Abraham Lincoln, Washington, DC, February 5, 1865. Alexander Gardner photographer.
And the dove came in to him in the evening; and, lo, in her mouth was an olive leaf plucked off: so Noah knew that the waters were abated from off the earth.
—GENESIS 8:11
During the final months of the Civil War, Frederick Douglass’s emotions and ideas careened from fear to exhilaration, from hope to despair, and in and out of Old Testament–style tribulation and redemption. In a special address to a black convention in Syracuse in October 1864, Douglass tackled many of the war’s personal and existential meanings. This national gathering, the first such convention to be held in nine years, attracted approximately 150 representatives from eighteen states, including small delegations from Mississippi, Missouri, Florida, Virginia, and North Carolina. The delegates collectively denounced colonization and explicitly demanded “equality before the law.”1
Possibly no previous convention had drawn a list of African American luminaries of such diverse backgrounds and talents. Virtually every major black religious, political, literary, or community leader attended. For nearly four days, all manner of rivalries were largely checked at the door while such men as Henry Highland Garnet, William Wells Brown, George T. Downing, John Mercer Langston, Jermain Loguen, and others matched wits over the great issues of the war: equality in the army for black soldiers; the dire necessity of complete abolition as the war’s aim; equal civil and political rights in the aftermath of emancipation. These men were both former slaves and freeborn; some were longtime “friends” of Douglass’s, and others had already spent much energy as his rival, a trend that would only increase in the postwar era. Douglass’s closest black comrade, James McCune Smith, ill with the beginnings of congestive heart failure, did not join the fifty-three-member New York delegation.2
The delegates elected Douglass as their president; he was ushered with “great applause” to the stage by the younger, Oberlin-educated Langston. Douglass swiftly announced in his sonorous voice that “the cause which we come here to promote is sacred.” He envisioned the “wide, wide world” watching them as they promoted no less than the “freedom, progress, elevation, and perfect enfranchisement of the entire colored people.” On the following mornings or evenings the convention would begin with prayers by the Reverend Garnet or others, and strikingly, with song, including “John Brown’s Body,” “Blow Ye the Trumpet, Blow,” and on the final day, Julia Ward Howe’s recently composed “Battle Hymn of the Republic.” How moving it must have been to hear full-throated renditions of such paeans to the emancipationist vision of the war and of the old Exodus story. At least one woman, Edmonia Highgate of Syracuse, addressed the convention, introduced by Douglass. The minutes do not record her speech, except to say that Highgate urged the men to steadfastness in the cause until the “glorious day of jubilee shall come.” Most poignant of all, at the afternoon session of the second day, Garnet took the lead in unfurling across the platform the battle flag of the First Louisiana Colored Troops, a unit that had achieved fame for its bravery at the battle of Port Hudson in July 1863.3
Delivered on the final day of the convention, Douglass’s speech was both celebration and warning. Since the Republicans did not want him out on the stump campaigning, he delivered his own political accounting to his fellow African Americans on this election eve. He addressed the question of history itself, bounding forward it seemed, to illuminate new barriers and obstacles to progress. In eloquence tinged with anger and anxiety, Douglass appealed to his own people, but especially to the generic “you” of white Northerners about to go to the polls. Nations could “learn righteousness” from supreme crises, he argued, and this was a moment when “mourning mingles everywhere with the national shout of victory.” Douglass asserted that the opportunity to crush slavery, throw back racism, and reinvent the American republic around principles of racial equality “may not come again in a century.”4
Everything was at stake in defeating the Democrats and finishing the war. Douglass provided a litany of the horrors that would result if the Democrats, allied with Confederates, managed a negotiated peace settlement, resulting in the reestablishment of “the white man’s country,” and the obliteration of “all the lessons taught by these four years of fire and sword.” Douglass portrayed the Democrats as the enemies of mankind, and of history itself. They were the “fiendish . . . hellhounds” ready to pounce on black people and their allies at their first grasp of power. They had cleverly cultivated the political landscape with what the next century would call Orwellian language. Avoiding the words slavery or slaves or slaveholders, Douglass maintained, Democratic doublespeak sought the “perpetuation” of slavery in their platform under the guise of such “verbiage” as private rights or the basis of Federal Union or the Constitution.5
Douglass took up the meaning of friends and enemies, claiming to be as worried about the Republicans’ hostility to black voting rights as to the Democrats’ darkest aims. “It is . . . not the malignity of enemies alone we have to fear,” he announced, “but the deflection from the straight line of principle by those who are known throughout the world as our special friends.” Douglass worried about possible peace plans that might get consummated before slavery legally ended. As though directly addressing Congress and a reelected President Lincoln, he employed a moving refrain four times in a single paragraph calling for the Thirteenth Amendment: “We implore you to abolish slavery,” he sang out over and over. Only then, he believed, would slavery’s destruction and the “national welfare” achieve “everlasting foundations.”6
Then Douglass signaled what would be for him a primary argument throughout the postwar era—he demanded in the classic terms of political liberalism the franchise as the greatest of all rights. Arguing from natural-rights moral doctrine, Douglass contended that in a republic all elements of liberty—“personal freedom; the right to testify in courts of law; the right to own, buy and sell real estate; the right to sue and be sued”—depended for protection on suffrage. The vote, said Douglass, was the “keystone to the arch of human liberty.” But he also accurately anticipated that the black male vote would bring great practical value to Republicans in the postwar era. The only guarantee about a postemancipation order in the South, he said, was the “sullen hatred towards the National Government” and the freedmen on the part of ex-Confederates. Theirs would be a “sacred animosity” toward their conquerors, black and white. “We may conquer Southern armies,” proclaimed Douglass, “but it is another thing to conquer Southern hate.” The only weapon available was the votes of 4 million new “friends.”7 With these astute strokes of war propaganda and moral philosophy, Douglass awaited the election results.
