotic melee complete with insults and epithets of all kinds, fisticuffs, chairs smashed and thrown, a swaying battle for control of the hall by the two competing sides. Eventually the Boston police took over and forced a clearing of the building. At the center of the fight for the abolitionists was Douglass, coat removed, sleeves rolled up, and in full angry voice returning nearly every insult with one of his own. First James Redpath and then Franklin Sanborn tried to exercise control as chairmen, but they were shouted away by what Boston and New York reporters called the “Unionists,” who hijacked the meeting. Amid “great confusion and noise,” Douglass, invited as a featured speaker, “frequently interrupted” the mob’s chairman, a Richard S. Fay. When Fay complained that he could not make himself heard over the tumult, Douglass warmed to the game by shouting, “When thine enemy thirst give him drink!” to “applause and hisses.” The Unionists put forward a series of anti–John Brown resolutions, to which Douglass again led the resistance, with some of the abolitonists now standing on their chairs, fists raised and calling on their champion, Douglass, to speak. Shouts of “Douglass! Douglass!” rang out around the Temple.40
The orator, who had both endured and enjoyed these violent rituals before, demanded the floor with a voice all apparently could hear, prompting Fay’s partisans to yet-louder screams of “Nigger!” . . . “Knock him down!” and “Treason!” For a few minutes Douglass managed some coherent statements, as he shouted down his opponents with “You are in the service of the slaveholders of the United States. . . . It is said the best way to abolish slavery is to obey the law. Shall we obey the blood-hounds of the law who do the dirty work of the slave catchers?”41
Douglass gave as he took. With disturbances breaking out all over the hall throughout this bizarre struggle, Douglass fought for the podium, at one point pushing his way through a line of men and fighting, said one Boston reporter, “like a trained pugilist.” He even fought with one man for possession of a chair in which to sit. But Douglass fought most the battle of words. He asked the gathering to “cast aside with indignation the wild and guilty fantasy that man owns property in man, even in that stout, big-fisted fellow down there, who has just insulted me.” As someone shouted, “Go on, nigger!,” Douglass answered from Exodus, “The freedom of all mankind was written on the heart by the finger of God!” Then from the sublime to the ridiculous, he screamed at another heckler, “If I was a slave driver, and had hold of that man for five minutes, I would let more daylight through his skin than ever got there before.” These hateful exchanges, however relished by the combatants, ended in pushing, shoving, and fists thrown wildly, coats torn off. One group dragged Douglass down by his hair (or his “wool” as reported), until a group of his friends rescued and protected him. Only the police could end such madness, but not before Douglass, who so defended his dignity and pride from even the smallest of slights, proclaimed that he felt “no more embarrassment by this uproar than if I had been kicked by a jackass.” As the police took over the stage and the hall, Douglass shouted, “Three cheers for liberty!,” as the opponents shouted, “Three cheers for Governor Wise!”42
Later that night, the abolitionists reassembled at a black church on Joy Street in Beacon Hill to remember John Brown and honor free speech. Perhaps with a clean shirt, Douglass again was a key speaker. For the first time in nearly eight years by his own count, he appeared on the same platform with old Garrisonian comrade Wendell Phillips. Douglass announced hearty agreement with Phillips that “all methods of proceeding against slavery” should be used, including the “John Brown way.” With John Brown Jr. in attendance at the small church, and with a large crowd outside trying to get in, Douglass preached in favor of violence and war. They needed to keep all slaveholders in “fear of personal danger,” Douglass pronounced. “I rejoice in every uprising at the South” among slaves. Douglass even drew from Old Man Brown’s crowd-pleasing poetic, if faulty, military idea: “There is liberty in yonder mountains . . . in the Alleghenies . . . a thousand men scattered in those hills, and slavery is dead.” Feeling the spirit after that day’s mob attack, Douglass called for an American Garibaldi to march into the South and “summon to his standard sixty thousand, if necessary, to accomplish the freedom of the slave.” Unfortunately, in the little war already breaking out in Boston, white mobs dogged Wendell Phillips on his path home, threatening his life. Several blacks while leaving the church around 10:15 p.m. were assaulted and some seriously injured.43 Douglass, the war propagandist wishing for blood and disunion, retreated from the former antislavery citadel of Boston unharmed.
