1 Douglass, “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July,” speech delivered July 5, 1852, Rochester, NY, Douglass Papers, ser. 1, 2:368; Robert P. Carroll, Jeremiah: A Commentary (London: SCM Press, 1986), 33–35, 497–508; R. N. Whybray, The Second Isaiah (London: T & T Clark International, 1988), 8–12, 20–41. In 587 BC the kingdom of Judah, the surviving part of the once-larger kingdom of Israel, fell disastrously to the military power of the Neo-Babylonian Empire. As Jeremiah and Ezekiel had predicted, their capital, Jerusalem, and its great temple were laid waste. The survivors were deported to Babylonia, in ancient Mesopotamia between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers. See Christine Hayes, Introduction to the Bible (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012), 1–14, 298–314.
2 Robert Alter, The Art of Biblical Narrative (1981; repr., New York: Basic Books, 2011), 25–54; Heschel, Prophets, 12; Whybray, Second Isaiah, 20; Isaiah 38:1; Jeremiah 2:2, 1:9. On black Jeremiahs and uses of the Jeremiadic tradition by Douglass, see David Howard-Pitney, The African American Jeremiad: Appeals for Justice in America (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2005), 1–52; and Wilson J. Moses, Black Messiahs and Uncle Toms: Social and Literary Manipulations of a Religious Myth (University Park: Penn State University Press, 1982), 30–66.
3 Douglass to Mrs. S. D. Porter, president, Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society of Rochester, March 27, 1852, in Foner, Life and Writings, 2:175–76; FDP, January 19, 1855 (this announcement included Theodore Parker, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Henry Ward Beecher); Douglass to Gerrit Smith, July 7, 1852, GS Papers; FDP, July 1, 9, and 16, 1852. For the Fifth of July tradition, see Mitch Kachun, Festivals of Freedom: Memory and Meaning in African American Emancipation Celebrations, 1808–1915 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2003), 42–53.
4 FDP, July 1 and 9, 1852. On eyewitness accounts of Douglass’s nervousness and trembling hands when beginning a speech, see Douglass Papers, ser. 1, vol. 1, intro., xxx.
5 “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July,” 2:359–60.
6 “Do Not Send Back the Fugitive,” address in Boston, October 14, 1850, Douglass Papers, ser. 1, 2:247; FDP, June 17 and 24, 1852.
7 “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July,” 2:360–64; and see James A. Colaiaco, Frederick Douglass and the Fourth of July (New York: Palgrave, 2006), 33–43.
8 “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July,” 2:365–66.
9 Ibid., 2:366–67.
10 Ibid., 2:366–68; Psalm 137:1–6; and see Jeremiah 9:19: “For a voice of wailing is heard out of Zion. How are we spoiled!” On Douglass’s use of Hebrew prophets in this speech, see Dilbeck, Frederick Douglass, 85–89.
11 “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July,” 2:369–71. On Douglass’s approach in this moment of the speech and his advocacy of natural rights more broadly, see Peter C. Myers, Frederick Douglass: Race and the Rebirth of American Liberalism (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2008), 49–56.
12 “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July,” 2:371–74.
13 Ibid., 2:375–78; Matthew 23:23.
14 Isaiah 1:13–17.
15 “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July,” 2:387–88.
16 Ibid., 2:383–87; and see Colaiaco, Douglass and the Fourth of July, 57–71; Isaiah 59:1. The full text reads, “Behold, the Lord’s hand is not shortened, that it cannot save; neither his ear heavy, that it cannot hear.” On Douglass’s embrace of the antislavery interpretation of the Constitution in the context of this speech, see Colaiaco, Frederick Douglass and the Fourth of July, 73–107; and Dilbeck, Frederick Douglass, 76–80.
17 Psalm 68:31; Garrison, “The Triumph of Freedom,” Liberator, January 10, 1845; FDP, July 9, 1852.
18 August Meier, introduction to Benjamin Quarles, Black Mosaic: Essays in Afro-American History and Historiography (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988), 4–6; also see Myers, Frederick Douglass, 47–49; and Blight, Frederick Douglass’ Civil War, 1–25.
19 Jeremiah 20:9; James Darsey, The Prophetic Tradition and Radical Rhetoric in America (New York: NYU Press, 1997), 16–18, 20–22, 27–28; Heschel, Prophets, 16, 22. Darsey makes the case that American abolitionists especially fit these patterns and forms; see 61–84. Also see Claus Westermann, Basic Forms of Prophetic Speech, trans. Hugh Clayton White (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1967); and Lundbom, Hebrew Prophets, 7–36.
20 Bercovitch, American Jeremiad, 141–42; Jeremiah 8:22, 31:17; Michael Walzer, Exodus and Revolution (New York: Basic Books, 1985), 17.
21 Douglass to Gerrit Smith, January 21, 1851, GS Papers; “Slavery and the Slave Power,” address in Rochester, December 1, 1850, Douglass Papers, ser. 1, 2:249–50.
22 Douglass’s first encounter with colonization in print was “Great Anti-Colonization Meeting in New York,” Liberator, February 1, 1839, one of the first issues of that paper he read. “Persecution on Account of Faith, Persecution on Account of Color,” speech in Corinthian Hall, Rochester, January 26, 1851; “Henry Clay and Colonization Cant, Sophistry, and Falsehood,” speech in Corinthian Hall, February 2, 1851; Douglass Papers, ser. 1, 2:301, 310–13, 318; “Horace Greeley and Colonization,” FDP, February 26, 1852; “The Present Condition and Future Prospect of the Negro People,” speech at the annual meeting of American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, New York, May 1853, in Foner, Life and Writings, 2:250; “Horace Greeley and the People of Color,” FDP, January 29, 1852. For Satan turning into an “angel of light,” Douglass drew from 2 Corinthians 11:14.
23 “Henry Clay and Colonization Cant,” 2:314. For Douglass’s assertion that he was mustering “evidence,” see 319–20. See Exodus 1:10–13.
24 “Persecution on Account of Faith,” 2:307–10.
25 Life and Times, 279–80; “Do Not Send Back the Fugitive,” speech in Boston, October 14, 1850, Douglass Papers, ser. 1, 2:246–48.
26 “Resistance to Blood-Houndism,” address at a New York State anti–Fugitive Slave Bill convention, January 8, 1851; and “Slavery’s Northern Bulwarks,” speech in Rochester, January 12, 1851; Douglass Papers, ser. 1, 2:275–77, 280–82.
27 Isaiah 2:4; Jeremiah 51:7. And see Heschel, Prophets, 159–68.
28 “Henry Clay and Colonization Cant,” 2:315–17; FDP, October 2, 1851. And see Jane H. Pease and William H. Pease, They Who Would Be Free: Blacks’ Search for Freedom, 1830–1861 (New York: Atheneum, 1974), 206–16.
29 Liberator, October 10, 1851; FDP, April 8, 1852 and February 4, 1853; and see Pease and Pease, They Who Would be Free, 219–25.
30 Thomas P. Slaughter, Bloody Dawn: The Christiana Riot and Racial Violence in the Antebellum North (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 43–93; FDP, September 25, 1851. And see the memoir by William Parker, “The Freedman’s Story,” Atlantic Monthly 18 (February–March 1866): 154–57, 160–66.
31 Douglass to Samuel D. Porter, Rochester, September 1851, Douglass Papers, ser. 3, 1:489; Julia Griffiths to Gerrit Smith, September 24, 1851, GS Papers; Life and Times, 280–82; and also see Coles, Cradle of Freedom, 140–42, 161. Coles embellishes the story with hyperdramatic prose and a claim that Douglass had dressed the fugitives as women.
32 Parker, “Freedman’s Story,” 290–92; and see Slaughter, Bloody Dawn, 78–79.
33 FDP, September 25, 1851.
34 Ibid. Douglass continued to follow and comment on the indictments and the trial for the Christiana case, as well as to monitor the fate of Parker and his comrades in Canada. See FDP, October 23, and November 13, 1851, and June 24, 1852.
35 “The Fugitive Slave Law,” speech at the National Free Soil Convention, Pittsburgh, August 11, 1852, in Foner, Life and Writings, 2:206–7; FDP, February 26, 1852.
36 “Is It Right and Wise to Kill a Kidnapper?,” FDP, June 2, 1854. On Douglass’s changing views on violence within his conception of reform, see Martin, Mind of Frederick Douglass, 166–68.
37 Martin, Mind of Frederick Douglass, 166–68. I have drawn on the discussion of Douglass’s philosophical quandary on violence in Frank M. Kirkland, “Enslavement, Moral Suasion, and Struggles for Recognition: Frederick Douglass’s Answer to the Question—‘What Is Enlightenment?,’ ” in Lawson and Kirkland, Frederick Douglass, 279–94.
38 Isaiah 57:20–21, and also 48:22. “No Peace for the Slaveholder,” address in New York, May 11, 1853; and “God’s Law Outlawed,” speech in Manchester, NH, January 24, 1854; Douglass Papers, ser. 1, 2:421–23, 435, 457. And on the redemptive power of violence, see Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Richard Philcox (1961; repr., New York: Grove Press, 2004).
39 FDP, March 4, 1853.
40 FDP, March 11, 1853; Celeste-Marie Bernier, “Dusky Powder Magazines: The Creole Revolt (1841) in Nineteenth Century American Literature” (PhD diss., University of Nottingham, UK, 2002), 1–33; Robert B. Stepto, “Storytelling in Early Afro-American Fiction: Frederick Douglass’s ‘The Heroic Slave,’ ” in Andrews, Critical Essays, 108–10. On the six speeches in which Douglass addressed Madison Washington’s story, see Bernier, “Dusky Powder Magazines,” ch. 2, 34–81; Douglass, “Slavery: The Slumbering Volcano,” address in New York, April 23, 1849, Douglass Papers, ser. 1, 2:154–58.
41 Shelley Fisher Fishkin and Carla L. Peterson, “ ‘We Hold These Truths to Be Self-Evident’: The Rhetoric of Frederick Douglass’s Journalism,” in Sundquist, Frederick Douglass, 198–99; Stepto, “Storytelling in Early Afro-American Fiction,” 110–11. On Douglass giving Washington a “voice,” see William L. Andrews, “The Heroic Slave,” headnote to reprint of the novella, in The Oxford Frederick Douglass Reader, ed. William L. Andrews (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 131.
42 Levine, Delany, Douglass, 83–85. Douglass’s ambivalence about Uncle Tom’s Cabin especially aimed at Stowe’s use of ideas about mulatto temperament, colonization, and Christian pacifism.
43 Eric J. Sundquist, To Wake the Nations: Race in the Making of American Literature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 105; and see Stepto, “Storytelling in Early Afro-American Fiction, 111–12.
44 “The Heroic Slave,” 133–35. On Listwell, see Fisher Fishkin and Peterson, “ ‘We Hold These Truths to be Self-Evident,’ ” 199–200.
45 “The Heroic Slave,” 142–53, 157–63. On Douglass and masculinity in the story, see Richard Yarborough, “Race, Violence and Manhood: The Masculine Ideal in Frederick Douglass’s ‘The Heroic Slave,’ ” in Sundquist, Frederick Douglass, 168–70.
1 Douglass to Gerrit Smith, November 6, 1852, GS Papers.
2 “The Anti-Slavery Movement,” lecture, Rochester, January 1855, in Foner, Life and Writings, 2:333, 351–52. On Douglass’s emerging politics see Blight, Frederick Douglass’ Civil War, 26–58; and Oakes, Radical and the Republican, 3–38, 87–132. On the Liberty Party, see Bruce Laurie, Beyond Garrison: Antislavery and Social Reform (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2005, 10–11, 57–59, 65–74, 135–40.
3 The first three chapter titles of Bondage and Freedom begin with “The Author. . . .” On sales, see C. Peter Ripley, “The Autobiographical Writings of Frederick Douglass,” Southern Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal of the South 24 (Spring 1985): 17. For the anecdote about Douglass’s son selling the book at lectures, see John David Smith, introduction, My Bondage and My Freedom (New York: Penguin, 2003), xlv; FDP, August 17, 1855.
4 The prefatory letter is dated July 2, 1855, Bondage and Freedom, 6–7.
5 See Robert S. Levine, “Identity in the Autobiographies,” in Lee, Cambridge Companion to Frederick Douglass, 36–39; Levine, Delany, Douglass, 99–102, 112–20; and Andrews, To Tell a Free Story, 214–39.
6 Stauffer, Works of James McCune Smith, xix–xxi.
7 Ibid., xxi–xxxiii; FDP, January 12 and February 9, 1855; Pease and Pease, They Who Would be Free, 140–42, 153–55; Stauffer, Black Hearts of Men, 160–61.
8 Blight, “In Search of Learning,” 7–26; Stauffer, Black Hearts of Men, 186; Stauffer, Works of James McCune Smith, xxviii–xxxiv, 187–89; FDP, May 27, 1853.
9 FDP, June 3 and November 18, 1853; McCune Smith to Gerrit Smith, July 20, 1848, in Stauffer, Works of James McCune Smith, 312. On the dedication, see Douglass to Gerrit Smith, August 14, 1855, GS Papers. Douglass responds to Smith’s grateful acknowledgment of the dedication, and yet another draft of $50, by saying that he wished “to couple my poor name with the name I love and honor.”
10 Bondage and Freedom, 10–11.
11 Ibid., 18–19, 21, 25.
12 Ibid., 10–13.
13 Ibid., 20–22.
14 Ibid., 20–24. Robert Alter, Pen of Iron: American Prose and the King James Bible (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), 2, 4, 19, 40–41. And see Mark A. Noll, “The United States as a Biblical Nation,” in The Bible in America, ed. Nathan O. Hatch and Mark A. Noll (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), 45; and George P. Landow, Elegant Jeremiahs: The Sage from Carlyle to Mailer (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986), 17–40. On the “Americanization” of Christian theology, see Mark A. Noll, America’s God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln (New York: Oxford, 2002), 227–364.
15 Bondage and Freedom, 84; Jeremiah 49:23; Isaiah 57:20.
16 Bondage and Freedom, 22, 24. On autobiography and loss, see James Olney, Metaphors of Self: The Meaning of Autobiography (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1972); James Olney, ed., Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980); and David W. Blight, “Several Lives in One: Frederick Douglass’s Autobiographical Art,” in Beyond the Battlefield: Race, Memory, and the American Civil War (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2002), 11–27.
17 Bondage and Freedom, 14; New York Tribune in FDP, March 31, 1854; FDP, October 27 and November 3, 1854; Congressional Globe, 36th Cong., 1st sess., 1859–60, 29, pt. 1, 239–40. I am grateful to Josh Lynn for these references to the two Douglasses, and to his unpublished paper, “The Black Douglass and the White Douglas: Frederick, Stephen, and the Embodiment of Racial Citizenship.”