• • •
The convention delegates in Syracuse had good reason for anxiety over the presidential election of 1864. They had keenly observed events for months, as the Thirteenth Amendment abolishing slavery, supported by Lincoln, had passed in the Senate but failed of the two-thirds majority in the House of Representatives. With the war in terrible military stalemate in Virginia and Georgia, Lincoln and his administration fell into turmoil over its own emancipation policy. “Peace Democrats” relentlessly attacked Lincoln and emancipation as the obstacles to ending the bloodshed. His reelection in danger, the president authorized an ill-advised, informal peace mission to meet with Confederate representatives. But the effort backfired on Lincoln. He allowed the nettlesome Horace Greeley to go to Niagara Falls, Canada, in July and meet with what turned out to be bogus Confederate representatives. Lincoln crafted a brief letter addressed infamously “To Whom It May Concern,” declaring that “any proposition” for peace would be received from Confederates as long as it included reunion of the states and the “abandonment of slavery.” The Niagara letter was a public-relations disaster. Confederate sympathizers in the North (known to their foes as Copperheads) and the Democratic Party newspapers seized on this news and pilloried Lincoln as the bloodthirsty war maker standing in the way of peace in order to free slaves. The Cincinnati Enquirer declared Lincoln’s clandestine actions “a finality, which . . . will preclude any conference for a settlement. Every soldier . . . that is killed, will lose his life not for the Union, the Stars and Stripes, but for the Negro.”8 From here, the Democratic campaign of 1864 descended into ever-more-savage racism, driving many Republicans into obfuscation on the emancipation amendment.
From where Douglass and other black leaders sat, the Republicans only added fuel to the Democrats’ racist fires. No less than Secretary of State William Seward and Secretary of the Interior John Usher suddenly denied that emancipation would be a condition of reunion if Lincoln was reelected. They asserted, confusingly, that abolition would be left “to the arbitrament of the courts of law.” Douglass called out Seward by name and quoted him at length in the Syracuse speech. The secretary’s “studied words” at this crucial time could only mean that the federal government was about to “not only . . . make peace with the Rebels, but to make peace with slavery.” Like a prophet in despair, Douglass felt betrayed, thrown back into 1861–62 and onto his apocalyptic imagination. The “surest . . . ground of hope” now, he said, was in the “madness” of the Confederates to continue their war until “destitute . . . and . . . divested of their slaves.”9 This was hardly the prescription for the “abolition war” in which he had placed confidence in 1863. But betting on his enemy’s actions had become an old habit.
Most dismaying of all was the Democrats’ racist rampage in using the label of “miscegenation” on Lincoln and the Republicans. The very term was first employed in early 1864 in a pamphlet, Miscegenation: The Theory of the Blending of the Races, written by two reporters, David Croly and George Wakeman (although published anonymously), at the Democratic New York World. The pernicious pamphlet purported to be crafted by Republicans touting the values of interbreeding blacks and whites to improve both. Most people detected the hoax, but the idea exploded as a political weapon more lethal than any impending constitutional amendment. Congressmen picked up the term and used it to attack Republican measures such as early efforts to establish the Freedmen’s Bureau. Demonstrating white men’s fears about racial purity as well as gender disorder, the tactic also exposed the depth of white supremacy abolitionists confronted.10
Democrats labeled Lincoln “Abraham Africanus I” and the “original ourangoutang,” suggesting he had African ancestors. Democratic campaign handbills, lithographs, and songs about race mixing as the “Republican solution” for the war flooded the North. “All the painful woes that wreck our lovely land,” moaned one ditty, “Are due the Abolitionists, the Miscegenation Band.” A widely distributed print from the New York World showed the scurrilous caricature of “The Miscegenation Ball,” a fake dance held at the “Central Lincoln Club” for “colored belles” and white Republican men pining with “love sick glances” for the “octoroons.”11 Frightening and disheartening to African Americans, this kind of race-baiting politics knew no bounds; at the polls, however, it did not work with enough white voters, especially after Union military successes in Georgia, the Shenandoah Valley, and Mobile Bay turned the tide in Lincoln’s favor.
In this extraordinary wartime election, in which nineteen states allowed soldiers to vote at the front, the incumbent president carried the popular vote by 2,206,938 to McClellan’s 1,803,787. In the electoral college Lincoln won 212–21. Despite fears that a good deal of the Union army might still be loyal to one of its former generals, Lincoln carried a stunning 78 percent of the soldier vote. Those thousands of men in blue who stood at ballot boxes in Virginia, Georgia, Tennessee, or Mississippi knew they were casting their vote for emancipation as well as saving the Union. Few black soldiers could vote in their states, but that did not stop their own officers at the front from letting them express themselves. Christian Fleetwood, a free black man from Baltimore and twenty-four-year-old noncommissioned sergeant major in the Fourth US Colored Troops, left this simple line in his diary: “Nov. 8, 1864—polled the regiment. 300 majority for Lincoln.” Fleetwood, who could not yet vote in Maryland, earned the Congressional Medal of Honor for extraordinary heroism at the Battle of Chaffin’s Farm, near Petersburg, Virginia, September 29, 1864.12
On Election Day, November 8, Douglass voted in Rochester. A local citizen later reminisced about working at the poll and tallying the famous orator’s ballot for Lincoln. That night the two men were walking back into downtown Rochester to follow the nationwide returns at the telegraph office. Four drunken white men blocked the street and challenged Douglass by shouting, “Nigger.” According to this witness, “Douglass stepped right out in front of them” and with fists raised challenged them in return. “Come on I am ready to settle this thing with you right here and now.” The drunken cowards “slunk out of the way and into the darkness,” wrote the former poll worker. He asked Douglass if he was hurt, to which the former editor replied, “Oh, no, I am not hurt in the least; the boys were probably not pleased with the news they had heard and wanted to give vent to their disappointment.” That night, asserted this witness, Douglass owned a “physical victory as well as a great political triumph.”13 The tortured election season of fear and racism had ended in relief and reasons to believe the war had made a profound turn toward Union and abolitionist victory.
