Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln: In Service of a Reconstructed Humanity

The Old Flag Never Touched the Ground, painting by Rick Reeves, 2004. US National Guard.

By Charles Everett Pace

Frederick Douglass, the most inspirational and influential black man of the Civil War era, demonstrated through his thoughts, words, and actions what it meant to be a public man in nineteenth-century America. Rising from his slave caste status to become an advisor to President Abraham Lincoln, Douglass, as abolitionist, advisor and critic of the president, illustrated how postwar reconstruction could be mirrored in personal terms as well. Because military necessity forced the reconstruction and merger of their personal and political relationship, their joint efforts during the Civil War proved that the long road from slavery to human equality, signified in the opening words of the Declaration of Independence, was a possibility for average Americans, black and white, not only in principle but in fact. Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln made visible the promise of reconstruction in their own lives.

In a letter, Douglass wrote to his abolitionist friend Gerrit Smith that, though he hoped for a Republican victory in the presidential election, he would cast his vote for the Radical Abolitionists’ candidate because, “I cannot support Lincoln.”

Douglass’s abolitionist’s goals diverged from the status quo goals of the Republican party with Lincoln as its standard bearer. Lincoln personally felt that slavery was morally wrong. He argued that while the framers of the U.S. Constitution allowed slavery to continue, it was a compromise move—one that ensured the union of the southern and northern colonies that would form the United States of America. But Lincoln also argued that the framers believed that slavery would eventually be disbanded by those same states at some unknown time in the future. However, because slavery was the law of the land, Lincoln said he would uphold the law. What he and the Republicans did was to hold slavery within its present locales and restrict its expansion into any newly acquired territories. They believed in a policy of containment rather than a policy of abolition. Thus, though Lincoln confessed: “I have always [personally] hated slavery,” this tension between the personal and the political made Lincoln an unacceptable candidate to Douglass and his abolitionist cohorts. Yet, Douglass was also a realist, and, because of his own personal and political decisions, had himself incurred severe criticism, even ostracism, from abolitionist friends, including his mentor William Lloyd Garrison.

In 1848, following his move from Lynn, Massachusetts, to Rochester, New York, Douglass, in becoming his “own man,” joined the political abolitionists in a move that placed him in at odds with the “moral persuasions” position of those who followed William Lloyd Garrison. They championed three main points that Douglass, after numerous conversations with Gerrit Smith, came to doubt and to eventually oppose. The Garrisonian position was: 1. The U. S. Constitution is a pro-slavery document, therefore they did not engage in party politics, a politics that derived its validity from said Constitution; 2. the church was a pro-slavery institution; and 3. moral persuasion should be the strongest action employed to overthrow the institution of slavery. Douglass, after a close reading of the Constitution, agreeing with Smith, argued that the Constitution was actually anti-slavery, and thus it was not only a proper but a wise choice to leverage the power of the political mainstream in his opposition to slavery. Second, Douglass eventually concluded while the Southern churches were pro-slavery and there should be no union with them, this restriction did not apply to northern churches that broke their affiliation with their southern counterparts. Finally, influenced by the ideas of John Brown, and outraged by the passage of the Kansas–Nebraska Act, the Fugitive Slave Bill, and The Dred Scott Decision in 1850, Douglass concluded that armed resistance might be necessary to opposed the growing power of the southern planters. Thus, by the time that he published his second book, My Bondage and My Freedom, in 1855, Douglass was indeed free, not only from the physical power of slaveholders to control his body and labor, but free from Garrison to control his mind. Because he was free to advance his own principles and abolitionist approaches, Frederick Douglass assumed the mantle of national leadership in his own right. In a sense then, Douglass, in restructuring and ‘reconstructing’ his position relative to the Garrisonians, succeeded in ‘reconstructing’ himself.