18 Bondage and Freedom, 146–47; Narrative, 78–79. See the remarkably sympathetic letter from John Mannoss to Douglass, Hillsdale, Michigan, January 14, 1856, FD Papers (LC).
19 Narrative, 79–89; Bondage and Freedom, 165–69; Matthew 23:4, 13–15.
20 Bondage and Freedom, 150–51, 154–55, 162–63, 179.
21 Ibid., 177–80, 215. See Levine, “Identity in the Autobiographies,” 38–39; and “Is It Right and Wise to Kill a Kidnapper?,” FDP, June 2, 1854.
22 “Poets to Come,” in The Portable Walt Whitman (New York: Penguin, 1945), 182; Bondage and Freedom, 266.
23 Bondage and Freedom, 277–86, 292.
24 Ibid., 291, 298.
25 Life and Times, 329.
26 “Notes by the Way,” FDP, March 30, 1855.
27 Douglass to Gerrit Smith, May 23, 1856, GS Papers.
28 Griffiths to Gerrit Smith, September 9 (no year), GS Papers.
29 Griffiths, “Letters from the Old World,” no. 1, FDP, August 10, 1855; no. 22, FDP, July 4, 1856. See Meer, “Public and Personal Letters,” 251–64.
30 Diedrich, Love across Color Lines, 131–42; Christoph Lohmann, ed., Radical Passion: Ottilie Assing’s Reports from America and Letters to Frederick Douglass (New York: Peter Lang, 1999), xii–xx; McFeely, Frederick Douglass, 183–85; Stauffer, Black Hearts of Men, 230–31. The full title of the German journal was Morgenblatt für Gebildete Leser (Morning Journal for Educated Readers), edited by Johann Friedrich Cotta. The German edition of Bondage and Freedom was Sklaverei und Freiheit: Autobiographie von Frederick Douglass (Hamburg: Hoffman and Campe, 1860).
31 Douglass to Mrs. Lydia Dennett, April 17, 1857, in Foner, Frederick Douglass on Women’s Rights, 21–22; and see Diedrich, Love Across Color Lines, 176–85. On Douglass’s need for a sense of “home,” see Andrews, To Tell a Free Story, 218–20, 230–35.
32 “The Fugitive Slave Law,” speech delivered at the National Free Soil Convention, Pittsburgh, August 11, 1852, in Foner, Life and Writings, 2:206–9; Sewell, Ballots for Freedom, 245–47.
33 FDP, July 30, August 13, September 10, and October 1, 1852.
34 FDP, September 3 and 17, and October 1 and 29, 1852.
35 FDP, September 17, and October 15 and 22, 1852; Proverbs 14:34; 14:8, 18; 11:23; 13:16.
36 FDP, September 10, 1852.
37 Douglass to Gerrit Smith, November 6, 1852, GS Papers; FDP, May 26, 1854. For the reactions of political abolitionists to the Kansas-Nebraska Act, see Sewell, Ballots for Freedom, 254–66; Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, 93–95; and William E. Gienapp, The Origins of the Republican Party, 1852–1856 (New York: Oxford, 1987), 72–87.
38 FDP, November 16, 1855. On Seward’s “Irrepressible Conflict” speech of 1858, see Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, 69–70; and for Republicans’ ideas about the inevitability of slavery’s demise, see James Oakes, Freedom National: The Destruction of Slavery in the United States, 1861–1865 (New York: Norton, 2013), 29–34.
39 “Present Condition and Future Prospect”; “The Kansas-Nebraska Bill,” speech in Metropolitan Hall, Chicago, October 30, 1854; both in Foner, Life and Writings, 2:245–48, 323. On the Slave Power concept, see Leonard L. Richards, The Slave Power: The Free North and Southern Domination, 1780–1860 (Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 2000), 1–27; Sewell, Ballots for Freedom, 86–89, 102–6, 257–60.
40 “Present Condition and Future Prospect,” 2:247; FDP, February 24, 1854; “Slavery Rules Everything,” FDP, August 24, 1855.
41 Life and Times, 292–302. See Richards, Slave Power, 16–27.
42 FDP, April 5, 1856; FDP, September 28, 1855. Douglass got Greeley’s attention; see exchange, FDP, October 5 and 12, 1855.
43 FDP, July 27, 1855.
44 FDP, August 24 and December 7, 1855. On the “cordon” concept, see Oakes, Freedom National, 256–300.
45 FDP, April 25, 1856.
46 “Kansas-Nebraska Bill,” 320; FDP, September 15, 1854. On free-labor ideology, see Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, 9–39.
47 FDP, April 25, June 20, and August 15, 1856.
48 FDP, August 15 and September 12, 1856.
49 Douglass to Gerrit Smith, August 31, 1856, GS Papers; FDP, November 13, 1857.
50 https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/60/393/case.html, Dred Scott v. Sandford; the court clerk misspelled the owner’s name, Sanford. See Richard H. Sewell, A House Divided: Sectionalism and the Civil War, 1848–1865 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988), 56–59.
51 See Sewell, Ballots for Freedom, 299–300.
52 “The Dred Scott Decision,” address delivered at the Anniversary of the American Abolition Society, New York, May 14, 1857, mss., FD Papers (LC).
53 Ibid.
54 Ibid. On Douglass and millennialism, see Blight, Frederick Douglass’ Civil War, 8–12, 73–78, 102–3; and Maurice O. Wallace, “Violence, Manhood, and War in Douglass,” in Lee, Cambridge Companion to Frederick Douglass, 73–86.
55 “Dred Scott Decision”; the complete poem, with twenty-nine stanzas, appears in FDP, January 16, 1857. On “The Tyrant’s Jubilee,” see William Gleason, “Volcanoes and Meteors: Douglass, Melville, and the Poetics of Insurrection,” in Levine and Otter, Frederick Douglass and Herman Melville, 110–33. On Brown in Rochester, see Life and Times, 314–16.
1 Life and Times, 271. The exact timing of this first meeting remains ambiguous. Brown biographers contain slightly different accounts. Given the evidence from Douglass’s own reporting, they met in either late 1847 or early 1848 the first time, and they definitely met again in Springfield in October or November of 1848. North Star, February 11, November 17, November 24, and December 8, 1848. See Oswald Garrison Villard, John Brown, 1800–1859, a Biography Fifty Years After (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1910), 57–58; David S. Reynolds, John Brown, Abolitionist: The Man Who Killed Slavery, Sparked the Civil War, and Seeded Civil Rights (New York: Knopf, 2005), 103–104; Stauffer, Black Hearts of Men, 172–73; Quarles, Frederick Douglass, 170–71; Tony Horwitz, Midnight Rising: John Brown and the Raid That Sparked the Civil War (New York: Henry Holt, 2011), 30–31.
2 Springfield Republican, quoted in North Star, February 11 and 18, 1848.
3 Life and Times, 271–73. On the interpretations of Brown over time, including Brown’s own self-fashioning, see R. Blakeslee Gilpin, John Brown Lives! America’s Long Reckoning with Violence, Equality, and Change (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011), 12, 17–31; Bertram Wyatt-Brown, “ ‘A Volcano beneath a Mountain of Snow’: John Brown and the Problem of Interpretation,” in His Soul Goes Marching On: Responses to John Brown and the Harpers Ferry Raid, ed. Paul Finkelman (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1995), 10–38; and Louis A. DeCaro, “The John Browns of History,” in John Brown: The Man Who Lived, Essays in Honor of the Harpers Ferry Raid Sesquicentennial 1859–2009 (New York: Lulu, 2009), 3–30.
4 Horwitz, Midnight Rising, 9–19; John Brown to Simon Perkins, August 15, 1849, in A John Brown Reader, the Making of a Revolutionary: The Story of John Brown in His Own Words and in the Words of Those Who Knew Him, ed. Louis Ruchames (1969; repr., New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1975), 68–69. Brown, $13,000 in debt at the time, took passage to England in August 1849 to revive his woolens enterprise. See Stauffer, Black Hearts of Men, 172.
5 Life and Times, 273–75.
6 Ibid., 275; Brown to Mary Brown (wife), Boston, December 22, 1851; Brown to Douglass, Akron, OH, January 9, 1854; in Ruchames, John Brown Reader, 78–79, 84.
7 Brown to Douglass, January 9, 1854, 84–85; Deuteronomy 23:15; Matthew 7:12; Nehemiah 13:11, 17, 25, 30–31. See Robert E. McGlone, John Brown’s War Against Slavery (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 7–10, 80–82, 309–28.
8 Life and Times, 272. On millennialism, see James H. Moorhead, American Apocalypse: Yankee Protestants and the Civil War, 1860–1869 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1978), 1–128; James H. Moorhead, “Between Progress and Apocalypse: A Reassessment of Millennialism in American Religious Thought, 1800–1880,” Journal of American History 71 (December 1984), 524–42; Ernest Lee Tuveson, Redeemer Nation: The Idea of America’s Millennial Role (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), 1–90, 187–214; and Edmund Wilson, Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Literature of the American Civil War (1962; repr., Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1984), 91–106.
9 Salmon Brown, “Reminiscences,” 1913, in Meteor of War: The John Brown Story, ed. Zoe Trodd and John Stauffer (Maplecrest, NY: Brandywine Press, 2004), 68. On Brown’s religious faith and how it changed toward perfectionist, millennial Calvinism, see Stauffer, Black Hearts of Men, 120–23.
10 Brown to “Dear children,” Troy, NY, January 23, 1852; Brown to John Jr., Akron, OH, August 26, 1853; in Ruchames, John Brown Reader, 79–80, 82–83; Joshua 24:15; Deuteronomy 29:18; Judges 2:19; Samuel 15:22. On John Jr. and his mental instability, see Horwitz, Midnight Rising, 56, 205.
11 Charles R. Douglass to Douglass, March 20, 1860, FD Papers (LC).
12 “West Indian Emancipation,” speech delivered at Canandaigua, NY, August 4, 1857, Douglass Papers, ser. 1, 3:204; McCune Smith, introduction, Bondage and Freedom, 18–19.
13 “The Final Struggle,” FDP, November 16, 1855, in Foner, Life and Writings, 2:377–78.
14 “West Indian Emancipation,” 190, and headnote, 183, for more than one thousand attendance.
15 Douglass to secretary of the Edinburgh New Antislavery Society, July 9, 1857, FD Papers (LC). Italics added by author.
16 “West Indian Emancipation,” 194–96; Isaiah 58:1–7.
17 McCune Smith in FDP, August 8, 1856; “West Indian Emancipation,” 200–201, 204–8; Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, canto 2, in Lord Byron’s Selected Poems, ed. Susan J. Wolfson (New York: Penguin, 1996), 120–21.
18 Typical of such sentiments at the time of Brown’s execution was that expressed by Charles Langston of Ohio, a black abolitionist who had been a leader of the Oberlin-Wellington rescue of fugitive slaves a year earlier. “I never thought that I should ever join in doing honor to or mourning for any American white man,” wrote Langston on December 2, 1859, the day of Brown’s hanging. In Brown the dead hero he found “a lover of mankind—not of any particular class or color, but of all men.” See Charles Langston, “Speech in Cleveland,” December 2, 1859, in The Tribunal: Responses to John Brown and the Harpers Ferry Raid, ed. John Stauffer and Zoe Trodd (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), 131–32.
19 John Brown, “Sambo’s Mistakes,” 1848, in Stauffer and Trodd, Tribunal, 3–6. And see Stauffer, Black Hearts of Men, 172–73. The Ram’s Horn editor was Willis Hodges, a friend of Brown’s and later a neighbor in the settlements at Timbucto.
20 Lecture “West Indian Emancipation,” Canandaigua, NY, August 3, 1857, Douglass Papers, ser. 1, 3:200–201; Smith as “Communipaw,” FDP, September 21, 1855; Benjamin Quarles, Allies for Freedom: Blacks on John Brown (New York: Da Capo Press, 1974), 22–25; Horwitz, Midnight Rising, 32–34. On “Gerrit Smith’s Land” in the North Elba region, see Douglass’s report as well as John Brown’s survey, in North Star, December 8, 1848.
21 “Self-Elevation,” FDP, April 13, 1855; “West Indian Emancipation,” 201.
22 “These Questions Cannot Be Answered by the White Race,” address in New York, May 11, 1855, Douglass Papers, ser. 1, 3:86–89.
23 Ibid., 90. Charles Lenox Remond spoke after Douglass with a decidedly Garrisonian dissenting opinion.
24 “Citizenship and the Spirit of Caste,” address in New York, May 11, 1858, in Douglass Papers, ser. 1, 3:209–12.
25 Diedrich, Love across Color Lines, 125–29; Lohmann, Radical Passion, xvii–xix. Diedrich portrays Assing as constantly in quest of a black literary “protagonist” for the new narrative of America she sought to discover and write. In Douglass, Diedrich argues, she found such an ideal.
26 Assing, preface to the German translation of Bondage and Freedom, in Lohmann, Radical Passion, 68–69. And see McFeely, Frederick Douglass, 183–85; and Diedrich, Love across Color Lines, 131–36. Diedrich invents a fictional dialogue between Assing and Douglass as a scene-setting way of narrating the first meeting.
27 Assing, preface, in Lohmann, Radical Passion, 69. Douglass gave his approval to the German edition of Bondage and Freedom.
28 Stauffer, Black Hearts of Men, 8–11; John Brown to John Jr., August 21, 1854, in Trodd and Stauffer, Meteor of War, 80; John Jr. to John Brown, May 20, 1855, quoted in Horwitz, Midnight Rising, 41.
29 FDP, July 6, 1855.
30 FDP, July 6 and July 20, 1855.
31 Horwitz, Midnight Rising, 43–45; Villard, John Brown, 87–90.
32 Horwitz, Midnight Rising, 47–55; McGlone, John Brown’s War Against Slavery, 114–42. For the context of violence in Kansas, see Reynolds, John Brown, Abolitionist, 140–78. Reynolds finds Brown’s crimes at Pottawatomie “explainable” by use of Doris Lessing’s notion of “good terrorism,” by which is meant “terrorism justified by obvious social injustice.” Reynolds’s spacious definition allows that Brown modeled insurrectionary slaves, justified in killing their oppressive masters.
33 Quarles, Allies for Freedom, 38; Reynolds, John Brown, Abolitionist, 9, 100–101, 105–9; Life and Times, 302–3.
34 Quarles, Allies for Freedom, 38–39; “Old Brown’s Farewell to the Plymouth Rocks, Bunker Hill Monuments, Charter Oaks, and Uncle Thoms Cabbins,” April 1857; and “To the Friends of Freedom,” March 1857, in New York Tribune, March 4, 1857; in Ruchames, John Brown Reader, 102, 106. On “Secret Six,” see Jeffrey Rossbach, Ambivalent Conspirators: John Brown, the Secret Six, and a Theory of Slave Violence (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982), 1–120.