On the Sunday after the election a celebration took place at Spring Street AME in Rochester. Douglass took to the pulpit to praise the reelection of Lincoln and to announce that he was about to embark on a special journey to Baltimore, his first-ever public return to the city where he had escaped from slavery. In the comfort of this hometown congregation, he drew on metaphors from Genesis and Noah’s Ark. The “waters of the flood were retiring,” he rejoiced, and he saw a “sign that the billows of slavery are rolling back to leave the land blooming again.” In the ancient story, Noah had sent a dove flying out the window of the ark to determine if the waters of the great flood had receded; the bird returned the first time with an “olive leaf” in its bill. The second time the dove did not return, and Noah “removed the covering of the ark and looked, and behold, the face of the ground was dry.” We cannot know for certain how Douglass prepared for such speeches or sermons, but that he consulted the first book of his Old Testament to grapple with the meaning of the Republican victory and the new prospects for emancipation is profoundly telling. He was not merely trying to connect with his black church audience; he reached, as he had so many times before, for ancient wisdom and metaphor, for a sense of sacred transformation amid the profane violence of war and the sordid practices of politics. He mixed the prophetic voices of the Hebrew prophets with his own. Something higher than the human capacity for folly to thwart good had just occurred. The election, said Douglass, had been “one to determine . . . life or death to the nation.” It had wrought “changes . . . vast and wonderful.” He linked the afflicted present to the oldest rebirth story in his culture.14
Douglass believed the fate of black folk in America now depended on a new order of power, law, and rights that would rise from the war. He told the packed pews of Spring Street AME that he discerned signs in the election, a “redeemed and purified nation,” not unlike Noah, had seen green land, the world reviving anew. He offered faith that the country, despite its worst elements, could now save “republican government,” pass the constitutional amendment, and “not return the sword to the scabbard” until the Confederacy and slavery were destroyed. So sanguine was Douglass that he even claimed victory over “all the negro minstrels, all the low clowns of the circus . . . all the rowdies of the street” who had fought so hard “in favor of the vile slaveholding traitors.”15 When he challenged those four thugs on the street in Rochester on election night, Douglass was the political analyst ready to fight with all the weapons he possessed—words, fists, and votes.
By November 1 the state of Maryland had adopted a new “free Constitution,” abolishing slavery in a referendum by the narrow margin of 30,174 to 29,799. Douglass made his dramatic return to Baltimore on the sixteenth, and the next day, he addressed a primarily black standing-room-only gathering at the Bethel AME Church in Fell’s Point, the place where he may have met Anna Murray. Reporters covering the event deemed Douglass the “illustrious exile.” A “perfect torrent of rapturous applause” echoed in the church as Douglass strode down the main aisle arm in arm with his older sister, Eliza Bailey Mitchell. Eliza was fifty-two years old and had traveled sixty miles from Talbot County for the reunion with her famous brother. They had not seen each other since 1836, when Fred Bailey had last departed from the Eastern Shore. Eliza had been free since 1844, when after years of difficult labor, she and her husband, Peter Mitchell, managed to purchase her liberty from the Aulds. She had never learned to read or write, but had nonetheless followed keenly her brother’s career and, in 1856, named one of her daughters Mary Douglass Mitchell. Variations on this reunion of siblings, free and former slaves, occurred all over the South in the coming year; indeed Douglass experienced more of them himself. The contrasts at the church that day were both happy and achingly poignant. Eliza had raised nine children, and all labored in various menial jobs to live, while Frederick had become a citizen of the world conquering lecture halls from Boston and New York to London and Edinburgh.16
The press reported that Douglass spoke for three hours that night, from a pulpit surrounded by American flags. He wished to rise above “egotism” for this homecoming, but that was not possible: “The fact that I am where I am, is really the subject, and the whole subject . . . for this evening.” As in Rochester a few days earlier, he harkened to Noah and Genesis. This time he was himself the “sign” on the dark clouds; he embodied Noah’s dove from the ark. “The return of the dove to the ark, with a leaf,” declared Douglass, “was no surer sign that the flood had subsided from the mountains of the east, than my coming among you is a sign that the bitter waters of slavery have subsided from the majestic hills, and fertile valleys of Maryland.”17
Douglass reminisced about each preacher he had heard in that church in the 1830s, about fighting with the “town boys” on the docks, and especially how it was in Baltimore where he first became a “thoughtful boy” cultivating a “faculty of the mind.” He declared himself a proud member of the “children of Maryland.” All of his kinfolk, black and white, were rooted in the soil and blood of Maryland. Douglass described a family romance with the state and region, reversing metaphors he had prominently used in his Narrative to represent the hopelessness of his bondage. “Then I left [his escape in 1838], shaking the dust from my feet,” he rhapsodized, “as leaving a doomed city, now I return to greet with an affectionate kiss, the humblest pebble from the shores of your glorious Chesapeake.” Freedom could change everything, especially in a tear-filled church of memory where he had hatched his “Baltimore dreams.” It was as if he announced that one of the “swift-winged angels,” the sailing ships of the Bay on which he had yearned to fly while imprisoned by Covey, had brought the “exiled son” home.18
Douglass took the Baltimore speech out with a brilliant political analysis of the right of “self-ownership,” the absurdity of “property in man,” and of America’s dilemma over race. “Liberty is logical, as well as slavery,” he proclaimed; “the one demands the restoration of all rights, as sternly as the other demands the destruction of all rights.” Above all others the right to vote was the “solid rock” on which to build the foundation of a new American state.19 He ended by calling whites and blacks to exercise a new psychological logic, to look into their hearts and minds to cross the racial divide of centuries.
Douglass addressed white people directly. What are you afraid of? he asked. He reminded them that in the race of “civilization” and history, their “Anglo-Saxon branch” possessed all the advantages. “Knowledge is power, and you have knowledge: Wealth is influence, and you have wealth. Majorities rule under our form of government, and you are the majority.” In phrasing and arguments so modern, that might fit any twenty-first-century discussion of racism and privilege, Douglass demanded to know why thinking white people so feared competition with their fellow black humans. Too many whites, he said, were “haunted with the idea, that to invest the colored race with equal rights is dangerous to the rights of white men.” Such a “mischievous heresy” had for far too long paralyzed history. In no uncertain terms Douglass concluded, “I deny that the black man’s degradation is essential to the white man’s elevation.” To believe otherwise, was to “pay a sorry compliment to the white race.”20
Then Douglass turned to his fellow blacks and delivered a stern prescription of hard work and self-reliance, one that would ride in tandem with his political liberalism throughout Reconstruction and beyond. The joyous and tearful homecoming ended with the plea to his people not to misinterpret freedom as release from labor. “You must be industrious,” he lectured his fellow former slaves, as he also urged those from the lower, rural counties of Maryland to “stick to their agricultural pursuits.” Nothing ambiguous or metaphorical here. “I believe $150 in the country is better than $400 in the city. . . . All men are equal naturally, but not practically.” He urged blacks to save money, “buy land,” “educate their children,” and forge a new generation “capable of thinking as well as digging.” He promised them that the “more intelligent and refined” they became, the more white people will “respect you.”21 These were complex dreams even for a jubilee meeting. Just where and how Douglass himself fit on this spectrum of striving he soon had to decide.