• • •
In late December 1860, Douglass welcomed the news of South Carolina’s secession from the Union. Heaping scorn upon the Palmetto State’s rash act, as well as relishing it as an opportunity, Douglass all but thanked the secessionists for “preferring to be a large piece of nothing, to being any longer a small piece of something.” Secessionists had resharpened his wit. They provided what he initially hoped would be the long-awaited opening for his cause—disunion, political crisis, and some form of sanctioned military action against the South and therefore against slavery. He would get his wish, but only through the confusion and fear of the secession winter of 1860–61. “Her people [South Carolina’s],” Douglass declared with anxious glee, “(except those of them held in slavery, which are more than half her population) have hailed the event as another and far more glorious Fourth of July, and are celebrating it with plenty of gunpowder, bad brandy, but as yet no balls, except those where perfumed ladies and gentlemen move their feet to the inspiring notes of the fiddle.” With no veiled intent, Douglass wished for a fight: “Other balls may yet come, and unless South Carolina shall retreat, or the Federal Government shall abdicate its functions, they must come.”44
Douglass had dreamed of this kind of moment, events that could dislodge history from its worn paths and move it in new directions. In editorials he lampooned what South Carolinians imagined as “peaceful secession,” celebrated by “bonfires, pyrotechnics . . . music and dancing.” He cautioned Carolinians over their confidence about “a thing as easily done,” so he maintained they believed, “as the leaving of a society of Odd Fellows, or bidding good night to a spiritual circle.” Excitement over secession, in South and North, according to the editor, tilted from an “undercurrent of doubt, uncertainty, distrust and foreboding.” Then he delivered a historical and constitutional analysis of secession. South Carolina was out of the Union, argued Douglass, only “on paper,” and in “resolutions and telegrams.” Governments “rest not upon paper, but upon power. They do not solicit obedience as a favor, but compel it as a duty.” Douglass, the sudden American nationalist, acknowledged the “right of revolution” for a state or a political group, but no constitutional “right of secession.” A state could not secede; it could revolt. “Revolution in this country is rebellion, and rebellion is treason, and treason is levying war against the United States, with something more than paper resolutions. . . . There must be swords, guns, powder, balls, and men behind them to use them.” Secession was no abstract debate over federalism or states’ rights, no issue resolved merely by ordinances, but a matter of power and guns. “The right of South Carolina to secede,” declared the angry but thrilled abolitionist, “depends upon her ability to do so, and to stay so.”45
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 sends 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.”46
Highly polemical, not always attuned to the nuances and divisions among the Republicans nor to the scale of unionism in parts of the divided South, and filling his own cups of wrath, Douglass wanted the clarity of polarized conflict. He wanted war. Perhaps his greatest fear as the secession crisis unfolded was the potential for concession and compromise. For a former slave and then an orator and an editor whose political consciousness had awakened with the Mexican War and the Compromise of 1850, who had seen the fate of the slaves bandied about in one political crisis after another, and who had struggled to sustain hope in the face of the Dred Scott decision’s egregious denials, a resolute stand by the North against secession and the Slave Power was hardly a sure thing. The best hopes of blacks, Douglass said that winter, had always been dashed by the “old medicine of compromise.” As he observed resolutions and conventions intended to settle the crisis, he complained that secession’s enablers, North and South, had “filled the air with whines of compromise.”47
Compromise proposals came into Washington from all quarters of the North. Some were resolutions passed at pro-compromise Union meetings, and some were the petitions of committees of industrialists eager to sustain their Southern commercial ties. All politicians were wary of the wrath and fears of their constituents and fervent to preserve the Union. On December 18, 1860, John J. Crittenden of Kentucky introduced the most comprehensive of the compromise initiatives, a series of constitutional amendments that blanketed the range of conciliatory measures. The debate over the Crittenden Compromise and others like it paralyzed Congress during the entire interregnum and secession winter.48