35 Life and Times, 314–15; Brown to “My Dear Wife and Children, Every One,” January 30, 1858; and Brown to Higginson, February 12, 1858; in Ruchames, John Brown Reader, 109–11. On the at least four meetings between Douglass and Brown in Rochester, see Douglass Papers, ser. 2, vol. 3, Historical Annotations for Life and Times, 824–25.
36 “Provisional Constitution and Ordinances of the People of the United States, May 8, 1858,” in Trodd and Stauffer, Meteor of War, 109–20; Horwitz, Midnight Rising, 80–84.
37 Life and Times, 315–16; Quarles, Frederick Douglass, 173; Brown to John Jr., February 4, 1858, quoted in Quarles, Allies for Freedom, 39.
38 Quarles, Allies for Freedom, 39–40; Horwitz, Midnight Rising, 66–69.
39 Quarles, Allies for Freedom, 41; Brown to “My Dear Wife and Children, Every One,” January 30, 1858, in Ruchames, John Brown Reader, 110.
40 Quarles, Frederick Douglass, 174–76; Life and Times, 316–17; Quarles, Allies for Freedom, 52. On Forbes, see Horwitz, Midnight Rising, 70–72.
41 On the Forbes postponement, especially the crucial involvement of the Secret Six in demanding it, see Rossbach, Ambivalent Conspirators, 160–81; John Brown to New York Tribune, Trading Post, Kansas, January 1859, in Ruchames, John Brown Reader, 114–15. On Brown back in Kansas in 1858–59 and the Missouri rescue, see Quarles, Allies for Freedom, 53–59; Horwitz, Midnight Rising, 88–90; and Reynolds, John Brown, Abolitionist, 277–84.
42 Luke 2:29–30; Quarles, Allies for Freedom, 60.
43 Quarles, Allies for Freedom, 60–61; Rosetta Douglass to Douglass, February 2, 1859, FD Papers (LC); FDP, April 15, 1859.
44 John Brown Jr. to John Kagi, August 11, 1859, in Quarles, Frederick Douglass, 176–77; Life and Times, 317–18.
45 Life and Times, 318–19.
46 Ibid., 319–20; Horwitz, Midnight Rising, 264–66.
47 “Our Recent Western Tour,” Douglass’ Monthly (hereafter DM), April 1859; “1859: The New Year,” DM, February 1859. For speaking itineraries, see Douglass Papers, ser. 1, 3:xxix–xxx. For McCune Smith’s editorship, DM, March 1859. For appeals for payment from subscribers, see FDP, December 4, 1857; October 29 and December 31, 1858.
48 FDP, January 7, 1859.
49 FDP, January 7 and 14, 1859; on Haiti, see FDP, March 11, April 29, and May 6, 1859.
50 “African Civilization Society,” FDP, February 1859; FDP, March 25, 1859; “The True Test,” DM, July 1859; “Progress of Slavery,” DM, August 1859; “Non-Extension vs. Abolition of Slavery,” DM, October 1859.
51 “The Ballot and the Bullet,” DM, October 1859. On Douglass and the ambivalence between rhetorical and actual violence, see John H. Cook, “Fighting with Breath, Not Blows: Frederick Douglass and Antislavery Violence,” in Antislavery Violence: Sectional, Racial, and Cultural Conflict in Antebellum America, ed. John R. McKivigan and Stanley Harrold (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1999), 138–63.
52 Horwitz, Midnight Rising, 291–92; New York Herald, October 18, 1859; Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, October 29, 1859; Cincinnati Enquirer, October 20, 1859; Life and Times, 307.
53 For Hurn interview, see James M. Gregory, Frederick Douglass the Orator: Containing an Account of His Life; His Eminent Public Services . . . (Springfield, MA: Willey & Co., 1893), 46–48; Life and Times, 308–9; Stauffer, Trodd, and Bernier, Picturing Frederick Douglass, 19.
54 Diedrich, Love Across Color Lines, 217–18. In McFeely, Frederick Douglass, 197–98, the author mistakenly adds one more piece of drama to Douglass’s presence in Philadelphia. In Life and Times, Douglass (much later in the book than his coverage of the Harpers Ferry revelations) describes receiving a note following a speech at National Hall in Philadelphia, informing him that a Mrs. Amanda Auld Sears had been in the audience. She was the daughter of Douglass’s former owners, Thomas and Lucretia Auld. Amanda and Frederick had not seen each other since childhood, and Douglass tells of their emotional reunion a full day after his speech, and of how Amanda had forgiven any harsh elements of the author’s representations of her father. McFeely portrays Douglass as staying nearly two extra days in the city before fleeing for his life northward. Maria Diedrich, in Love across Color Lines, 216–17, picked up the story from McFeely and made it part of her narrative as well. Douglass spoke at National Hall, Philadelphia, at least two other times, January 14, 1862, and July 6, 1863. This first reunion with Amanda Sears could not have occurred in October of 1859, given how hurriedly Douglass fled the city. See Life and Times, 392–95; and Douglass Papers, ser. 2, vol. 3, Historical Annotations, 905–6.
55 Life and Times, 309–10. See letter, Henry A. Wise to “His Excellency James Buchanan, President of the United States, and to the Honorable Postmaster General of the United States,” Richmond, November 13, 1859.
56 Douglass to Amy Post, October 27, 1859, Post Family Papers. The black leader John Sella Martin accused Douglass of failure to make good on his promises at Harpers Ferry in Weekly Anglo-African, October 29, 1859; and see Quarles, Allies for Freedom, 114–15.
57 Douglass to the Rochester Democrat and American, October 31, 1859, in Foner, Life and Writings, 2:460–63, also reprinted in Toronto Daily Globe, November 4, 1859; Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, November 12, 1859.
58 Douglass to the Rochester Democrat and American, October 31, 1859, 2:462–63.
59 “Capt. John Brown Not Insane,” FDP, November 11, 1859; Brown to Franklin Sanborn, February 24, 1858, quoted in Horwitz, Midnight Rising, 239. Another of Brown’s biblical self-identifications was with the apostle Paul and his imprisonment and death at the hands of the Romans. See McGlone, John Brown’s War against Slavery, 323–24. For the “creative vocation” of martyrdom, see Wyatt-Brown, “Volcano beneath a Mountain of Snow,” 33. For an effective treatment of how Brown had a kind of “second plan” to orchestrate his own symbolic death at Harpers Ferry, or by execution afterward, see Horwitz, Midnight Rising, 239–43. On the outpouring of poetry, song, and melodramatic plays in the wake of Brown’s execution, see Reynolds, John Brown, Abolitionist, 436–77. On martyrdom, also see Charles Joyner, “ ‘Guilty of Holiest Crime’: The Passion of John Brown,” in Finkelman, His Soul Goes Marching On, 296–334.
60 “Capt. John Brown Not Insane.”
61 Life and Times, 321–22; Toronto Daily Globe, November 9, 1859; letter aboard ship, in FDP, December 16, 1859.
1 Douglass to Samuel J. May, August 30, 1861, in Foner, Life and Writings, 3:159; Life and Times, 336. On Douglass and the idea of the “logic of events,” see Blight, Frederick Douglass’ Civil War, 107–9.
2 “1859—the New Year,” DM, February 1859; for faith and sight expression, he drew from 2 Corinthians 5:7.
3 New York Times, December 19, 1859; Douglass, “The Present Condition of Slavery,” address delivered in Bradford, England, January 6, 1860, Douglass Papers, ser. 1, 3:302–9.
4 “John Brown and the Slaveholders’ Insurrection,” address delivered in Edinburgh, Scotland, January 30, 1860, Douglass Papers, ser. 1, 3:316–17; “Reception Soiree to Mr. Frederick Douglass,” Glasgow Herald, February 1, 1860, Mitchell Public Library, Glasgow, Scotland.
5 “To My American Readers and Friends,” DM, November 1859.
6 Douglass to Amy Post, May 25, 1860, Post Family Papers, Rochester; DM, March and May, 1859; Pillsbury to Samuel J. May, quoted in Douglas, “Cherished Friendship,” 269; and on H. O. Crofts, see Report of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, annual meeting, Rochester, NY, September 1843 (Boston: Crocker & Brewster, 1843), 15. Crofts is reported that year living in Montreal.
7 DM, February 1859; Douglass quoted and membership statistics in Douglas, “Cherished Friendship,” 270–71; Griffiths to Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society of Rochester, March 9, 1860, in DM, April 1860.
8 DeCaro, John Brown: The Cost of Freedom (New York: International Publishers, 2007), 64–69, 169n103; McFeely, Frederick Douglass, 195–96; Kagi letter, June 23, 1859, quoted in McGlone, John Brown’s War against Slavery, 228–29; Katherine Mayo interview with Mrs. Russell, in Ruchames, John Brown Reader, 239. Anne Brown Adams (daughter) especially spread the rumor over time about Shields Green as a “substitute.”
9 DeCaro, John Brown: Cost of Freedom, 67–68; Brown to “Brother Jeremiah,” November 12, 1859, in Stauffer and Trodd, Tribunal, 61; Brown to wife, Mary, November 10, 1859, in Villard, John Brown, 540–41. On the song, see John Stauffer and Benjamin Soskis, The Battle Hymn of the Republic: A Biography of the Song That Marches On (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 3–72.
10 Report of the Select Committee of the Senate Appointed to Inquire into the Late Invasion and Seizure of the Public Property at Harpers Ferry, Committee no. 278, 36th Cong., 1st sess. (Washington, DC, 1860); Villard, John Brown, 580–83; Stephen B. Oates, To Purge This Land with Blood: A Biography of John Brown (New York: Harper & Row, 1970), 359–60.
11 Report of the Select Committee, 2–10, 21–25; McGlone, John Brown’s War against Slavery, 237–39. On December 8, 1859, in the US Senate, Davis called Seward a “traitor” for his moral and personal support of Brown. See Trodd and Stauffer, Meteor of War, 260–61.
12 Douglass to Maria Webb, Halifax, England, November 30, 1859, Gilder Lehrman Collection, New-York Historical Society.
13 “John Brown and the Slaveowners’ Insurrection,” 3:322, 324.
14 “Progress and Divisions of Anti-Slavery,” address delivered in Glasgow, Scotland, February 14, 1860, Douglass Papers, ser. 1, 3:326–30.
15 Glasgow Emancipation Society Minute Books, April 3, 1869, Smeal Collection, Mitchell Library, Glasgow, reel 1. Douglass borrowed from the American divine George Cheever. “British Racial Attitudes and Slavery,” address delivered in Newcastle upon Tyne, England, February 23, 1860; “The American Constitution and the Slave,” address delivered in Glasgow, Scotland, March 26, 1860; in Douglass Papers, ser. 1, 3:334–40, 351–65.
16 Newcastle Daily Express, February 21, 1860, in DM, April 1860; R. J. M. Blackett, “Cracks in the Antislavery Wall: Frederick Douglass’s Second Visit to England (1859–1860) and the Coming of the Civil War,” in Rice and Martin, Liberating Sojourn, 188–90, 192–93, 200–203.
17 Life and Times, 322–23; Diedrich, Love across Color Lines, 222–24.
18 Diedrich, Love across Color Lines, 220–23; Assing, “The Aftermath of John Brown’s Trial” and “John Brown’s Execution and Its Consequences,” in Lohmann, Radical Passion, 170–80. On Douglass’s efforts to secure a passport to go to France, see Douglass Papers, ser. 2, vol. 3, Historical Annotations, 842–43. The French consul at Newcastle did indeed issue Douglass a passport, as reported in the Newcastle Courant, February 3, 1860, but he did not use the opportunity.
19 Annie Douglass to Douglass, December 7, 1859; Rosetta Douglass to Douglass, December 6, 1859, FD Papers (LC); Rosetta Douglass to Aunt Harriet, April 20, 1860, Douglass Papers, unpublished mss., Indianapolis, quoted in McFeely, Frederick Douglass, 207; “Death of Little Annie Douglass,” DM, April 1860.
20 Rosetta Douglass to Aunt Harriet, April 20, 1860; “To My British Anti-Slavery Friends,” May 26, 1860, in DM, June 1860; Charles R. Douglass, “Some Incidents of the Home Life of Frederick Douglass,” February 1917, Evans Collection.
21 “To My British Anti-Slavery Friends.”
22 Diedrich, Love across Color Lines, 226–30; “Going to England Given Up,” DM, September 1860; “Political Abolition Convention in Worcester,” DM, November 1860.
23 Douglass to Elizabeth Cady Stanton, August 25, 1860, in Foner, Life and Writings, 2:497–98; “Seventh Annual Clam Bake,” DM, December 1860.
24 “To My British Anti-Slavery Friends.” On the issue of “politics and principles” regarding the Republican Party and the election of 1860, see Sewell, Ballots for Freedom, 343–65.
25 “The Chicago Nominations,” DM, June 1860.
26 Douglass to Gerrit Smith, July 2, 1860, GS Papers; “The Republican Party,” DM, August 1860; Sewell, Ballots for Freedom, 338.
27 Oakes, Radical and the Republican, 92; “The Presidential Campaign of 1860,” speech at celebration of West Indian emancipation, August 1, 1860, Foner, Life and Writings, 2:506–7; “The Speech of Senator Sumner,” DM, July 1860; DM, August 1860.
28 “Chicago Nominations.” On denationalization and the Republicans, see Sewell, Ballots for Freedom, 304, 308–15; Oakes, Freedom National, xx–xxx.
29 “Republican Party.” On nativists in the Republican Party, see Gienapp, Origins of the Republican Party, xx–xxx; and Sewell, Ballots for Freedom, 266–75.
30 “The Democratic Party” and “The Prospect in the Future,” DM, August 1860.
31 “Prospect in the Future”; Genesis 4:3–34.
32 “Prospect in the Future.”
33 “Presidential Campaign of 1860,” 2:514–15. See Blight, Frederick Douglass’ Civil War, 52–58.
34 On Myers and the suffrage campaign, see C. Peter Ripley et al., eds., Black Abolitionist Papers (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1993), 4:326–30; Stauffer, Works of James McCune Smith, 182–83; Blight, Frederick Douglass’ Civil War, 60–61; Quarles, Frederick Douglass, 166–67. And see Phyllis F. Field, The Politics of Race in New York: The Struggle for Black Suffrage in the Civil War Era (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1982), 114–46.
35 “Republican Opposition to the Right of Suffrage,” DM, October 1860.
36 “Equal Suffrage Defeated,” DM, December 1860.
37 “The Late Election,” DM, December 1860.