Douglass did not yet understand just how grim the prospects were for such self-help dictates in the daily lives of freedmen in places such as the Eastern Shore. His son Lewis visited Eliza Mitchell’s struggling family in June 1865. The war was over, blacks were free, but Lewis called St. Michaels “one of the worst places in the South.” No matter how hard they worked, Lewis observed Eastern Shore blacks stymied economically at every turn. “The white people will do everything they can,” he wrote to his father, “to keep the blacks from buying land. Large tracts of woods that the whites will neither use nor sell to the blacks lie idle and wasting.” Wages were pitifully meager for black farmhands, and even those who worked in “oystering” could not use their savings to buy land. In the neighborhood in which his father had grown up, Lewis saw the social results of the protection of white status the elder Douglass had warned about in Baltimore.22
In all, over the next twelve days, Douglass gave some six lectures at five different black and white churches in Baltimore and Washington, DC, including a version of his “Mission of the War” address. But apart from all the public oratory, and revealing his private desire to connect with his former owners, he called on Sophia Auld, the former mistress who had taught him his first letters and who now lived on Ann Street. But she refused to see him; at the door Douglass was rejected by Benjamin Auld, Sophia’s son and younger brother of Tommy, for whom Fred Bailey had originally been sent to Baltimore as the slave companion. Benjamin, now a Baltimore policeman, had read Douglass’s autobiography and let him know in no uncertain terms that his family resented the author’s treatment of them in the portrayal of his slave youth. In Bondage and Freedom, in the public “Letter to My Old Master,” and in many early speeches in Britain and America, Douglass had indeed assailed the Aulds as quintessential models of evil slaveholders. He would have to wait many years for the genuine reconciliations he sought with the Aulds and their descendants.23
• • •
For Douglass, his family, and his closest friends, the final months of the Civil War provided days of rejoicing and days of mourning. For Douglass, constantly on the road lecturing, these months were frenzied and exhausting. After his grueling tour to Maryland in November, he was speaking in Portland, Maine, to benefit a soldiers’ home by December 16. By January 2, 1865, he was one of many speakers—including Garrison and William Wells Brown—at the second annual celebration of the Emancipation Proclamation in Tremont Temple in Boston. Two sessions occurred, one morning and one evening; Douglass and Garrison did not have to share a platform. During an especially brutal Northern winter, in January and February, the Rochester orator held forth at all kinds of “jubilee” meetings and benefits from Troy and Albany, New York, to Boston, to Wilmington, Delaware, and stops in between in Hoboken, New Jersey, New York City, Philadelphia, and again in Baltimore. In Douglass’s standard stump performance that winter he exulted in the “events” that now seemed to happen with such “velocity” as to “dazzle us.” The Proclamation was the “mountain rock amid the dashing waves of a troubled ocean.” Lincoln’s reelection and black soldiers in the field were causes for jubilation. But nothing was secure or lasting until black men attained the right to vote. Douglass warned that the freedpeople must not be “citizens in war and aliens in peace.”24 Real victory was far from won.
In Rochester, Anna, as always, kept the home fires burning in these winters as her husband rode the rails up and down the country. Her children all now grown and struggling to be independent, Anna had few companions other than whoever in the Spring Street church may have looked in on her. Rosetta and her new baby were nearby, and no doubt Anna was indispensable to the young mother. The lonely “reserve” and “acrid” personality that Rosetta recalled about her mother only deepened in these winters, despite all the hopeful political and war news. Rosetta admiringly said her mother “strived to live a Christian life instead of talking it.” But by 1865, Anna must have missed the older family “custom,” as her daughter recalled it, “to read a chapter in the Bible around the table, each reading a verse in turn until the chapter was completed.”25 Douglass himself, no doubt, chose those passages in the children’s youth, giving Anna, as listener, her own personalized Bible study.
Frederick Jr. never served as a combat soldier, but remained proud throughout his life of having helped recruit especially members of the Fifty-Fifth Massachusetts black regiment. He would not marry until 1870 and lived only to be fifty-one, dying in 1892. He must have taken hard the news in December of the bloody Battle of Honey Hill, on Hilton Head, South Carolina, where the Fifty-Fifth regiment lost nearly one hundred men. Charles and Frederick Jr., as the youngest Douglass sons, wrote frequently to each other in that last year of the war. Charles worked at the freedmen’s hospital in Washington, DC, but as the war wound down, he felt adrift, financially stunted, even desperate to find new employment. He wrote to his father in February 1865 of his frustrations, thinking of relocating at war’s end to Nashville or Savannah, where he had heard rumors of business opportunities. “I mean to have some money,” Charles wrote, “and I want to go off . . . on my own hook as every young man does. I see nothing ahead for me unless I have money.” He still asked for his father’s “consent,” but insisted on a “bold start.” Such a sentiment reflected a long pattern of Charles’s desperation for the elder Douglass’s approval. “If I fail I will not return home a beggar,” he said. “I will stay and strive until I am worth something. I am in earnest and mean to go ahead.”26 To the father who preached a stern self-reliance to gatherings of black former slaves, these words must have been painful to read from his youngest boy, who had just turned twenty. To the son the father’s fame and achievement was one part inspiration and one part albatross.
Meanwhile, Lewis Douglass, recovering from his war wounds in late 1864 and early 1865, kept up his long, frustrating courtship of Amelia Loguen (they did not finally marry until 1869). He wrote to Amelia of his desire to be “more self-reliant, more independent.” He promised to labor at “making life,” and especially at getting “money, for without that we would be like a ship without a helm, soon to go wreck on the rock of poverty.” In September 1864, Lewis wished he had already proposed marriage to Amelia; but he could only conclude that the war had left him “so unsettled,” without any clear “identity.” Feeling too old to go back and live under his mother’s roof, he declared, “I do not know where my home is.” Amelia apparently stopped responding. By March 1865, Lewis wrote of the many weeks of “anxiety” over her silence. “What’s de matter,” he scrawled in dialect. He described terrible spring floods in Rochester damaging “stone and brick buildings,” and the Main Street bridge “knocked and bruised fearfully,” as though they symbolized his own temperament. He did seem gleeful at least that the Confederacy was collapsing, “their vision of an empire founded on the unpaid toil of black millions fading away from their longing sight.”27 Lewis could craft prose almost like his father; he simply was not having luck with love or with making a living. His model for achievement, much less greatness, was a mountain too high.