Douglass, in making the transition from Maryland slave, to Massachusetts fugitive, to New York freedman, was now in a position to be both a moralist and a politician. He had positioned himself in such a way that he could, and sometimes did, shift his position in accordance with changes in the world. And, like Lincoln, Douglass understood the power of persuasive words to influence and sometimes even to control public opinion, as well as advance one’s moral and political agenda. Thus when it became clear that the “war of the rebellion” was not a skirmish, one that would be easily and effectively put down by northern troops, both Douglass and Lincoln escalated their efforts in personal and political reconstruction. With the realization that we were in the midst of a full-scale Civil War, Douglass emerged as an ardent supporter of Lincoln, even though he remained critical of his policy of only opposing the rebelling slave-holders, rather warring with real enemy, slavery itself. Douglass called for a war to free the slaves, as well as a war to save the Union. He also called for the even more radical position of arming black men to fight in the Union military.

This was precisely the position that Lincoln, by late 1862, himself had reached. He declared in his Emancipation Proclamation that, as of January 1, 1863, all slaves in the rebellious states were now and “forever free.” Lincoln also adopted the radical position, long advocated by Douglass, that because northern blacks and runaway slaves could advance Unionist goals, and since the Confederacy was employing slave labor to support its war effort, and because of the debilitating psychological effect of Confederate troops facing armed black men fighting for their people’s liberation, black military might was a resource that must be tapped. Thus, when Lincoln gave the order, Douglass himself became a major recruiter of the Massachusetts 54th and 55th Regiments. His oldest sons were his first two recruits. Also, in a meeting with Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, Douglass agreed that upon receipt of his promised commission in the officer corps, he would join General Lorenzo Thomas in the Mississippi Valley. Because his promised commission was not issued, he refused to join the army, but did continue to recruit.

The major question posed about black recruitment was, however, would they fight? This question was quickly settled by the brave action of black soldiers in the Battles of Milliken’s Bend and Vicksburg, Port Hudson in Louisiana and Ft. Wagner in South Carolina. And, according to Cornish, “An officially recorded number of 178,892 black men served in the Union armies, including some 7,000 noncommissioned officers and about 100 commissioned officers, virtually all at company-grade levels (a token few making it to field-grade level). (p.ix)

In the end, it was this juxtaposition of the abolitionist War to Save the Union that set up Douglass to become a champion of Lincoln as a symbol of reconstructions ideals. It set Douglass on the road to becoming a staunch and lifelong Republican operative as well.

After the war, Douglass worked to aid Lincoln’s Reconstruction aims—no small task. David Blight argues in Race and Reunion, after five years of combat with over 600,000 dead, northern and southern whites were much more willing to unify with each other than either side were to unify with blacks, whom they regarded as the primary beneficiaries of the war. Many, if not most whites, questioned not only the desirability but the very possibility of union, in terms of human equality between blacks and whites. It was around this issue that Douglass once again merged the personal with the political by leveraging the memory of his three wartime meetings with Lincoln as demonstrating the reality of black and white social relations based on the recognition of human equality. In so doing, he hoped that their personal and political relationship would serve as the living symbol of a racially unified America. Their ‘reconstructed’ relationship, beginning on opposite sides of the abolitionist question, and ending with a mutual policy of abolitionist unification, could serve as a model for the potential, reconstructed, equal relationship between blacks and whites in the nation as a whole.

To make his point, Douglass often told the story of how Lincoln personally received him at his home, the White House. And, the symbolic nature of Douglass’s (and one must believe Lincoln’s) political agenda was not lost on the receiving public. As Oakes informs us: “The Anti-Slavery Society had printed the text of Douglass’s December address, with its brief but glowing account of his visit to the White House. The Democrats seized on Douglass’s words, churning them back in a pamphlet entitled Miscegenation Indorsed by the Republican Party…The Democrats took particular note of Douglass’s claim that the President had received him ‘as one gentleman receives another’” (Oakes, p. 229).