38 Ibid.; “Southern Thunder—Spirit of the Press,” DM, December 1860. On Georgia’s debate and divided vote in its secession convention, and the impulse among its Unionists toward “resistances short of secession,” see William W. Freehling and Craig M. Simpson, eds., Secession Debated: Georgia’s Showdown in 1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), xviii–xxi.
39 On mob violence against abolitionists, see James M. McPherson, Struggle for Equality: Abolitionists and the Negro in the Civil War and Reconstruction (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1964), 40–45.
40 “Legacy of John Brown,” Douglass Papers, ser. 1, vol. 3, headnote, and 387–97. The editors recorded this event and the commentary from various newspapers, including Boston Post, December 4, 1860; Boston Semi-Weekly Courier, December 6, 1860; Boston Daily Evening Transcript, December 3, 1860; New York Tribune, December 4 and 7, 1860; Liberator, December 7, 1860; NASS, December 8, 1860; and DM, January 1861.
41 “Legacy of John Brown,” 3:399–400.
42 Ibid., 400–401, 405, 407; Exodus 31:18.
43 “Speech on John Brown,” Boston, December 3, 1860, in Foner, Life and Writings, 2:533–37; Douglass Papers, ser. 1, vol. 3, headnote, 412–13.
44 “Dissolution of the American Union,” DM, January 1861. On the early part of the secession winter and the “street festival” atmosphere of Charleston in South Carolina, see William L. Barney, “Rush to Disaster: Secession and the Slaves’ Revenge,” in Robert J. Cook, William L. Barney, and Elizabeth R. Varon, Secession Winter: When the Union Fell Apart (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013), 30–31; and Steven A. Channing, Crisis of Fear: Secession in South Carolina (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1970), chs. 1–2.
45 “Dissolution of the American Union.” An excellent and concise treatment of the nature and causes of secession is Charles B. Dew, Apostles of Disunion: Southern Secession Commissioners and the Causes of the Civil War (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2001), 1–21.
46 “The Union and How to Save It,” DM, February 1860. For “drink the wine cup of wrath and fire,” Douglass could be drawing from Luke 22:39–46, Psalm 75:8, or Matthew 26:39.
47 “Union and How to Save It”; Kenneth M. Stampp, And the War Came: The North and the Secession Crisis, 1860–1861 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1960), 13–14; David M. Potter, The Impending Crisis, 1848–1861 (New York: Knopf, 1976), 524–28. And see Daniel W. Crofts, Reluctant Confederates: Upper South Unionists in the Secession Crisis (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989); William W. Freehling, The Road to Disunion, vol. 2: Secessionists Triumphant, 1854–1861 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007); and Stephanie McCurry, Confederate Reckoning: Power and Politics in the Civil War South (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010).
48 Stampp, And the War Came, 21, 129–31.
49 Ibid., 130–47; Potter, Impending Crisis, 529–35.
50 “Proslavery Mobs and Proslavery Ministry,” DM, March 1861. Douglass was the primary speaker at the Spring Street Church weekly meetings, but it also attracted other abolitionists and reformers such as Lucy Colman, Susan B. Anthony, Parker Pillsbury, and Jermain Loguen. See Douglass Papers, ser. 1, 3:424.
51 “Union and How to Save It.”
52 “The New President,” DM, March 1861; “Future of the Abolition Cause,” DM, April 1861.
53 “Hope and Despair in These Cowardly Times,” address delivered in Rochester, Spring Street AME Zion Church, April 28, 1861, Douglass Papers, ser. 1, 3:424; and see Blake McKelvey, Rochester: The Flower City, 1855–1890 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1949), 62–64.
1 “New President,” DM, May 1861; Paul Laurence Dunbar, “Douglass,” in Lyrics of Love and Laughter (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1913), 128–29.
2 “The President-Elect,” DM, March 1861; “The Inaugural Address,” DM, April 1861; David Herbert Donald, Lincoln (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995), 273–75; Stauffer, Giants, 219–20. On the tension and “paralysis” of Northern communities during the secession winter, covered virtually week by week or even day by day, see Russell McClintock, Lincoln and the Decision for War: The Northern Response to Secession (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008).
3 “Inaugural Address”, Abraham Lincoln, “First Inaugural Address,” in Abraham Lincoln, Slavery, and the Civil War, ed. Michael P. Johnson (Boston: Bedford Books, 2001), 109–10, 112–13.
4 “Emigration to Hayti,” DM, January 1861. Redpath was the general agent of the Haitian Bureau of Emigration. See Foner, Life and Writings, 2:556n24. Blake McKelvey, “Lights and Shadows in Local Negro History,” in Rochester History 21 (October 1959), 11. Douglass wishes “safe and speedy voyage” to twenty-six adults and twelve children, mostly from Rochester, heading to Haiti to take up life growing cotton.
5 “Haitian Emigration” and “Proslavery Mobs and Proslavery Ministry,” DM, March 1861; “Emigration to Hayti.” Douglass used both spellings of Haiti.
6 “A Trip to Haiti,” DM, May 1861; “Outbreak of Hostilities—Martial Spirit,” Morganblatt, May 1861, in Lohmann, Radical Passion, 207; Diedrich, Love across Color Lines, 234–35, 237.
7 “Trip to Haiti.”
8 Ibid., “Outbreak of Hostilities,” 207–9; Diedrich, Love across Color Lines, 237–39.
9 Bondage and Freedom, 184.
10 “The Victors Conquered by the Vanquished,” DM, March 1861.
11 “Nemesis,” DM, May 1861; Isaiah 58:6.
12 “Who Killed the American Eagle?,” DM, April 1861.
13 Ibid. On how Douglass fit into the biblical traditions of millennialism and apocalypticism and their role in the coming of the Civil War, see Moorhead, American Apocalypse, 42–81; Tuveson, Redeemer Nation, 137–86; Blight, Frederick Douglass’ Civil War, esp. ch. 5.
14 “Revolutions Never Go Backward,” speech in Rochester, May 5, 1861, Douglass Papers, ser. 1, 3:427–29; Exodus 7:10–12; DM, June 1861.
15 “Hope and Despair in These Cowardly Times,” speech in Rochester, April 29, 1861, Douglass Papers, ser. 1, 3:424–25.
16 “Antislavery in Rochester,” DM, June 1861; “The American Apocalypse,” speech in Rochester, June 16, 1861; “Revolutions Never Go Backward,” Douglass Papers, ser. 1, 3:434, 442; Griffiths Crofts to Douglass, Sherwood, England, February 12, 1861, DM, April 1861.
17 “The Reign of Ruffianism—the Brutal Oppression and Blood-Stained South—Life in the Land of Chivalry,” DM, May 1861; “Black Regiments Proposed,” DM, May 1861; “Revolutions Never Go Backward,” 3:431, 434–35.
18 “American Apocalypse,” 3:444; “Position of the Government toward Slavery,” DM, June 1861.
19 “American Apocalypse,” 3:437–38; Revelation 12:7–9.
20 On Douglass and violence, see Ronald T. Takaki, Violence in the Black Imagination: Essays and Documents (New York: Putnam, 1972), 17–35; Leslie F. Goldstein, “Violence as an Instrument for Social Change: The Views of Frederick Douglass,” Journal of Negro History 61 (1976): 61–72; Martin, Mind of Frederick Douglass, 24, 167–68; Blight, Frederick Douglass’ Civil War, 91–97.
21 Barbara Ehrenreich, Blood Rites: The Origins and History of the Passions of War (New York: Granta, 1997), 132; “American Apocalypse,” 3:437. On the dangers and misuse of biological metaphors to understand war, and the notion that beliefs and ideology prompt men to war, see Jeffrey H. Goldstein, “Beliefs About Human Aggression,” and Jay Winter, “Causes of War,” both in Aggression and War: Their Biological and Social Bases, ed. Jo Groebel and Robert A. Hinde (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 10–19, 194–201.
22 See Peter Walker, Moral Choices: Memory, Desire, and Imagination in Nineteenth Century American Abolition (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1978), 225, 236, 247. And see the work of psychologist Allison Davis, Leadership, Love and Aggression (San Diego: Harcourt Brace, 1983), 20–23, 29, 35–37, 41, 52–53, 58, 74, 79. Davis agrees that Douglass carried out of slavery a genuine hatred for slaveholders, but that it was “healed” or resolved essentially by 1860. Davis does not follow the issue of vengeance into the war years.
23 “Sudden Revolution in Northern Sentiment” and “The Past and the Present,” DM, May 1861. See Walt Whitman, “Beat! Beat! Drums!,” in Portable Walt Whitman, 216–17. On the dehumanization of enemies or victims, see Herbert C. Kelman, “Violence without Moral Restraint: Reflections on the Dehumanization of Victims and Victimizers,” in Varieties of Psychohistory, ed. George M. Kren and Leon H. Rappaport (New York: Springer, 1976), 282–314.
24 “The Future of the Abolition Cause,” DM, April 1861.
25 “American Apocalypse,” 3:440–42.
26 “Revolutions Never Go Backward,” 3:432; “American Apocalypse,” 3:439.
27 “Shall Slavery Survive the War?,” DM, September 1861; “The War and Slavery,” DM, August 1861. On the reactions of Northern conservatives to the First Battle of Bull Run, see George M. Frederickson, The Inner Civil War: Northern Intellectuals and the Crisis of the Union (New York: Oxford University Press, 1965), 73–76.
28 “The Rebels, the Government, and the Difference Between Them,” DM, August 1861.
29 “The Duty of Abolitionists in the Present State of the Country,” DM, October 1861; “Signs of the Times,” DM, November 1861, a response to a letter from S. Dutton, Meredith, NY, October 14, 1861.
30 “Signs of Barbarism,” DM, December 1861. Douglass cited as his source the Norfolk (VA) Day Book. “The Slaveholders’ Rebellion,” speech delivered at Himrods Corners, NY, July 4, 1862, DM, August 1862, in Foner, Life and Writings, 3:242, 244.
31 See Noll, America’s God, 424–26; Moorhead, American Apocalypse, 1–128. On the doctrine of Providence and millennial worldviews, see Nicholas Guyatt, Providence and the Invention of the United States, 1607–1876 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 249–52, 259–326.
32 “Notes on the War,” DM, July 1861; “Rebels, the Government”; and see James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 345–49.
33 Julia G. Crofts to Douglass, Edinburgh and Leeds, England, August 5 and 21, 1861, in DM, October 1861.
34 “The Contraband Goods and Fortress Monroe,” DM, July 1861; and see Eric Foner, The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery (New York: Norton, 2010), 169–71.
35 “War and Slavery”; Kate Masur, “A Rare Phenomenon of Philological Vegetation: The Word ‘Contraband’ and the Meanings of Emancipation in the United States,” Journal of American History 93 (March 2007): 1054–59; Louis P. Masur, Lincoln’s Hundred Days: The Emancipation Proclamation and the War for the Union (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), 42–65, 81–97.
36 “War and Slavery.”
37 Chicago Tribune, June 16, 1861, quoted in Foner, Fiery Trial, 170; “War and Slavery.”
38 “How to End the War,” DM, May 1861; “War and Slavery”; Foner, Fiery Trial, 176–79; Oakes, Radical and the Republican, 159–65, 169–70.
39 “Cast Off the Millstone,” DM, September 1861; “General Fremont’s Proclamation to the Rebels of Missouri,” DM, October 1861.
40 Reminiscence of Lincoln, from Don E. Fehrenbacher and Virginia Fehrenbacher, comp. and eds., Recollected Words of Abraham Lincoln (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press), 433, quoted in Oakes, Radical and the Republican, 168; “Fremont and His Proclamation,” DM, December 1861.
41 On the First Confiscation Act, see Foner, Fiery Trial, 174–75.
42 Lincoln, “Annual Message to Congress,” December 3, 1861, in Johnson, Abraham Lincoln, 141–44; John H. Bryant to Lyman Trumbull, December 6, 1861, quoted in Foner, Fiery Trial, 187; Douglass to S. Dutton, DM, November 1861.
1 “The Day of Jubilee Comes,” address at Spring Street AME Zion Church, Rochester, December 28, 1862, Douglass Papers, ser. 1, 3:543.
2 Ibid., 543–44. Douglass here plays on the language in Lincoln’s Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation (“henceforth and forever free”); John Wesley’s image of the slave trade as “that execrable sum of all villainies”; and Chief Justice Taney’s use of the statement in Dred Scott v. Sandford that black people “had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.”
3 “Free Speech Maintained in Syracuse” and “The Would-Be Mobocrats in Syracuse,” DM, December 1861.
4 On Civil War casualties, see J. David Hacker, “A Census-Based Count of the Civil War Dead,” Civil War History, December 2011, 306–47; New York Times, April 2, 2012; and Historynet.com/Civil War death statistics; “Of the War,” DM, May 1862; “Dealings with Slavery and Contrabands,” DM, December 1861. On the freedpeople, contraband camps, and disease, see Jim Downs, Sick from Freedom: African American Illness and Suffering during the Civil War and Reconstruction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), chs. 1–3.
5 Douglass to Smith, December 22, 1861, GS Papers; Smith to Douglass, December 25, 1861, FD Papers (LC).
6 McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom, 389–91.
7 Julia Griffiths Crofts to Douglass, Leeds, England, December 6, 1861, FD Papers (LC); “War with England,” DM, January 1862.
8 As Paul Fussell wrote of World War I, the experience had its way of causing a “strict division” between “Time Before and Time After.” See Paul Fussell, The Great War in Modern Memory (London: Oxford University Press, 1975), 80; “The Slave Power at Washington,” DM, January 1862. For a month-by-month account of the significance of 1862, and Lincoln’s role in events, see David Von Drehle, Rise to Greatness: Abraham Lincoln and America’s Most Perilous Year (New York: Henry Holt, 2012).
9 Julia G. Crofts to Douglass, September 24, 1861, reprinted in DM, January 1862; “The State of the War,” DM, February 1862.
10 “The Reasons for Our Troubles,” speech delivered in National Hall, Philadelphia, January 14, 1862, in Foner, Life and Writings, 3:197–99; Hamlet, act 3, sc. 1; Mathew 10:16; Isaiah 1:5.
11 “Reasons for Our Troubles,” 196, 205.
12 Ibid., 196, 207; Douglass, “Love of God, Love of Man, Love of Country,” speech delivered in Syracuse, NY, September 24, 1847, Douglass Papers, ser. 1, 2:103; Donald W. Shriver Jr., Honest Patriots: Loving a Country Enough to Remember Its Misdeeds (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 3–13, 127–205. Also see Reinhold Niebuhr, The Irony of American History (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1952).
13 “The Future of the Negro People of the Slave States,” speech delivered in Tremont Temple, Boston, February 12, 1862, in Foner, Life and Writings, 3:214–15, 221.