The elder Douglass, however, managed a complicated romantic and emotional life. Ottilie Assing remained very much in love with Douglass through the end of the turbulent war years and beyond. Their relationship greatly frustrated her at times, and at other times was richly fulfilling. Exactly what it meant to him is not clear. He needed Ottilie for intellectual stimulation, emotional support, and perhaps physical intimacy; he continued to cultivate their long-term relationship by stopping at her boardinghouse in Hoboken on his travels whenever he could, often for only one day and sometimes for as long as a week. Assing introduced Douglass to her circle of Hoboken German émigrés, some of whom became his close friends, especially Sylvester Rosa Koehler, a much younger curator and art historian who took a deep interest in the American abolitionist. Astonishingly, Assing spent as many as three to four months in Rochester during the summers, living upstairs in the Douglass home, especially after 1865. How she and Mrs. Douglass coexisted in Anna’s house endures as an intriguing mystery, although by the frenzied war years and their aftermath, short- and long-term guests, especially women, were hardly a new thing at the Douglass homestead.28
Much of what we know about Assing and of her connection with Douglass comes from Ottilie’s letters to her sister, Ludmilla, who lived in Italy. Particularly as the war ended, and Douglass searched for a new career, Assing dreamed and schemed assiduously from 1865 into the early 1870s to convince her special companion to join her on a long-term, if not permanent, journey to Europe. He probably never seriously considered it, although he appears to have listened. A common refrain in Ottilie’s letters was that she stood “ready and willing” to travel back to Europe, “but could not convince Douglass and could not make up my mind to go by myself and to, on top of things, rob him of the only time of year [summer] that he looks forward to with joy and anticipation.” When in Rochester, Ottilie often appeared contentedly at home “on the green marvel island,” the homestead surrounded by a large garden and orchard with well-kept walking paths. She constantly wrote of her pleasure in introducing books to Douglass and reading them with him, from Dickens to German and French works. In August 1868, a forty-nine-year-old Ottilie wrote from the hill on South Avenue that she was so “completely content with the kind of garden life I am living here that I have no desire for anything else.” If the domestic situation was awkward or disappointing, which she would later say in embittered language, the “garden” itself had “a world to offer. . . . It constitutes a great pleasure for me to collect fruit from under the trees every morning, which given the great size of the garden as well as the number of fruit trees can involve a rather long journey.” She seems to have thrilled to the sheer “activity . . . the different views, the lighting and the constellation of clouds.” Her closest companion was Fox, her “civilized and most faithful cat.”29
Assing may have expunged loneliness at the same time she lived it in a different way while in Rochester. Her secret garden was no secret at all to anyone looking. Ottilie never wrote of Douglass taking long strolls with her in the garden paths. That garden and orchard had been the product of Anna’s labor, imagination, and desire. But this poetic, deeply literary woman somehow established for a time her own place near, if not truly with, Douglass, and somehow in the middle of Anna’s world. Assing never mentioned whether she peeled any of the pears she picked to help prepare a meal for all the mouths that were fed from the Douglass kitchen, where Anna ruled.
Assing remained a frequent, astute commentator on the war, emancipation, and many other issues in its aftermath as long as Morgenblatt maintained publication. She wrote at length and with acuity about the election of 1864. The months of the campaign brought a “fever pitch” and passed with “brooding anxiety.” Echoing Douglass’s speeches, she thought the election would determine the “fate . . . of the entire country.” She effectively exposed some of the “sophistries” of Democrats and Copperheads, but held little enthusiasm for Lincoln, whom she considered a political creature without a genuine antislavery core. She preferred the alternative candidacy of the more radical Frémont, but as a political analyst, she delivered an astute explanation of his failure, especially in the wake of Union military successes. Assing voraciously read newspapers and walked in the circles of radical German émigrés such as Carl Schurz. Never lacking for confidence in her own judgments, she drew class and ethnic lines indelibly across American politics. Chief among supporters of the Copperheads, peace Democrats were the “crude, brutal, ignorant” Irish, “given to drink and full of hatred for the Negro.” Leading the way for the enlightened Republicans were “radical, educated Germans,” immigrants such as herself and her Hoboken circle, who brought the “German mind” to the contest in their adopted country. Assing told a poignant story of attending an election-eve speech by Schurz at the Cooper Institute in New York, crowds spilling into the hallways. The stage was decorated with “red, white, and blue” flags, and for a lectern, “they had piled up cannonballs” from which the orator delivered a brilliant endorsement of Lincoln’s reelection.30 Assing appreciated political symbolism as long as it did not embrace religion.
Although Assing continually misapprehended Lincoln, her interpretation of the election results was perceptive. Northerners had voted for “the complete suppression of the rebellion” and for emancipation. She saw the importance of the soldier vote, and by the beginning of 1865, much as Douglass had many times said, she put as much faith in the “suicidal blindness and rigidity” of Confederate leadership, insisting on their “independence,” as in the “firmness” of the Lincoln administration. Assing had become not only an American citizen, but a talented political commentator on the “revolution” in her new country.31 Whether Douglass read her columns is unknown. But their encounters provided crucial occasions for the flow of ideas from which both of them benefited.