Douglass feared compromise for good reason. Thirty years of antislavery agitation and its meager gains, as well as the very meaning of the Republican Party, were at stake. Attended by delegates from twenty-one states (although none from the Deep South) and sponsored by the Virginia legislature, a peace conference convened in Washington on February 4, 1861. After three weeks of confusion and negotiation, the uninspired gathering reported a compromise proposal nearly identical to that of Crittenden. No compromise measures ever passed the divided Congress; week after week of wrangling gave evidence that most Democrats but only a handful of Republicans were willing to appease the South and extend the life of slavery in order to save the Union. As six more of the cotton states joined South Carolina and bolted the Union by early February, most Republicans across the North had resolved to prevent any conciliation. Most Northern state legislatures also refused to support compromise; only New Jersey formally endorsed the Crittenden plan, which was a set of one-sided concessions to the South.49
Douglass observed the secession crisis with a combination of excitement and dismay. At least until late February he believed the prospect for a major compromise to be real. He simply did not yet trust the will of the Republican Party and its president-elect, Lincoln. Discouraged, he complained that the state of the abolitionist cause was “somewhat gloomy and dark.” Abolitionists had “plied the national heart and conscience with sound doctrine,” but they seemed “as far from accomplishment of their work as during the proslavery mobs of twenty-five years ago.” Plenty of new mobs raged in the present. In January in Rochester, a convention of abolitionists meeting in Corinthian Hall was attacked by a violent crowd. The abolitionists reconvened at the Spring Street AME Zion Church to complete their meeting, out of which developed a series of weekly Sunday lectures organized by Douglass that lasted throughout the secession crisis.50
Uncertain of whom to trust or on whom to turn his anger, Douglass felt an acute sense of powerlessness as the Union dissolved. He feared that secession would become a struggle only over the survival of the Union and not over slavery. “What disturbs, divides, and threatens to bring on civil war . . . and ruin this country,” he pled in February, “but slavery?” Only the “morally blind,” he argued, could fail to see it.51 What Douglass dreaded most was that a great opportunity to strike a lasting blow for black freedom might forever be lost through peaceful reconciliation. So he braced for the worst and anxiously awaited the inauguration of Abraham Lincoln.
By March, Douglass seemed well aware that his fondest hopes were at the mercy of events. He knew the secession crisis was a test of power; whether it resulted in war depended upon the reaction of the incoming Lincoln administration, which to him represented the “one ray of hope amid the darkness of the passing hour and the reign of doubt and distraction.” But by early April Douglass was anything but confident that “coercion” against the South would ever truly come. He could only feel despair. “All talk of putting down treason and rebellion by force, by our demoralized Government and people,” he agonized, “are as impotent and worthless as the words of a drunken woman in a ditch.” He still expected “schemers” to reach a deal.52 And so he imagined a future where abolitionists would have to attack slavery in a separate, independent country, and their work would take revolutionary turns. Then, as of old, he reached for desperate hope in a logic of violence. Faith strained against unpredictable daily events and a volatile politics he could only dimly discern. These were the sentiments of a man observing a revolution, the directions of which he could not control. But then the startling turn of events caused by the bombardment of one island fort in Charleston Harbor changed everything.
By April, in Rochester, lecturing at the Spring Street AME Zion Church, where he had done so nearly every week during the past two months, Douglass spoke for his community: “I have never spent days so restless and anxious. Our mornings and evenings have continually oscillated between the dim light of hope and the gloomy shadow of despair. We have opened our papers, new and damp from the press, tremblingly, lest the first line of the lightning should tell us that our National Capital has fallen into the hands of traitors and murderers.”53 The secession crisis took an enormous emotional toll on Americans of every persuasion. The only thing foggier than war itself can be the path to its frightening, if too often exciting, outbreak. Douglass ached for the event that would relieve the emotional tension and teach the world a new history.