14 Ibid., 213.
15 “Service of Colored Men,” DM, July 1861; Charles Dickens, Martin Chuzzlewit (1844, repr., New York and London: Wordsworth Classics, 1997), 246, 272.
16 Dickens, Martin Chuzzlewit, 246, 272, 278, 282; Douglass, “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?,” 2:370–71.
17 Foner, Fiery Trial, 18–19, 34–62, 168.
18 “Message to Congress,” March 6, 1862, in The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, ed. Roy P. Basler (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1953), 5:144–46.
19 Phillips quoted in Foner, Fiery Trial, 196; “The War and How to End It,” DM, April 1862; “The War and How to End It,” speech delivered in Corinthian Hall, Rochester, March 25, 1862, Douglass Papers, ser. 1, 3:518.
20 See Foner, Fiery Trial, 123–28; Masur, Lincoln’s Hundred Days, 46–51.
21 Foner, Fiery Trial, 197–201; Douglass to Charles Sumner, April 8, 1862, in Foner, Life and Writings, 3:233–34.
22 Foner, Fiery Trial, 200–201, 212–13.
23 “Future of the Negro People of the Slave States,” 3:216. On idea of “military necessity,” see Masur, Lincoln’s Hundred Days, 26, 28, 36, 74–75.
24 Springfield Republican, quoted in Foner, Fiery Trial, 215. On content of the Second Confiscation Act, see Silvana R. Siddali, From Property to Person: Slavery and the Confiscation Acts, 1861–1862 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2005); Foner, Fiery Trial, 215–16.
25 “The Situation of the War” and “The Popular Heart,” DM, March 1862; McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom, 405–13.
26 DM, August 1862; “Appeal to Border State Representatives to Favor Compensated Emancipation,” July 12, 1862, in Basler, Collected Works, 5:317–19.
27 Julia G. Crofts to Douglass, June 18, 1862, London, in DM, August 1862.
28 “Meeting at Himrods Corners” and “The Fourth at Himrods,” DM, August 1862.
29 “The Slaveholders’ Rebellion,” in Foner, Life and Writings, 3:242–58.
30 Ibid., 243; and see Blight, Frederick Douglass’ Civil War, 76–77.
31 “The Proclamation and the Negro Army,” speech at Cooper Union, New York, February 1863, DM, March 1863.
32 “Anti-Slavery Progress,” DM, September 1862. The lyrics appeared on the cover, Atlantic Monthly, February 1862; and see Stauffer and Soskis, Battle Hymn of the Republic.
33 Nicholas Guyatt, “ ‘The Outskirts of Our Happiness’: Race and the Lure of Colonization in the Early Republic,” Journal of American History 95, no. 4 (March 2009): 986–1011; David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation (New York: Knopf, 2014), 83–104, 126–31. Guyatt shows that colonization’s more “idealistic” roots and motives, while complex and real, declined in the face of harsher forms of racism and proslavery ideology after 1840.
34 “Dr. M. R. Delany,” DM, August 1862; “Colonization,” North Star, January 26, 1849; Douglass to Benjamin Coates, April 17, 1856, in Foner, Life and Writings, 2:387–88; speech at Shiloh Church, New York City, April 30, 1863, DM, June 1863; “The Present and Future of the Colored Race in America,” speech at Church of the Puritans, New York City, May 1863, in Foner, Life and Writings, 3:350.
35 On Crosby instructions, see Walter A. Payne, “Lincoln’s Caribbean Colonization Plan,” Pacific Historian 7 (May 1963): 67–68. On Chiriqui initiative, see Paul J. Sheips, “Lincoln and the Chiriqui Colonization Project,” Journal of Negro History 37 (October 1952): 419–21. On Lincoln’s early colonizationist thought, see Basler, Collected Works, 2:132, 255, 298–99, 409–10.
36 Sheips, “Lincoln and the Chiriqui Colonization Project,” 424–27. For West Indian initiatives, see “Correspondence Respecting the Emigration of Free Negroes from the United States to the West Indies,” CO 884/2, June 19, 1863, Confidential Print, Public Record Office, London, England. On the British West Indian connection, see Tom W. Shick, Behold the Promised Land: A History of Afro-American Settler Society in Nineteenth Century Liberia (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), 124–29; Foner, Fiery Trial, 222–23; and Michael Burlingame, Lincoln: A Life, vol. 2 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), 394–95.
37 The other four clergymen were John F. Cook, John T. Costin, Cornelius Clark, and Benjamin McCoy. Allen C. Guelzo, Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation: The End of Slavery in America (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004), 142; “Address on Colonization to a Deputation of Negroes,” Basler, Collected Works, 5:370–71.
38 “Address on Colonization,” Basler, Collected Works, 5:371.
39 Ibid., 372–73.
40 Ibid., 374–75; and see Burlingame, Lincoln, 387–89.
41 “The President and His Speeches,” DM, September 1862.
42 Ibid.
43 The New York and Philadelphia resolutions are in Herbert Aptheker, ed., A Documentary History of the Negro People in the United States (New York: Citadel Press, 1968), 1:472–74; Smith letter in DM, October 1862; Liberator, August 22, 1862; Beriah Green to Gerrit Smith, September 12, 1862, GS Papers; and also see Burlingame, Lincoln, 389–91.
44 On Pomeroy and black interest, see S. C. Pomeroy to James R. Doolittle, October 20, 1862, Doolittle Papers, State Historical Society of Wisconsin, Madison, WI; and Benjamin Quarles, Lincoln and the Negro (New York: Oxford University Press, 1962), 122–23. Douglass reported that a group of blacks in Washington, DC, had petitioned the government to be colonized in Africa, DM, May 1862. He also received letters from a W. W. Tate, who challenged the editor’s position on colonization and argued that it was the best option for blacks; and from a John W. Menard of Washington, DC, who argued that the idea of a “white nationality” could never be overcome in America; DM, July 1862 and April 1863. On Pomeroy and Douglass’s sons, see Douglass to Montgomery Blair, September 16, 1862, in DM, October 1862.
45 Ronald C. White, A. Lincoln (New York: Random House, 2009), 511; Oakes, Radical and the Republican, 119–32, 191–95; Guelzo, Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, 144; Burlingame, Lincoln, 384; David Herbert Donald, Lincoln (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995), 352–53; Gabor S. Boritt, “The Voyage to the Colony of Linconia: The Sixteenth President, Black Colonization, and the Defense Mechanism of Avoidance,” Historian 37 (August 1975), 619–33; Foner, Fiery Trial, 127, 184–86, 198–200, 221–29; and Masur, Lincoln’s Hundred Days, 88–90.
46 “President and His Speeches.”
47 “The Spirit of Colonization,” DM, September 1862.
48 Ibid. “The Claims of the Negro Ethnologically Considered,” address delivered at Western Reserve College, July 12, 1854, in Foner, Life and Writings, 2:295. For this formal address at a college commencement, Douglass immersed himself in the ethnological-origins debates about “races.”
49 The letter to Pomeroy does not survive. Embedded in the protest to Pomeroy was Douglass’s letter of recommendation for his oldest son, Lewis. Montgomery Blair to Douglass, September 11, 1862, in Foner, Life and Writings, 3:281–83.
50 Douglass to Montgomery Blair, September 16, 1862, in Foner, Life and Writings, 3:283–85. On white supremacy in the nineteenth century, see George M. Fredrickson, The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny, 1817–1914 (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), 130–64.
51 Douglass to Montgomery Blair, September 16, 1862, 3:286.
52 Ibid., 288–90; Foner, Fiery Trial, 231–32; Burlingame, Lincoln, 407–11.
53 Lincoln to George B. McClellan, September 15, 1862; “Reply to Emancipation Memorial Presented by Chicago Christians of All Denominations,” September 13, 1862; in Basler, Collected Works, 5:426, 420–25; Donald, Lincoln, 358–60.
54 “Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation,” in Basler, Collected Works, 5:433–35; and see introduction by Harold Holzer at www.nysl.nysed.gov/ep/.
55 “Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation,” 434–35.
56 Harrisburg (PA) Weekly Patriot and Union, quoted in Liberator, October 3, 1862; New York Express, n.d.; New York Herald, n.d.; Albert G. Browne, Sketch of the Official Life of John A. Andrew (New York: Hurd & Houghton, 1868), 74; all in Masur, Lincoln’s Hundred Days, 106, 110, 114–15; Donald, Lincoln, 369.
57 “Emancipation Proclaimed,” DM, October 1862.
58 Donald, Lincoln, 368; Democrats quoted in Foner, Fiery Trial, 233–34.
59 “The Expedition to Chiriqui” and “Central American Scheme of Colonization,” DM, November 1862.
60 “The Slave Democracy Again in the Field,” DM, November 1862.
61 H. Oscar to Douglass, Cairo, IL, September 25, 1862, in DM, November 1862.
62 “Address to Our Friends in Great Britain and Ireland” and “Already Bearing Fruit,” DM, November 1862. On Douglass’s fund-raising with British friends, see especially Maria Webb to Douglass, Dublin, March 15, 1862; John Smith to Douglass, Glasgow, May 16, 1862; unsigned to Douglass, Westmoreland Terrace, England, August 21, 1862; Julia G. Crofts to Douglass, September 1 and December 5, 1862; Henry Richardson to Douglass, Newcastle, December 4, 1862; Mary Carpenter to Douglass, Halifax, December 5, 1862; and Alexander Imes to Douglass, Liverpool, December 23, 1862; in FD Papers (LC).
63 Lincoln, “Annual Message to Congress,” December 1, 1862, in Basler, Collected Works, 5:534; Liberator, January 9, 1863; and see Benjamin Quarles, The Negro in the Civil War (1953, repr., New York, Da Capo Press, 1989), 170–71.
64 Liberator, January 16, 1863; Quarles, Negro in the Civil War, 171–72; Mayer, All on Fire, 545–47; Blight, Frederick Douglass’ Civil War, 106.
65 Life and Times, 352–53.
66 Ibid., 353–54; Quarles, Negro in the Civil War, 173–74.
1 “Men of Color to Arms!,” a broadside, Rochester, March 21, 1863, in Foner, Life and Writings, 3:317–18; Douglass to Gerrit Smith, March 6, 1863, GS Papers.
2 See letters, Lewis to Amelia Loguen, first fiancée and later wife, from 1860 to circa 1907, Evans Collection, Savannah, GA, “Assorted Material” box.
3 Rosetta Douglass to Douglass, Philadelphia, April 4, 1862; Rosetta to Douglass, Salem, NY, August 31, September 24, and October 9, 1862, FD Papers (LC). On Rosetta’s moves and teaching jobs, also see Julia Crofts to Douglass, Leeds, December 5, 1862, FD Papers (LC). Julia expressed concern that a “Rochester Society” had not “appointed Rosetta,” and that she may also have sought a position in Washington, DC. On Rosetta, see McFeely, Frederick Douglass, 218–23.
4 Rosetta Douglass to Douglass, October 9 and December 28, 1862, FD Papers (LC). Business card for Lewis and Frederick Jr., Evans Collection, scrapbook 1. According to Charles Douglass’s later reminiscence, Lewis was also teaching school in Salem up until enlistment in the late winter of 1863. See Charles Douglass, “Some Incidents of the Home Life.”
5 Diedrich, Love across Color Lines, 171–88; Assing to Douglass, August 21, 1878, in Lohmann, Radical Passion, 340, and see xx–xxi; Fought, Women in the World of Frederick Douglass, 149–51.
6 Douglass Sprague, “My Mother as I Recall Her.”
7 “The Proclamation and the Negro Army,” speech delivered at Cooper Institute, in Foner, Life and Writings, 3:321; “January First, 1863,” DM, January 1863.
8 “Proclamation and the Negro Army,” 3:321–22. Douglass gave variations on this speech perhaps two dozen times; for example in Chicago, Metropolitan Hall, January 19, 1863, see Douglass Papers, ser. 1, 3:620–21.
9 Michael Walzer, Exodus and Revolution (New York: Basic Books, 1985), 17, 21–22; “Proclamation and the Negro Army,” 3:325–26; Heschel, Prophets, 16, 22.
10 “Proclamation and the Negro Army,” 3:323–24, 326–27; James Baldwin, “As Much Truth as One Can Bear,” New York Times, January 14, 1962.
11 “Proclamation and the Negro Army,” 3:333–36.
12 “Massachusetts” and “Movers,” DM, April 1863; Douglass to Gerrit Smith, March 6, 1863, GS Papers; Gerrit Smith to Douglass, March 10, 1863, FD Papers (LC). On Stearns and organization of the Fifty-Fourth Regiment, see McPherson, Struggle for Equality, 202–6.
13 Edwin S. Redkey, “Brave Black Volunteers: A Profile of the Fifty-Fourth Massachusetts Regiment,” in Hope and Glory: Essays on the Legacy of the Fifty-Fourth Massachusetts Regiment, ed. Martin H. Blatt, Thomas J. Brown, and Donald Yacovone (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001), 22–25; Russell Duncan, Where Death and Glory Meet: Colonel Robert Gould Shaw and the 54th Massachusetts Infantry (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1999), 66–68.
14 George L. Stearns to Douglass, Buffalo, March 24, 1863, FD Papers (LC); Charles Douglass, “Some Incidents in the Home Life”; Lewis Douglass to Amelia Loguen, Camp Meigs, March 31, 1863, Evans Collection, “Assorted Material” box. Amelia, nineteen years old in 1863, was the daughter of Jermain Loguen, former fugitive slave and abolitionist in Syracuse.
15 DM, April 1863; “Men of Color to Arms!,” 3:318; original sheet music for “John Brown” song, in Stauffer and Soskis, Battle Hymn of the Republic, after p. 151; Douglass to Gerrit Smith, March 10, 1863, GS Papers; and on Syracuse and Elmira recruits, see Milton C. Sernett, North Star Country: Upstate New York and the Crusade for African American Freedom (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2002), 240–42.
16 “Another Word to Colored Men,” DM, April 1863; “Men of Color to Arms! To Arms!,” original broadside in Gilder Lehrman Collection, New-York Historical Society; Elizur Wright, “To the Men of Color,” February 15, 1863, Antislavery Collections, Boston Public Library. The angel Gabriel has many appearances and purposes in the Bible, especially that of blowing the horn that will announce God’s coming; see Daniel 8:12; Luke 1:19. William Shakespeare, Henry V.
17 “Men of Color to Arms!,” 3:318–19.
18 “Why Should the Colored Man Enlist?,” DM, April 1863; “Great Meeting at Shiloh Church,” DM, July 1863. The meeting took place on April 27 and was presided over by the Reverend Henry Highland Garnet.