She was “intoxicated with joy,” she reported on February 3, 1865, “about the adoption of the constitutional amendment in Congress” abolishing slavery. Working especially hard on a list of retiring Democrats and relying on eight others who absented themselves from the chamber, the Lincoln administration and Republican House leadership managed a decisive roll call of 119–56 in favor of passage of the enactment; they had only two votes to spare to rally the required two-thirds. Some states immediately ratified the Thirteenth Amendment, but full ratification by three-fourths of the states would not come until December 1865. There had never been a legislative moment quite like this when the simple but resounding language entered law: “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime, whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.” Emotionally, Assing almost choked on her astonishment: “Reality, at times, does go beyond anything the powers of imagination can draw up.”32
Douglass lectured in Boston on January 27 and Troy, New York, on February 1. Hence, he could not be in Washington on January 31 to witness the unprecedented jubilation that engulfed the congressional chamber the moment the amendment was adopted. Republican Congressmen wept and shouted like revelers; they knew they had done something special, a historic act for the ages. Many blacks attended the session, sitting and standing in the galleries above with electric anticipation. Among them was Charles Douglass. Shortly afterward, he wrote to his father, “I wish that you could have been here the day that the constitutional amendment was passed forever abolishing slavery in the United States, such rejoicing I never before witnessed, cannons firing, people hugging and shaking hands, white people I mean, flags flying all over the city.” Charles would never forget that day, nor did his father ever forget his son’s depiction of it: “I tell you things are progressing finely, and if they will only give us the elective franchise and shoulder straps (which is only simple justice) that will be all I ask. . . . It is a big thing for me to see all this.”33
• • •
That tender son-to-father letter echoed some of the themes the elder Douglass proffered now out on the lecture circuit. From January to May 1865, throughout the Northeast and mid-Atlantic states, from Massachusetts to Delaware and Maryland, Douglass vehemently demanded the right to vote for black men guaranteed at the federal level. He warned of the poverty and lack of education of the liberated freedpeople as well as the hostility and potential violence to come from the white South in the wake of their defeat. He also articulated an evolving vision of Reconstruction. Everywhere he appeared, Douglass celebrated victory as well as delivered warnings of the unprecedented struggles ahead. To two thousand people in Cooper Institute in New York he announced that they were “living at a glorious moment” in the nation’s history. But the Republican Party had to learn now to be as “logical” as the Democratic Party, by which he meant that antislavery and pro-black-rights efforts had to overcome decades of proslavery demands in law and morality.34
At every stop Douglass preached the moral value and the practical meaning of the right to vote. He called the prospect of the vote his “one idea.” Everything else—blacks’ demonstrated ability to work, to fight, to serve faithfully in the face of all manner of racism—depended on “the immediate, unconditional, and universal enfranchisement of the black man.” The vote had been earned in blood, it embodied citizenship, and it would be the freedpeople’s protector against the “treason” and “deadly hate” of the defeated Confederates. In a world where African Americans had never been taken seriously as a voting bloc, the franchise would lift the “stigma of inferiority” from their heads.35
Here was Douglass’s political liberalism at its most hopeful. But he almost never recited his litany of reasons for the franchise without trotting out his drunken Irishman joke, especially among New England Yankees. He could easily garner laughter and applause, as he did in Boston on January 26, with “If we know enough to be hung, we know enough to vote. If the negro knows enough to pay taxes . . . he knows enough to vote. . . . If he knows enough to shoulder a musket and fight for the flag . . . he knows enough to vote. If he knows as much when he is sober as an Irishman knows when drunk, he knows enough to vote.” He was eager to counter the Uncle Tom image of the quiescent black man, the “perfect lamb” exuding Christian piety but not standing up, demanding and fighting, while exploiting the “picture of the Irishman, drunk and good humored.” Moreover, he asserted African Americans’ claims to “a state of civilization” by contrasting them with “the Indians,” who may “die out.” “The Indian, to be sure,” said Douglass, “is a stout man; he is proud and dignified; he is too stiff to bend, and breaks. He sees the plowshare of civilization casting up the bones of his venerated fathers, and he retires from the lakes to the mountains. . . . He will not even imitate your wearing apparel, but clings to his blanket, lives in hollow trees, and finally, dies.”36
To these brutal racial images, Douglass compared “the negro,” who “likes to be in the midst of civilization,” in the “city . . . where he can hear the finest music, and where he can see all that is going on in the world.” A black man, declared Douglass with some obvious personal reference, “wears a coat after the latest European pattern. . . . If you see him go down town and not see his face, you would think that it was a [white] man going along. They are not going to die out.”37 Such egregious racial characterizations fit nineteenth-century popular attitudes as much as they clang painfully on our ears today. But for a man who spent so much of his life trying to thwart America’s endemic racism, it is troubling to observe his use of racial and ethnic stereotypes to exalt the capacities and claims of his own people. So desperate was America’s scramble for rights and resources among its marginalized peoples that even Douglass employed ugly language for comparative advantage.
In the spring of 1865, however, Douglass tended to end his speeches on a high scriptural note, the parable of Lazarus and the rich man in Luke 16. Douglass believed that with emancipation and the defeat of Southern slaveholders, Americans witnessed the “fulfillment” of the tale of “a certain poor man who laid at the gate of a rich man.” In the ancient story that has inspired a black spiritual and a famous modern folk song (“Rock My Soul in the Bosom of Abraham”), a rich man “was clothed in purple and fine linen, and fared sumptuously every day.” A poor beggar named Lazarus, “full of sores” from leprosy, lay at the rich man’s gate, “desiring to be fed crumbs which fell from the rich man’s table.” Dogs lick the poor man’s wounds. Both men die; the beggar is “carried by the angels into Abraham’s bosom,” while the rich man is buried and descends into hell. As he begins to burn, the tormented rich man sees Lazarus “afar off” resting in the comfort and security of Abraham’s embrace. He cries out, “Father Abraham, have mercy upon me, and send Lazarus that he may dip the tip of his finger in water, and cool my tongue.” As the rich man is slowly engulfed in flames, Abraham (God) answers that the tables have turned and it is too late; he scolds the rich man for never listening to “Moses and the prophets.”38
Douglass brilliantly employed the parable, and his auditors seemed to love it. “Everybody is calling for Lazarus now at the North and the South,” he announced. “We all know who the rich man is in this country, and who the poor man is, or has been.” “The slaves” were the “Lazaruses of the South, lying at the rich slaveholder’s gates; but it has come to pass,” said Douglass in his best King James paraphrases, “that the poor man and the rich man are dead, for both have been in a dying condition for some time.” Eliciting great laughter and applause from a New York audience in January, he concluded that the “poor man is said to be very near in Abraham’s bosom. And the rich man is crying out, ‘Father Abraham, send Lazarus.’ ” By April in Boston, Douglass confidently applied the story to Lincoln and the end of the war. Richmond had just fallen, the haughty slaveholding Confederates were in flight, those “arrayed in purple . . . in silk and satin,” with “breast sparkling with diamonds,” were defeated and pleading to have their Lazaruses back. “Send Lazarus back,” cried the rump of Jefferson Davis’s revolution and Robert E. Lee’s army. Douglass provided the new answers: “But Father Abraham says, ‘If they hear not Grant nor Sherman, neither will they be persuaded though I send Lazarus unto them.’ ” With an arm gesture to the sky, Douglass shouted the transformation: “I say we are way up yonder now, no mistake!” With his audience shouting approval and in “great merriment,” Douglass had recrafted a piece of Scripture to fit the moment of impending victory—for the federal Union and for black freedom.39 Just how much the mortal Father Abraham’s bosom (the United States) could hold and comfort the freedpeople as they came back to life was to be determined. And very soon that mortal Abraham was gone.