In later years, Douglass made sure that his reception by the president got maximum contemporary and historical coverage, the most prominent being the “Oration by Frederick Douglass, delivered on the occasion of the unveiling of the Freedmen’s Monument, in memory of Abraham Lincoln, in Lincoln Park, Washington, D. C., April 14, 1876.” In this address Douglass portrays how Lincoln, during the course of his administration from 1860 to 1863, reconstructed himself—in both his racial consciousness and, in his relationship to blacks.

54th Massachusetts Regiment, unknown photographer, 1862.

Frederick Douglass appealing to President Lincoln and his cabinet to enlist Negroes, mural by William Edouard Scott at the Recorder of Deeds building, Washington, D.C., 1943.

During the opening moments of the oration, Douglass charts the change for the distinguished and mixed race crowd: “In his interests, his associations, his habits of thought and in his prejudices, he [Lincoln] was a white man” (Life and Times, p. 353). For example, he noted:

“He was ready to execute all the supposed constitutional guarantees of the United States Constitution in favor of the slave system anywhere inside the slave states. He was willing to pursue, recapture, and send back the fugitive slave to his master, and to suppress a slave rising for liberty, though the guilty master were already in arms against the Government (Life and Times, p. 354).”

But, as they were all aware, this was not the position of the president as the war continued.

Yet, at the beginning of his administration, Lincoln, the self-made man, was a man of the masses. He was one of them in belief and behavior. But, in order to save the Union, Lincoln was forced into a confrontation with his own psyche and concluded that for our national salvation (and perhaps his own), he would have to, and he did, reconstruct his ideas, policies and behavior in tune with the realities of a changing and new world/national order. The result of this personal/political reconstruction is that former slaves were now citizens and the “divided house” was now unified.

Thus, Lincoln serves as a model of the transition that others must and can make with the right type of leadership in place. And, because of this example, black people are in his debt and pay homage to his significance symbolically through the erection of the Lincoln monuments. Reflecting on this fact, Douglass goes on: “When therefore, it shall be asked what we have to do with the memory of Abraham Lincoln, or what Abraham Lincoln had to do with us, the answer is ready, full, and complete” (Ibid, p. 355).

“He was assailed by abolitionists; he was assailed by slaveholders…he was assailed for not making the war an abolition war; and he was most bitterly assailed for making the war an abolition war.

But now behold the change: the judgment of the present hour is, that, taking him for all in all, measuring the tremendous magnitude of the work before him; considering the necessary means to ends, and surveying the end from the beginning, infinite wisdom has seldom sent any man into the world better fitted for his mission than was Abraham Lincoln” (ibid, p. 358).

Through this oration, which Douglass delivered during the last full year of the Reconstruction years, he places the black race squarely within the actions of a civilized people. He places them within the world of artists and cultural workers, where literate and creative expression represents the height of what it means to be human. And thus, linking the monument’s dedication with the reconstructionist vision of the dead president, Douglass closes with the comforting admonition that when their humanity is questioned even further ”…we may point to the monument we have this day erected to the memory of Abraham Lincoln” (p. 361) and proclaim their right to sit at the seat of the highest reaches of a common humanity.

Charles Everett Pace has undergraduate and graduate degrees from The University of Texas at Austin (B.A., biology) and Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana (M.A., American studies: history and anthropology). As well as being a program advisor at the Texas Union, University of Texas at Austin, Charles has taught at The University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Purdue University, and most recently at Centre College in Kentucky. His research area is the anthropology of performance, experience and visual communications. He has performed and conducted workshops in hundreds of cities across the United States, as well as in London. Pace has also conducted performance-based public diplomacy work for the United States Information Agency (USIA).

WORKS CITED

Frederick Douglass, The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (New York: Dover, 2003). Originally published in 1892 by DeWolf & Frisk Company, Boston.

Dudley Taylor Cornish, The Sable Arm: Black Troops in the Union Army, 18611865 (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1987).

James Oakes, The Radical and the Republican: Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, and the Triumph of Antislavery Politics (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2007).