19 “Another Word to Colored Men,” DM, April 1863; “Address for the Promotion of Colored Enlistments,” speech in Philadelphia, July 6, 1863, in Foner, Life and Writings, 3:365.
20 Lewis Douglass to Amelia Loguen, Camp Meigs, May 9 and 20, 1863, Evans Collection; Charles R. Douglass to Douglass, Readville, July 6, 1863, FD Papers (LC).
21 Lewis Douglass to Amelia Loguen, Camp Meigs, April 15, May 9, and May 20, 1863, Evans Collection; Douglass visited the camp on May 16–17, while staying with Lewis Hayden in Boston, see DM, August 1863.
22 Luis F. Emilio, A Brave Black Regiment: History of the Fifty-Fourth Regiment Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry, 1863–1865 (Boston: Boston Book Co., 1891), 3–7, 19–23; Peter Burchard, One Gallant Rush: Robert Gould Shaw and His Brave Black Regiment (New York: St. Martin’s, 1965), 4–21, 74–92; Joan Waugh, “ ‘It Was a Sacrifice We Owed’: The Shaw Family and the 54th Massachusetts Regiment,” in Blatt, Brown, and Yacovone, Hope and Glory, 52–55, 63–66; Duncan, Where Death and Glory Meet, 11–34; Shaw to father, Maryland Heights, September 21, 1862, in Blue-Eyed Child of Fortune: The Civil War Letters of Colonel Robert Gould Shaw, ed. Russell Duncan (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1992), 241.
23 Burchard, One Gallant Rush, 91–92; Emilio, Brave Black Regiment, 24–30; Lewis Douglass to Amelia Loguen, May 27, 1863, Evans Collection. The regiment received four flags from Andrew in the ceremony. See Shaw’s letters to his mother, May 17 and 18, 1863, in Duncan, Blue-Eyed Child of Fortune, 332–33.
24 Emilio, Brave Black Regiment, 31–33; Duncan, Where Death and Glory Meet, 85–86.
25 Emilio, Brave Black Regiment, 33; Duncan, Where Death and Glory Meet, 87–88.
26 Lewis Douglass to Amelia Loguen, St. Simon’s Island, June 18, 1863, Evans Collection; Burchard, One Gallant Rush, 96–111; Savannah News, quoted in Duncan, Where Death and Glory Meet, 95.
27 Duncan, Where Death and Glory Meet, 103–8; Emilio, Brave Black Regiment, 199–216.
28 Burchard, One Gallant Rush, 130–37.
29 Ibid., 137–41; casualty report, and General Q. A. Gillmore’s report from the field, July 21, 1863, The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies, ser. 1, vol. 28 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1890), 201–202, 210.
30 Lewis Douglass to Amelia Loguen, July 20, 1863, quoted in Duncan, Where Death and Glory Meet, 114; Lewis Douglass to father and mother, Morris Island, July 20, 1863, in DM, August 1863.
31 Douglass reprinted General Rufus Saxton’s official account of Shaw’s death, addressed to “colored soldiers and freedmen,” July 27, 1863, DM, August 1863. And see David W. Blight, “The Shaw Memorial in the Landscape of Civil War Memory,” in Blatt, Brown, and Yacovone, Hope and Glory, 79–93.
32 For early doubts and warnings about unequal pay, before and as recruiting began, see Christian Recorder, July 26, 1862, and February 14, 1863. On the unequal pay struggle, see Ira Berlin et al., eds, Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation, 1861–1867 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1985), ser. 2, vol. 1, 17–21, 362–68; and Dudley T. Cornish, The Sable Arm: Negro Troops in the Union Army, 1861–1865 (New York: Longman’s Green, 1956), 181–96.
33 Gooding letter in Berlin et al., Freedom, ser. 2, 386; George Stephens to editor, Morris Island, SC, August 7, 1863, and August 1, 1864, in A Voice of Thunder: The Civil War Letters of George E. Stephens, ed. Donald Yacovone (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997), 252–54, 320. On mutinies, see Donald Yacovone, “The Fifty-Fourth Massachusetts Regiment, the Pay Crisis, and the ‘Lincoln Despotism,’ ” in Blatt, Brown, and Yacovone, Hope and Glory, 38–49.
34 Wicker letter in Berlin et al., Freedom, ser. 2, 402; Life and Times, 343; DM, August 1863.
35 “Condition of the Country,” DM, February 1863; “Another Law against Common Sense,” DM, March 1863.
36 Stearns quoted in McPherson, Struggle for Equality, 203; “Great Meeting at Shiloh Church,” New York, DM, June 1863; “Address for the Promotion of Colored Enlistments,” delivered at National Hall, Philadelphia, July 6, 1863, in Foner, Life and Writings, 3:362. On “double battle,” see Blight, Frederick Douglass’ Civil War, 163–67.
37 Life and Times, 356.
38 “The Commander-in-Chief and His Black Soldiers,” DM, August 1863. Douglass reprinted Lincoln’s order in the August issue of his paper. On the retaliation issue, see Quarles, Lincoln and the Negro, 173–76. Lincoln ordered his cabinet to investigate ways to protect black troops as early as February 1863.
39 Douglass to Stearns, August 1, 1863, in Foner, Life and Writings, 3:367–69; Martha Greene to Douglass, July 7, 1863, FD Papers (LC).
40 Stauffer, Giants, 3–6; Life and Times, 346–47; and see McFeely, Frederick Douglass, 228–30.
41 Douglass to Stearns, Philadelphia, August 12, 1863, Abraham Barker Papers, Historical Society of Pennsylvania; Life and Times, 349. Stanton wanted Douglass to go to Vicksburg, Mississippi.
42 This extraordinary “To whom it may concern” letter/pass is in FD Papers (LC); and see Stauffer, Giants, 11–12.
43 “Our Work Is Not Done,” speech delivered at the annual meeting of the American Anti-Slavery Society, Philadelphia, December 3–4, 1863, in Foner, Life and Writings, 3:383–84.
44 Life and Times, 347; “Our Work Is Not Done,” 384.
45 Douglass to Stearns, August 12, 1863; and see Oakes, Radical and the Republican, 210–17.
46 Life and Times, 348; Douglass to Stearns, August 12, 1863; Stauffer, Giants, 22; “To whom it may concern” pass.
47 Douglass to Stearns, August 12, 1863; “Valedictory,” August 16, 1863, DM, August 1863; C. W. Foster to Douglass, August 13 and August 21, 1863; C. W. Foster to Brigadier General Daniel H. Rucker, August 13, 1863, authorizing Douglass’s transportation; and Stearns to Douglass, August 29, 1863; all in FD Papers (LC). Foster was Stanton’s secretary. As late as August 29, Stearns believed Douglass was still going to Mississippi. See Stearns to Douglass, August 29, 1863, FD Papers (LC).
48 H. Ford Douglas to Douglass, Collinsville, TN, January 8, 1863, and Douglass’s response, DM, February 1863.
49 Life and Times, 350; Douglass to Thomas Webster, August 19, 1863, in Foner, Life and Writings, 3:377.
50 Douglass to Anglo-African, Rochester, July 27, 1863, DM, August 1863, in Foner, Life and Writings, 3:360–61.
51 Charles R. Douglass to Douglass, Boston, September 8, September 18, and December 20, 1863, FD Papers (LC).
52 Lewis Douglass to Amelia Loguen, August 15 and August 27, 1863, Morris Island, SC, Evans Collection; Henry Gooding to editors, September 9, 1863, in On the Altar of Freedom: A Black Soldier’s Civil War Letters from the Front, ed. Virginia Matzke Adams (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1991), 56–58. On the siege of Charleston and the relentless shelling of Forts Wagner and Gregory and the long-term efforts to take Fort Sumter, see Joseph Kelly, America’s Longest Siege: Charleston, Slavery, and the Slow March Toward Civil War (New York: Overlook Press, 2013), 301–12; and E. B. Long, The Civil War Day by Day: An Almanac, 1861–1865 (New York: Doubleday, 1971), covering August 8 to September 7, 395–406.
53 George E. Stephens to editor, September 1863, in Yacovone, Voice of Thunder, 269; Douglass to Gerrit Smith, October 10, 1863, GS Papers. The hospital may have been McDougall Hospital, Fort Schuyler, at Throggs Neck, where the East River meets Long Island Sound. Lewis Douglass, “Regimental Descriptive Book,” National Archives, http://www.archives.gov/education/lessons/blacks-civil-war/douglass-sons.html; certification by Dr. James McCune Smith, October 6, 1863, in “Compiled Military Service Records of Volunteer Union Soldiers,” US Colored Troops, 54th Mass. Infantry, reel 5, National Archives; and see Douglas R. Egerton, The Wars of Reconstruction: The Brief Violent History of America’s Most Progressive Era (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013), 37–41, 370–81; and Diedrich, Love Across Color Lines, 354–55.
54 Julia Griffiths Crofts to Douglass, September 1, 1862, April 3, 1863, and December 10, 1863, all in FD Papers (LC). For the continued flow of British funds to Douglass’s support, professional and personal, see Julia Griffiths Crofts to Douglass, Leeds, February 5 and April 15, 1864; an unsigned letter to Douglass, March 5, 1864, telling of a children’s musical concert planned to raise money for Douglass’s cause; Mary Carpenter to Douglass, Halifax, February 19, 1864, and August 5, 1864; and numerous letters from an admirer, Ame Draz, to Douglass, July 12, August 17, and December 15, 1863, and March 24 and October 15, 1864, all in FD Papers (LC).
55 “Address delivered at the Dedication of the Cemetery at Gettysburg,” November 19, 1863, Basler, Collected Works, 7:22–23; Douglas L. Wilson, Lincoln’s Sword: The Presidency and the Power of Words (New York: Knopf, 2006), 201, 206–37; and see Garry Wills, Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That Remade America (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992), 38, 40.
56 “Annual Message to Congress,” December 8, 1863, in Basler, Collected Words, 7:49–51, 53; “The Mission of the War,” delivered at Cooper Institute, New York, February 13, 1864, in Foner, Life and Writings, 3:401.
1 “Our Work Is Not Done,” 3:378–83.
2 Thomas H. C. Hinton, Christian Recorder, December 26, 1863.
3 Ibid.; Lincoln, “Annual Message to Congress,” 7:49, 51, 53. While in Washington, Douglass visited the burgeoning contraband camp, known as Freedmen’s Village, in Arlington, across the Potomac River.
4 Kate Masur, An Example for All the Land: Emancipation and the Struggle over Equality in Washington, DC (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), ch. 1; Ernest B. Furgurson, Freedom Rising: Washington in the Civil War (New York: Knopf, 2004), 197–98, 256–57; Constance McLaughlin Green, The Secret City: A History of Race Relations in the Nation’s Capital (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1967), 62–64.
5 Harriet Jacobs, “Life Among the Contrabands,” Liberator, September 5, 1862; Jean Fagan Yellin, Harriet Jacobs: A Life (New York: Basic Books, 2004), 159, 164–67; Amy Post to Isaac Post, Washington, DC, December 11, 1863, Post Family Papers, University of Rochester.
6 Julia Crofts to Douglass, Leeds, England, February 5, 1864, FD Papers (LC). Douglass’s letter to Julia, which does not survive, had been dated January 9. Assing, “Anniversary of the Antislavery Society,” Morgenblatt, January 1864; and Assing, “A Negro Regiment—Radical Germans,” Morgenblatt, March 1864; in Lohmann, Radical Passion, 275, 280.
7 Martha Greene to Douglass, July 7, 1864; Julia Crofts to Douglass, April 15, 1864; and Mary Carpenter to Douglass, February 19, 1864; FD Papers (LC).
8 “The Mission of the War,” address delivered in New York, January 13, 1864, Douglass Papers, ser. 1, 4:3–5, 7, 23.
9 Ibid., 8–9, 13.
10 Ibid., 16.
11 Ibid., 19, 24; Isaiah 48:18. In his ending of the “Dream” speech, King used the words in Amos 5:24: “Let justice run down like waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream.” Whether King was aware of Douglass’s speech, delivered a hundred years earlier, is not clear. See Drew D. Hansen, The Dream: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Speech That Inspired a Nation (New York: Ecco, HarperCollins, 2003), 104.
12 “Genealogy and Descendants of Frederick Douglass,” prepared for author by Christine McKay, 2013; McFeely, Frederick Douglass, 222–23; Egerton, Wars of Reconstruction, 41; and Julia Crofts to Douglass, December 10, 1863 and February 5, 1864, FD Papers (LC). Rosetta and Nathan Sprague lived with her parents at the beginning of their marriage, but eventually moved to a house owned by the elder Douglass on Hamilton Place in Rochester. See http://rochester.twcnews.com/content/news/492838/frederick-douglass—forgotten-home-now-a-landmark/?ap=1&MP4/.
13 Lewis Douglass to Douglass, August 22, 1864, FD Papers (LC); Lewis Douglass, “Regimental Descriptive Book,” National Archives.
14 Charles Douglass to Douglass, City Point, VA, near Bermuda Hundred, May 31, 1864, FD Papers (LC); War of the Rebellion, vol. 36, pt. 1, 258, and vol. 51, pt. 1, 251.
15 Charles Douglass to Douglass, May 31, 1864.
16 Charles Douglass, “Regimental Descriptive Book”; Douglass to Abraham Lincoln, undated, and Lincoln endorsement, September 1, 1864, service record of Charles R. Douglass, National Archives; Charles Douglass to Father and Mother, Point Lookout, September 15, 1864, FD Papers (LC).
17 McKay, “Genealogy and Descendants of Frederick Douglass.”
18 “Mission of the War,” 4:4, 13.
19 “The Work of the Future,” DM, November 1862, in Foner, Life and Writings, 3:290–92.
20 “What Shall Be Done with the Slaves if Emancipated,” DM, January 1862, in Foner, Life and Writings, 3:188. And see “Arms Not Alms for the Contrabands,” DM, May 1862. See Clarence Thomas’s dissent in Grutter v. Bollinger 539 US 206 (2003). Thomas quoted at length from Douglass’s 1862 speech to justify his opposition to affirmative action programs at the University of Michigan and elsewhere. On Thomas’s misunderstandings of Douglass, see Buccola, Political Thought of Frederick Douglass, 162–67. For a critique of Thomas and other misuses of Douglass by the American right wing, see Jack Turner, “Douglass and Political Judgment: The Post-Reconstruction Years,” copy of MS provided to the author. Also see Sean Coons, “Frederick Douglass: New Tea Party Hero?,” Salon, July 3, 2013.
21 On British friends and their money (for Douglass’s own work and travel as well as for freedmen’s relief) during wartime, see Julia Crofts to Douglass, February 5, April 15, August 19, and November 23, 1864; Mary T. Cropper to Douglass, July 12, 1864; Mary Carpenter to Douglass, August 5, 1864; Thomas Coates to Douglass, February 25, 1865; Ame Draz to Douglass, February 26, 1865; all in FD Papers (LC).