• • •
Eager for a place at the center of American politics, especially among Republicans, as well as yearning to see, feel, and shape historic events, Douglass traveled to Washington, DC, in early March for Lincoln’s second inauguration. Douglass arrived a couple of days earlier than the Saturday, March 4, ceremony, on a crowded train at the B&O depot, where he listened to a band playing “The Battle Cry of Freedom.” The city was a rain-soaked mess, many streets mere troughs of mud. Every hotel was jammed to capacity, with cots assembled in hallways for the throngs of visitors. Although the end of the war was in sight, Washington was anything but a festive national capital. Almost every available building had become a hospital for the wounded and dying soldiers of the Union armies—some merely large makeshift sheds, others in churches and armories, while still others were government buildings such as the Patent Office, and the Capitol itself. Amputees hobbling on crutches and standing on corners with empty shirtsleeves could be spotted everywhere. By spring 1865 nearly forty thousand liberated slaves had migrated into Washington, some living in freedmen’s villages and others always in search of housing and work. Well over a thousand visible Confederate deserters had also swelled the ranks of the military and civilian homeless by March, causing no shortage of fear about violence and disorder.40 Lazarus, it turns out, had come to Washington and was lying at the gates.
Douglass remembered the scene in dramatic, novelistic language. He felt “danger” everywhere, he said, and “murder in the air.” The “rebellion” of the Confederacy, though almost spent, “had reached the verge of madness,” and its vengeful agents lurked in the District’s muddy alleys. The day before the inaugural, Douglass took tea at the home of chief justice of the Supreme Court, Salmon Chase. The abolitionist wrote about the visit, and much else, as a series of steps in his own rising status. Chase had known Douglass from “early antislavery days,” but having the black leader for tea with “dignity and grandeur” at his own table was in the guest’s view a public tribute. Douglass remembered fondly assisting Chase’s daughter, Kate, as she helped her father try on his new robe for the inauguration.41 The former slave surely felt like an insider in such private settings that he could justifiably make into racial triumphs.
Douglass observed the parade on March 4, accompanied by Mrs. Thomas J. Dorsey, the former Louise Tobias and wife of a successful Philadelphia caterer, real estate entrepreneur, and former slave. Douglass had known the Dorseys a long time as family friends; his daughter Rosetta had once boarded with them in Philadelphia. He did not say why Mrs. Dorsey was his companion on such a special day; perhaps her status as part of the Philadelphia black elite helped him secure introductions and housing in Washington. As many as thirty thousand gathered for the ceremony on the East Portico of the Capitol. Douglass and Mrs. Dorsey secured a place in the crowd, standing in the center up front. After a morning of gale winds and hard rain, the skies cleared at the appointed hour. The sea of umbrellas disappeared, but Douglass still remembered the scene as one of “leaden stillness.” While awaiting Chase’s administering of the oath, Douglass remembered seeing the sitting Lincoln tap Vice President Andrew Johnson and point to the famous black orator up front in the crowd. The president “pointed me out to him.” Johnson’s initial reaction, wrote Douglass, as “the true index of his heart, was one of bitter contempt and aversion.” Then, recovering his poise, the “frown” changed to a “bland and sickly smile.” The autobiographer used this recollection to draw a sharp distinction between the martyred Lincoln and the villainous Johnson. As Douglass later learned, Johnson had been inebriated, having indulged in whiskey due to an illness, for his rambling formal speech inside the Capitol only a short time before taking his place for the outdoor ceremony.42 For Douglass, such a memory, crafted in 1881, was infused with the experience of confronting Johnson’s white supremacy firsthand, as well as having battled the seventeenth president’s bitter obstructions of Reconstruction.
Lincoln’s magnificent speech that day left Douglass breathless and clapping his hands “in gladness and thanksgiving.” He said it “sounded more like a sermon than a state paper.” He was stunned by its biblical foundations, moved by the forthright statement of slavery as “cause” and emancipation as “result” of “this mighty scourge of war.” Douglass observed the lack of vindictive celebration, but felt thrilled by the sentiment of retribution, as Lincoln promised that “every drop of blood drawn by the lash, shall be paid by another drawn with the sword.” In Lincoln’s “woe due to those by whom the offence came,” Douglass heard echoes of his own jeremiads and his relentless war propaganda. He tried to read the emotions of those around him in the audience, but found them “widely different.” He would quote from the third paragraph of the Second Inaugural countless times in the coming years. Douglass believed he had never heard such “vital substance . . . compressed in a space so narrow” as in the 703 words of Lincoln’s greatest speech. “There seemed at the time to be in the man’s soul,” Douglass declared in an 1893 speech, “the united souls of all Hebrew prophets.” For four long years of war, Douglass had dreamed of writing that speech for Lincoln, to place such words in the president’s mouth as “all knew that this interest [slavery] was, somehow, the cause of the war.”43 That Lincoln himself wrote those words in the tragic but exhilarating spring of 1865 was the far more important fact. It was a tribute to the power of events, to Lincoln’s own moral fiber and growth, as well as to the political and rhetorical bond the former slave now felt with the president.
On the evening of the inaugural, accompanied again by Mrs. Dorsey, Douglass stepped out and joined the “grand procession” entering the White House reception. He later complained that many other blacks had refused to join him, complaining that they would be rejected. Douglass used the event as a source of personal pride and distinction: “I had for some time looked upon myself as a man, but now in this multitude of the elite of the land, I felt myself a man among men.”44 Douglass stood tall and confronted the White House guards.