22 “The Future of the Negro People of the Slave States,” Boston, February 12, 1862, in Foner, Life and Writings, 3:211; “What Shall Be Done with the Slaves,” 3:190–91; and see Martin, Mind of Frederick Douglass, 67–70.
23 “What Shall Be Done With the Slaves,” 3:190.
24 “Future of the Negro People of the Slave States,” 3:222.
25 Ibid., 3:218.
26 Douglass to an English correspondent, June 1864, in Foner, Life and Writings, 3:404; “A Day for Poetry and Song,” remarks at Zion Church, December 28, 1862, Foner, Life and Writings, 3, 312.
27 “What the Black Man Wants,” speech delivered in Boston, April 1865, in Foner, Life and Writings, 4:158–60.
28 Montgomery Blair, Comments on the Policy Inaugurated by the President, in a Letter and Two Speeches (New York: Hall, Clayton, & Medole, 1863), 10, 17–19; Lincoln to Zachariah Chandler, November 20, 1863, in Basler, Collected Works, 7:24; and see Foner, Fiery Trial, 268–75.
29 See reminiscences and quotations in Burlingame, Lincoln, 2:609–16. On Lincoln’s Ten Per-Cent plan as “gradualism” and as a means of making “emancipation and reunion palatable,” see Foner, Fiery Trial, 269–70; and Stauffer, Giants, 278–79.
30 Phillips quoted in Burlingame, Lincoln, 2:637, and see 632–35; and on Frémont third-party movement, also see Michael Vorenberg, Final Freedom: The Civil War, the Abolition of Slavery, and the Thirteenth Amendment (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 116–21. Garrison in Liberator, March 18, 1864. Also see Blight, Frederick Douglass’ Civil War, 183–84. On the Phillips-Garrison split, see McPherson, Struggle for Equality, 260–67.
31 Lincoln to Nathaniel P. Banks, November 5, 1863, in Boston, Collected Works, 7:1; War of the Rebellion, ser. 1, 15:666–67, vol. 34, pt. 2, 227–31; McPherson, Struggle for Equality, 243–45, 289–90.
32 Liberator, March 11, 1864; McPherson, Struggle for Equality, 289–90; Douglass to E. Gilbert, Esq., Rochester, May 23, 1864, in Foner, Life and Writings, 3:405.
33 Douglass to an English correspondent, June 1864, in Liberator, September 16, 1864; and Foner, Life and Writings, 3:404.
34 Gay to Elizabeth Gay, August 8, 1864, quoted in McPherson, Struggle for Equality, 280; Blight, Frederick Douglass’ Civil War, 183.
35 White, A. Lincoln, 612–13; Blight, Frederick Douglass’ Civil War, ch. 5; Lincoln, “A House Divided,” speech in Springfield, IL, June 16, 1858, in Johnson, ed., Abraham Lincoln, Slavery and the Civil War: Selected Writings and Speeches (Boston: Bedford Books, 2001), 63; Douglass, “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July,” 2:361, 368, 387; Lincoln, “Annual Message,” December 1, 1862, in Boston, Collected Works, 5:537; Douglass, “Antislavery Progress,” DM, September 1862. Lincoln drew from 1 Peter 4:12 and Douglass from 1 Corinthians 3:15.
36 Richard J. Carwardine, Lincoln (London: Pearson, Longman, 2003), 220–25; Lincoln, “Meditation on the Divine Will,” in Boston, Collected Works, 5:403–4. For the most sustained analyses of this document, see Wilson, Lincoln’s Sword, 253–63; and White, A. Lincoln, 612–15. Wilson makes a compelling case for dating the “Meditation” in 1864 (see pp. 329–30).
37 See Blight, Frederick Douglass’ Civil War, 106–8; “Nemesis,” DM, May 1861; and Isaiah 10:27. Another favorite scriptural text for Douglass, which he used in many ways, was Isaiah 1:4–5.
38 John Eaton, Grant, Lincoln, and the Freedmen: Reminiscences of the Civil War (New York: Longman’s, Green, 1907), 168–69. On Eaton and the contraband camps, see Ira Berlin et al., eds., Free at Last: A Documentary History of Slavery, Freedom, and the Civil War (New York: New Press, 1992), 185–200. As for Lincoln’s famous public letters that could have influenced Douglass, I have in mind especially Lincoln to James C. Conkling, August 26, 1863, and Lincoln to Albert G. Hodges, April 4, 1864, in Johnson, Abraham Lincoln, 255–58, 285–86.
39 Eaton, Grant, Lincoln, and the Freedmen, 173–75; Stauffer, Giants, 282–85.
40 “Interview with Alexander W. Randall and Joseph T. Mills,” in Basler, Collected Works, 7:508.
41 “Mission of the War,” in Foner, Life and Writings, 3:394; Life and Times, 359.
42 Life and Times, 358. Many prominent Republicans, as well as some of Lincoln’s closest advisers in his cabinet, believed as late as August that he would not win reelection. See Vorenberg, Final Freedom, 150–52.
43 Life and Times, 359; Eaton, Grant, Lincoln, and the Freedmen, 175–76; Stauffer, Giants, 290.
44 Julia Crofts to Douglass, Hawley, Staffordshire, England, August 19, 1864, FD Papers (LC); Douglass to Abraham Lincoln, August 29, 1864, in Foner, Life and Writings, 3:405–6; Life and Times, 358.
45 McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom, 771–74; William T. Sherman to Henry W. Halleck, south of Atlanta, September 3, 1864, in Sherman’s Civil War: Selected Correspondence of William T. Sherman, ed. Brooks D. Simpson and Jean V. Berlin (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 695–96; Allan Nevins and Milton Halsey Thomas, eds., Diary of George Templeton Strong (New York: MacMillan, 1952), 480–81.
46 Douglass to Theodore Tilton, October 15, 1864, in Foner, Life and Writings, 3:423–24. On abolitionists stumping for Lincoln in 1864, see McPherson, Struggle for Equality, 383–84.
47 Job 1:21.
1 Proceedings of the National Convention of Colored Men, Held in the City of Syracuse, NY, October 4–7, 1864 (Boston: Rand & Avery, 1864), 3–4, copy in Sterling Library, Yale University. McCune Smith died a year later in November 1865. Also see Vorenberg, Final Freedom, 158–59.
2 Proceedings of the National Convention of Colored Men, 4–7.
3 Ibid., 8–9, 12–13, 15. The black regiment was also known as the First Louisiana Native Guards.
4 “Address of the Colored National Convention, to the People of the United States,” Syracuse, NY, October 4–7, 1864, in Foner, Life and Writings, 3:409–10.
5 Ibid., 410–13.
6 Ibid., 412, 416.
7 Ibid., 418–21. On Douglass and political liberalism, see Myers, Frederick Douglass, 1–16, 127–37; and Buccola, Political Thought of Frederick Douglass, 65–75.
8 Lincoln, “To Whom It May Concern,” July 18, 1864, in Basler, Collected Works, 7:451; Vorenberg, Final Freedom, 146–49; Cincinnati Enquirer, July 25, 1864, in Vorenberg, Final Freedom, 149.
9 Vorenberg, Final Freedom, 155–56; “Address of the Colored National Convention,” 3:414–15.
10 Miscegenation: The Theory of the Blending of the Races, Applied to the American Man and Negro (New York: H. Dexter, Hamilton, 1864); Vorenberg, Final Freedom, 101; Forrest G. Wood, Black Scare: The Racist Response to Emancipation and Reconstruction (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), 53–79; Paul D. Escott, Lincoln’s Dilemma: Blair, Sumner, and the Republican Struggle over Racism and Equality in the Civil War Era (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2014), 174–76.
11 New York World, September 23, 1864; miscegenation passages all quoted in Vorenberg, Final Freedom, 160–62.
12 W. Dean Burnham, Presidential Ballots, 1836–1892 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1955), 247, 888; McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom, 803–5; “Diary” of Christian Fleetwood, Christian Abraham Fleetwood Papers, Library of Congress manuscript division; citation for Medal of Honor, http://amhistory.si.edu/militaryhistory/collection/object.asp?ID=417.
13 Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, June 2, 1882, Evans Collection, Savannah, scrapbook 2. The letter to the editor was by a person who had just seen Douglass deliver a Decoration Day address in Rochester, May 30, 1882.
14 “The Final Test of Self-Government,” address in Rochester, Spring Street AME Zion Church, November 13, 1864, Douglass Papers, ser. 1, 4:31–32; Genesis 8:11–13. For understanding of Noah’s ark and the flood, and Genesis generally, see Walter Brueggemann, Genesis: A Bible Commentary for Teaching and Preaching (Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1982), 11–88.
15 “Final Test of Self-Government,” 4:33–34, 36–37.
16 Vorenberg, Final Freedom, 172–74; Preston, Young Frederick Douglass, 163–64; Douglass to a friend in England, New York Independent, March 2, 1865; “A Friendly Word to Maryland,” address delivered in Baltimore, November 17, 1864, Douglass Papers, ser. 1, 3:38–39.
17 “Friendly Word to Maryland,” 3:41–42; Liberator, November 25 and December 2, 1864; NASS, November 26, 1864.
18 “Friendly Word to Maryland,” 3:39–40, 43–44; Narrative, 84.
19 “Friendly Word to Maryland,” 3:45–46, 49.
20 Ibid., 3:47–48.
21 Ibid., 3:50.
22 Lewis Douglass to Douglass, June 9, 1865, Douglass Collection, Moorland-Spingarn Center, Howard University, Washington, DC; and see Preston, Young Frederick Douglass, 164–65.
23 Benjamin F. Auld to Douglass, September 11, 1891, FD Papers (LC); Douglass Papers, ser. 1, vol. 3, partial speaking itinerary, 1864–80, xix–xx; and see Preston, Young Frederick Douglass, 165–67.
24 Liberator, December 30, 1864, and January 20, 1865; Douglass Papers, ser. 1, vol. 3, speaking itinerary, xx.
25 Douglass Sprague, “My Mother as I Recall Her.”
26 Frederick Douglass Jr., “F. Douglass, Jr. in Brief from 1842 to 1890,” handwritten personal narrative, n.d., Evans Collection, Assorted Material box; Charles R. Douglass to Douglass, Freedmen’s Hospital, Washington, DC, February 19, 1865, FD Papers (LC). On the Fifty-Fifth Massachusetts and the Battle of Honey Hill, see Luis F. Emilio, A Brave Black Regiment: History of the Fifty-Fourth Regiment Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry, 1863–1865 (Boston: Boston Book Co., 1891), 236–53.
27 Lewis Douglass to Amelia Loguen, Mitchellville, Maryland, September 28, 1864; and Lewis to Amelia, Rochester, March 26, 1865; Evans Collection, family letters. In Mitchellville, which is on the Western Shore, at a federal hospital, Lewis may have been engaged in another part of his convalescence.
28 Diedrich, Love across Color Lines, 255–58.
29 Assing to Ludmilla Assing, Hoboken, NJ, April 3, 1868, and Rochester, NY, August 24, 1868, Karl August Varnhagen von Ense Papers, Jagiellonian Library, Jagiellonian University, Krakow, Poland, with assistance of Leigh Fought, translated by Katharina Schmidt.
30 Ottilie Assing, “The Presidential Election,” Morgenblatt, September 1864; “The Presidential Election,” November 1864, in Lohmann, Radical Passion, 283–92.
31 Assing, “Presidential Election,” Morgenblatt, November 1864; “Christmas and New Year’s—Slavery—Everett—a New German Book,” Morgenblatt, January 1865; in Lohmann, Radical Passion, 288, 295.
32 Assing to Ludmilla Assing, Hoboken, NJ, February 3, 1865, Varnhagen von Ense Papers. And see Vorenberg, Final Freedom, 197–204.
33 Charles Douglass to Douglass, February 9, 1865, FD Papers (LC); Douglass Papers, ser. 1, vol. 3, itineraries, xx; Vorenberg, Final Freedom, 205–10.
34 “Black Freedom Is the Prerequisite for Victory,” address at Cooper Institute, New York, January 13, 1865, Douglass Papers, ser. 1, 4:51, 58.
35 “What the Black Man Wants,” address delivered in Boston, January 26, 1865, Douglass Papers, ser. 1, 4:61–64, 66.
36 “Black Freedom Is the Prerequisite to Victory” and “What the Black man Wants,” 4:57–59, 66.
37 “What the Black Man Wants,” 4:58.
38 Luke 16:19–31. “Rock My Soul” was popularized by Peter Paul & Mary as well as Elvis Presley in the 1960s. The story of Lazarus and the rich man has been used through the ages as a mirror for inequality, for how the last shall be first.
39 “Black Freedom Is the Prerequisite for Victory” and “The Fall of Richmond,” address delivered in Faneuil Hall, Boston, April 4, 1865, both in Douglass Papers, ser. 1, 4:55–56, 73–74.
40 Ronald C. White, Lincoln’s Greatest Speech: The Second Inaugural (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2002), 24–29; Stauffer, Giants, 292–95; and see Masur, Example for All the Land, 22–28, 30–32, 54–55; Ferguson, Freedom Rising, 197–98, 256–57; and Green, Secret City, 62–64.
41 Life and Times, 361–62.
42 Ibid., 364–65; White, Lincoln’s Greatest Speech, 37–39; and see John Muller, Frederick Douglass in Washington, D.C., the Lion of Anacostia (Charleston, SC: History Press, 2012), 31–33.
43 Life and Times, 364; Lincoln, “Second Inaugural,” in Basler, Collected Works, 8:56–57; “Abraham Lincoln: Great Man of Our Century,” address delivered in Brooklyn, NY, February 13, 1893, Douglass Papers, ser. 1, 5:535–37.
44 Life and Times, 365.
45 Ibid., 365–66.
46 Ibid., 366; and see David W. Blight, “Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass: A Relationship in Language, Politics and Memory,” in Blight, Beyond the Battlefield, 78–79, 87. Henry C. Warmoth, an army officer from Illinois and later Reconstruction governor of Louisiana, was an eyewitness to this exchange at the White House, confirming the president’s appeal to Douglass about the speech. See Henry Clay Warmoth Diary, March 4, 1865, Henry Clay Warmoth Papers, Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill; and see Foner, Fiery Trial, 405n10.
47 Douglass, “Abraham Lincoln, a Speech,” FD Papers (LC), hdl.loc.gov/loc.mss/mfd.22015; Martha Hodes, Mourning Lincoln (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015), 11; and see Richard Wightman Fox, Lincoln’s Body: A Cultural History (New York: Norton, 2015), 24–46.
48 Life and Times, 371; “Our Martyred President,” speech delivered at City Hall, Rochester, April 15, 1865, Douglass Papers, ser. 1, 4:74–76. I also relied on a handwritten manuscript version of this speech, in which the language, if not the spirit, of the published text changes. Speech on Lincoln’s death, Rochester, handwritten MS, Evans Collection, Savannah, scrapbook 4.
49 “Our Martyred President,” 4:76–78; speech on Lincoln’s death, Evans Collection, scrapbook 4.
50 “Our Martyred President,” 4:77–78.
51 Life and Times, 372; and see Blight, Frederick Douglass’ Civil War, 188.
1 Life and Times, 373.
2 Shakespeare’s Tragedy of Othello: The Moor of Venice, as produced by Edwin Booth, intro. by Henry L. Hinton (New York: Henry L. Hinton, 1870), 86–93; and http://www.shakespeare-navigators.com/othello/S33.html#exitdesdemona.
3 Tilden G. Edelstein, “Othello in America: The Drama of Racial Intermarriage,” in Region, Race and Reconstruction: Essays in Honor of C. Vann Woodward, ed. J. Morgan Kousser and James M. McPherson (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), 179–85; Adams quotation, 185. And see Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare and Modern Culture (New York: Pantheon Books, 2008), 154–77.
4 Ottilie Assing to Ludmilla Assing, May 23, 1869, Varnhagen von Ense Papers; Shakespeare’s Tragedy of Othello, intro., iii–ix; Edelstein, “Othello in America,” 186–91; Arthur W. Bloom, Edwin Booth: A Biography and Performance History (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2013), ch. 13.
5 Shakespeare’s Tragedy of Othello, 61–62; and for the ways Shakespeare helped shape American speech and his sheer popularity, see Lawrence W. Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 37–38, 48–52, 57–60.
6 Phebe Dean to Amy Post, February 27, 1868, Post Family Papers; Chase invitation and Douglass response in McFeely, Frederick Douglass, 254; the desire to meet Auld, Douglass to Lydia Maria Child, July 30, 1865, Post Family Papers; on possible farming, see Life and Times, 374; and see Diedrich, Love across Color Lines, 258, 261–62.
7 Julia Crofts to Douglass, April 28 and May 19, 1865, FD Papers (LC). With the May letter Griffiths sent £27, including her own and that of three other ladies’ associations. Extract from Augusta (GA) Constitutionalist, n.d., Evans Collection, scrapbook 1.
8 Exodus 14:13; “In What New Skin Will the Old Snake Come Forth?,” address delivered in New York, Church of the Puritans, May 10, 1865, Douglass Papers, ser. 1, 4:79–85; Liberator, May 26, 1865.
9 J. Thomas Scharf, The Chronicles of Baltimore, Being a Complete History of Baltimore Town and Baltimore City from the Earliest Period to the Present Time (Baltimore: Turnbull Brothers, 1874), 661; and see from Maryland State Archives, http://msa.maryland.gov/msa/stagser/s1259/121/6050/html/douginst.html.
10 “The Douglass Institute,” address in Baltimore, September 29, 1865, Douglass Papers, ser. 1, 4:86–89.
11 Ibid., 91–96. Near the end of the speech, Douglass deftly quoted, unannounced and slightly altered, a verse from Whittier’s poem “Pennsylvania Hall.” See Horace E. Scudder, ed., The Complete Poetical Works of John Greenleaf Whittier, Cambridge ed. (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1894), 280. Whittier had delivered the poem at the dedication of Pennsylvania Hall, an antislavery edifice, on May 15, 1838.
12 Life and Times, 374–76.
13 “Reconstruction,” Atlantic Monthly, December 1866, in Foner, Life and Writings, 4:198–99, 202.
14 Ibid., 199–201; Herman Melville, Battle Pieces and Aspects of the War (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1866), 272. Melville’s “Supplement,” a kind of epilogue, was itself an essay on the nature and meaning of Reconstruction.
15 Hans Trefousse, Andrew Johnson: A Biography (New York: Norton, 1989), 69–254; Eric L. McKitrick, Andrew Johnson and Reconstruction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960), 85–92, 158–74, 253–59.
16 John Hope Franklin, Reconstruction after the Civil War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961), 54–58; Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877 (New York: Harper & Row, 1988), 199–201; “In What Skin Will the Old Snake Come Forth?” and “Douglass Institute,” 4:82, 91.
17 Foner, Reconstruction, 246–47, 252–61; Franklin, Reconstruction after the Civil War, 57–58.
18 Report of the Joint Committee on Reconstruction, 1st sess., 39th Cong. (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1866), 224–29, 112–13; Benjamin B. Kendrick, The Journal of the Joint Committee of Fifteen on Reconstruction (New York: Columbia University, 1914), 264–67; Foner, Reconstruction, 246–47; Franklin, Reconstruction after the Civil War, 58–59.
19 George T. Downing to Douglass, January 18, 1866, FD Papers (LC). Henry Highland Garnet to Lewis Douglass, January 17, 1866; Lewis Douglass to General Oliver O. Howard, January 22, 1866; George T. Downing, Frederick Douglass, Lewis Douglass, and six others to Charles Sumner, n.d., but is January 1866; Evans Collection, scrapbook unnumbered. “The Claims of Our Race,” interview with President Andrew Johnson, Washington, DC, February 7, 1866, Douglass Papers, ser. 1, 4:96–99; Egerton, Wars of Reconstruction, 192–93.
20 “Claims of Our Race,” 4:99–100; Life and Times, 382.
21 “Claims of Our Race,” 4:101–5.
22 Ibid., 97, 104–5. Philip Ripley was the correspondent of the New York World. The stenographer was James O. Clephane of the Washington Evening Star. See Evening Star, February 7, 1866. Quotes in Trefousse, Andrew Johnson, 242. And see Quarles, Frederick Douglass, 226–28.
23 “Reply of the Colored Delegation to the President,” February 7, 1866, in Foner, Life and Writings, 4:191–93.
24 Life and Times, 378; “Sources of Danger to the Republic,” speech delivered in St. Louis, MO, February 8, 1867, Douglass Papers, ser. 1, 4:149, 159–60, 167.
25 “In What New Skin Will the Old Snake Come Forth?,” 4:83; Patrick W. Riddleberger, 1866: The Critical Year Revisited (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1979); Howard K. Beale, The Critical Year: A Study of Andrew Johnson and Reconstruction (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1930); Douglass to Charles Sumner, October 19, 1866, in Foner, Life and Writings, 4:198.
26 Charles Douglass to Douglass, December 14, 1866, and February 10 and 24, 1867; Rosetta Sprague to Douglass, April 24, 1867; FD Papers (LC); see itineraries, Douglass Papers, ser. 1, 4:xxi–xxii.
27 William L. Hodge to Johnson, February 8, 1866; James H. Embry to Johnson, February 9, 1866; Ralph Phinney to Johnson, February 15, 1866; Administration Friend to Johnson, March 10, 1866; James B. Bingham to Johnson, May 17, 1866; in Paul H. Bergeron, ed., The Papers of Andrew Johnson, vol. 10 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1992), 60–63, 102, 232, 513–14.
28 Foner, Reconstruction, 243–46; Trumbull quote, 243.
29 “Veto of Civil Rights Bill,” Washington, DC, March 27, 1866, in Bergeron, Papers of Andrew Johnson, 10:313–14, 318–20; and see Trefousse, Andrew Johnson, 245–49.
30 Bingham, in Congressional Globe, 37th Cong., 2nd sess. (1862), 1639; Stevens, “The Pending Canvass! Speech of the Honorable Thaddeus Stevens,” Bedford, PA, September 4, 1866, both quoted in William E. Nelson, The Fourteenth Amendment: From Political Principle to Judicial Doctrine (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 72. And see Gerard N. Magliocca, American Founding Son: John Bingham and the Invention of the Fourteenth Amendment (New York: NYU Press, 2013).
31 John Bingham, “Speech: The Amendment of the Constitution,” January 25, 1866 (Washington, DC: Congressional Globe Office, 1866), 2, 4, Huntington Library, San Marino, CA.
32 “Majority and Minority Reports of the Joint Committee on Reconstruction,” June 18, 1866, in Edward McPherson, The Political History of the United States of America during the Period of Reconstruction, April 15, 1865–July 15, 1870 (1871; repr., New York: Da Capo Press, 1972), 92–93; Howard N. Meyer, XIV: The Amendment That Refused to Die (Boston: Beacon, 1973), 39–68; John Bingham, “One Country, One Constitution, One People,” February 28, 1866 (Washington, DC: Congressional Globe Office, 1866), 1–3, 6, Huntington Library, San Marino, CA. On Bingham’s role in the Fourteenth Amendment, see Garrett Epps, Democracy Reborn: The Fourteenth Amendment and the Fight for Equal Rights in Post–Civil War America (New York: Henry Holt, 2006), 95–99, 164–72, 225–27.
33 Epps, Democracy Reborn, 224–39, 247–50; Nelson, Fourteenth Amendment, 40–90; and Harold M. Hymen, A More Perfect Union: The Impact of the Civil War and Reconstruction on the Constitution (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1975), 446–71.
34 For full text and vote counts, see McPherson, Political History of the United States, 102–6.
35 Ibid., 102.
36 “The Assassination and Its Lessons,” speech delivered in Washington, DC, at First Presbyterian Church, February 13, 1866, Douglass Papers, ser. 1, 4:106; see headnote, 108–10, 115–16.
37 Genesis 18:16–19:29; Brueggemann, Genesis, 162–76.
38 “The Issues of the Day,” address in Washington, DC, March 10, 1866, Douglass Papers, ser. 1, 4:118–23; for broadside, see Administration Friend to Johnson, March 10, 1866, 10:234.
39 NASS, July 7, 1866; see Hans Trefousse, Thaddeus Stevens: Nineteenth Century Egalitarian (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997).
40 Foner, Reconstruction, 261–63; Ted Tunnell, Crucible of Reconstruction: War, Radicalism, and Race in Louisiana, 1862–1877 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1984), 103–7.
41 McPherson, Struggle for Equality, 360–62; Blight, Frederick Douglass’ Civil War, 192; Foner, Reconstruction, 264; Douglass to John Van Voorhis, August 30, 1866, Rochester Union and Advertiser, September 1, 1866; McFeely, Frederick Douglass, 250–51.
42 Life and Times, 387–89.
43 Ibid., 390–92. See McFeely, Frederick Douglass, 250–52.
44 Stevens to William D. Kelley, September 6, 1866, quoted in Trefousse, Thaddeus Stevens, 198.
45 “We Are Here and Want the Ballot Box,” address in Philadelphia, September 4, 1866; “The Altered State of the Negro,” address in Philadelphia, September 5, 1866, in Douglass Papers, ser. 1, 4:123–38.
46 “We Are Here and Want the Ballot Box,” 4:129–30; Frederick E. Hoxie, The Final Promise: The Campaign to Assimilate the Indians, 1888–1920 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1984); David Wallace Adams, Education for Extinction: American Indians and the Boarding School Experience (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1995); Robert F. Berkhofer Jr., The White Man’s Indian: Images of the American Indian from Columbus to the Present (New York: Random House, 1978), 166–75; Colin G. Calloway, First Peoples: A Documentary Survey of American Indian History (Boston: Bedford St. Martin’s, 2004), 335–51.
47 “We Are Here and Want the Ballot Box,” 4:127, 129, 131; “Altered State of the Negro,” 4:134, 137; “Govern with Magnanimity and Courage,” address in Philadelphia, September 6, 1866, Douglass Papers, ser. 1, 4:145.
48 Life and Times, 396; “Govern with Magnanimity and Courage,” 4:137; Quarles, Frederick Douglass, 232–34; McPherson, Struggle for Equality, 128–32; Anna Dickinson to Douglass, September 12, 1866, FD Papers (LC).
49 Life and Times, 390; New Orleans Daily Picayune, September 14, 1866; Harrisburg Weekly Patriot and Union, October 4, 1866; both quoted in Egerton, Wars of Reconstruction, 204.
50 Douglass to Elizabeth Cady Stanton, February 16, 1866, quoted in McFeely, Frederick Douglass, 249.
51 NASS, November 10 and 17, 1866; “Let No One Be Excluded from the Ballot Box,” address delivered in Tweedle Hall, Albany, NY, Douglass Papers, ser. 1, 4:146–47.
52 Lori D. Ginzberg, Elizabeth Cady Stanton: An American Life (New York: Hill & Wang, 2009), 116–21; Susan B. Anthony to Douglass, December 15, 1866, FD Papers (LC); Stanton to Douglass, January 8, 1867, in The Selected Papers of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, Ann D. Gordon, ed. (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2000), 2:10–11.
53 A strong defense of Stanton is Ann D. Gordon, “Stanton and the Right to Vote: On Account of Race or Sex,” in Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Feminist as Thinker: A Reader, ed. Ellen Carol DuBois and Richard Candida Smith (New York: NYU Press, 2007), 111–27. On Stanton as “absolutist,” see Ginzberg, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, 120–21, 124–28; Stanton, “Manhood Suffrage,” December 24, 1868, in Gordon, Selected Papers of Stanton and Anthony, 2:194–95.
54 “Manhood Suffrage,” 2:196; Ginzberg, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, 123; Faye E. Dudden, Fighting Chance: The Struggle over Woman Suffrage and Black Suffrage in Reconstruction America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 136–39; Fought, Women in the World of Frederick Douglass, 197.
55 Anthony, Remarks at the American Equal Rights Association meeting, New York, May 12, 1869, in Gordon, Selected Papers of Stanton and Anthony, 2:239–40.
56 Addresses on Fifteenth Amendment, New York, May 12–13, Douglass Papers, ser. 1, 4:216–17. And see Dudden, Fighting Chance, 178–79.
57 Stanton quoted in Dudden, Fighting Chance, 169–70, 177; Ginzberg, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, 120, 134. And see McFeely, Frederick Douglass, 265–69.
58 On Douglass’s calm and civility, see Dudden, Fighting Chance, 177–78; “Women and Negroes Must Work Together,” address in Providence, RI, December 11, 1868, Douglass Papers, ser. 1 4:185.
59 Stanton, editorial correspondence, Galena, IL, March 3, 1869, in Gordon, Selected Papers of Stanton and Anthony, 2:224.
60 New National Era, October 20 and 27, 1870, in Foner, Frederick Douglass on Women’s Rights, 90–95; and see Fought, Women in the World of Frederick Douglass, 202–3.
61 Charles Douglass to Douglass, February 26, 1870; Julia G. Crofts to Douglass, July 16 and October 18, 1866, FD Papers (LC); Assing to Ludmilla, July 16, 1868, Varnhagen von Ense Papers.