As the abolitionist and his black female companion approached the door of the executive mansion, two guards “took me rudely by the arm and ordered me to stand back,” Douglass recalled, saying they could “admit no persons of color.” After a lifetime of such rejections, Douglass rebelled and demanded entry. The guards acquiesced deceptively by ushering the two African Americans into a hallway where they found themselves “walking some planks out of a window” arranged as a temporary exit. Then Douglass, in raised voice, insisted someone inform the president, “Frederick Douglass is detained by officers at the door.” Soon he and Mrs. Dorsey were allowed into the elegant East Room gala. “Like a mountain pine high above all others,” wrote Douglass, “Mr. Lincoln stood, in his grand simplicity and homely beauty.”45
Then followed a scene for the ages as Douglass tells it. “Here comes my friend Douglass,” announced the president for all to hear. Lincoln said he had seen the orator in the crowd that afternoon listening to the speech and was eager to know his reaction. Douglass demurred, urging the president to attend to his guests. But focused fully on the unmistakable black man with the large mane of graying hair, Lincoln insisted, “There is no man in the country whose opinion I value more than yours.” “Mr. Lincoln,” replied the former slave from Tuckahoe, “that was a sacred effort.”46 We do not know what small or deeper talk ensued as other guests crowded into this special meeting of two parts of America. We can only guess at the thrill in Douglass’s heart, knowing that the cause he had so long pleaded—a sanctioned war to destroy slavery and potentially to reinvent the American republic around the principle of racial equality—might now come to fruition. Standing in the White House East Room, the Chesapeake Bay no great distance out of the windows to the east, Douglass could fairly entertain the belief that he and Lincoln, the slaves and the nation, were walking that night into a new history.
• • •
On the night of April 14, 1865, Good Friday, when the crack from John Wilkes Booth’s pistol rang out in Ford’s Theatre, mortally wounding Abraham Lincoln in the back of the head, Douglass had just returned to Rochester from speaking engagements in the East, where he had witnessed whole towns in great joy over the Confederate surrender and the end of the war. He, like millions, would never forget the moment he heard the news. Of the “many shocks” endured in four years of war by Americans, Douglass said in a speech some eight months later, the assassination of Lincoln was “heaviest of all.” Douglass called it a “grand convulsion,” as if the “solid earth opened and swallowed up one of our chief towns or cities.” The event instantly became an eternal marker in personal human memory. “A hush fell upon the land,” said Douglass, “as though each man in it heard a voice from heaven, an uninterpreted sound from the sky and had paused to learn its meaning.” The extremes of feeling were all but impossible to bear, and as the historian Martha Hodes writes, in North and South, among blacks and whites, “irreconcilable personal responses to Lincoln’s assassination” would always be “intertwined with different understandings of the war that had just ended.” Such it would be for Douglass, who over time fashioned several different kinds of eulogies and symbols of the martyred Lincoln. Douglass never let his audiences forget that though Booth and his conspirators were individual assassins and fierce Confederate partisans, it was “slavery” itself, the “insolent, aggressive, and malignant oligarchy,” in a last spasm of madness, that had murdered the president.47
In Rochester, as in hundreds of other towns and cities across the North, as well as in a thousand places in the South among former slaves, a springtime of relief turned overnight into horror and mourning. On the fifteenth a huge throng of people gathered at Rochester’s City Hall at 3:00 p.m., “not knowing what else to do in the agony of the hour,” as Douglass put it. Much of the crowd could not even fit into the space, as Mayor Daniel Moore presided. Several clergymen spoke, including Ezekiel Robinson. Douglass was sitting at the rear of the hall as a loud chant began to ring out: “Douglass! Douglass! Douglass!” The mass of people parted for a pathway as the orator walked to the platform. He recalled feeling “stunned and overwhelmed.” In his remarks, he declared it a “day for silence and meditation; for grief and tears.”48 He tried to wrest hope from all the despair, and he was hardly silent.
Less than twenty-four hours after the assassination, on that Easter weekend, Douglass insisted on seeing in the president’s sacrifice the nation’s new life: “Though Abraham Lincoln dies, the Republic lives.” In Lincoln’s “blood,” they would find the “salvation of our country.” Douglass tried to mute his partisanship in this time of grief, but he could not suppress it. The subdued audience began to cheer, even laugh, as the orator complained that it was only yesterday that too many people “were manifesting almost as much gratitude to General Lee for surrendering as to General Grant for compelling him to surrender.” Douglass insisted on Appomattox as victory, not a story of mutual honor. “Crimes of treason and slavery,” he demanded, ought not be met with “amnesty and oblivion in behalf of men whose hands are red with the best blood of the land.” He pleaded that people not be too ready to “do the work of restoration,” not make “haste to nurse the spirit that gave birth to Booth.”49
Douglass must have been carrying a copy of the Second Inaugural in his pocket, or perhaps by then he had memorized key passages. After telling of shaking Lincoln’s hand on inauguration day a month earlier, the speaker deftly floated into the president’s poetry: “Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away.” If Douglass did this from memory or not, many in the crowd choked back gasps and tears. “Yet if God will that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn by the lash shall be paid by another, drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still must it be said, that the judgments of the Lord are righteous altogether.” For so long Douglass wanted to write such words for Lincoln to speak; now, he could indeed speak them for the president, in a shared “sacred effort.” Before he ended, the former slave put it all in a simple paraphrase of Lincoln’s own argument: “Let us not forget that justice to the negro is safety to the nation.”50
Much later, in Life and Times, Douglass gave this moment a special personal meaning: “I had resided long in Rochester and had made many speeches there which had more or less touched the hearts of my hearers, but never to this day was I brought into such close accord with them. We shared in common a terrible calamity, and this touch of nature made us more than countrymen, it made us Kin.” His use of the words countrymen and kin is revealing. So much of the war’s meaning, of his own life, were caught up in those words. In common grief with his mostly white fellow citizens, the black orator felt a sense of belonging. The war had provided a common sense of nationhood, Lincoln’s death virtually a common sense of family. Douglass had often used his own story as the embodiment of America’s representative exiled son. Out of a common search for meaning in Lincoln’s violent death at the dawning of peace, Douglass felt a unity with other Americans. His sense of birthright may have felt more complete that afternoon than ever before. The exiled son who had returned to the free state of Maryland in late 1864 as Noah’s “sign” that the flood (slavery and the war) was almost over, was the same exiled son returning to Rochester in April 1865 to announce national redemption through Lincoln’s blood. Both were homecomings, one to Douglass’s native Maryland, and the other to his adopted western New York. His two lives, two homes, two sides of the Chesapeake, slavery and freedom, were no longer divided. At least for now, Douglass could weep tears of kinship with his countrymen.51