American Experience; The Abolitionists; Interview with John Stauffer, part 4 of 5

How is it that relative to sober citizens would be drawn into the orbit of somebody like John Brown by this point, why have you turned away from that? The reason why so many people, intellectuals, highly respected men and women like Julie Ward-Hall and Boston, her husband, were drawn into John Brown's orbit is because increasingly by the 1850s, Northerners understood that the South was hijacking the country. Prospectory Southerners were hijacking the nation's ideals of freedom, hijacking what they believe to be the essential premise of the framers of the Constitution, the founders of the United States, championing universal freedom. We've seen Jefferson's words of the Declaration that all men are created equal in literal terms, not just white men, not just property owners, but all men are created equal.

In 1848, the world's first women's rights convention, women expanded that definition of the Declaration and say, not just men, but all women are created equal. So this broadening this expansion of not only freedom, but understanding this of equality and understanding that to be a citizen is to have equality of opportunity with everyone else and to be equal under the law to everyone else became a huge movement. And John Brown understood, and he's explicit about that, John Brown understood the degree to which Southerners are hijacking the nation and the only way that a Southerner will listen to you is if you use force. That's the only language Southerner understood. And Brown, more than anything else, defines himself as a warrior, as a soldier. Brown could not write a grammatically correct sentence to save his life.

In fact, the most grammatically correct document that he produces is his provisional constitution, which will govern those areas he hopes to liberate from slavery. And writes that in Douglas's home, and Douglas edits it. So it's grammatically correct. Did Southerners feel the only way? Did Southerner's radical abolitionists see them hijacking the country how it's built? Southerners believed that they increasingly believed that over the course of the 1850s, that there should be no constraints for the spread of slavery. So Southerners felt that they were a head of northerners, of anti-slavery northerners, certainly in the election, certainly in the polls. But at the same time, Southerners were profoundly on the defensive, because on the one hand, they see the rise of anti-slavery sentiment growing throughout the north, especially

after the fugitive slave law. And more broadly, in the context of North Central and South America, if you're a pro-slavery Southerner, if you're a slave owner, and you're, say, 60 years old in 1850, you remembered at a time when you were a little boy that the entire North Central and South America was slave territory everywhere. In 1760, there was not an acre of land anywhere in the entire New World, and in fact, anywhere in Europe, in which slavery was officially outlawed. And over the course of the late 18th and 19th century, slavery is abolished in the French West and is in the British West and is all of the European countries abolish, increasingly abolish slavery, and they're calling it such that by 1850, Southerners in the United States could look around them and say, hey, the only territories in which slavery still exists in the New World is in Brazil, in Cuba, in Duchyana, and us.

And if this trend continues, slavery is going to end here. We need to counteract this tidal wave of anti-slavery sentiment. So in a sense, they did go on the offensive. They sought to acquire more slave territory. Throughout the 1850s, many Southerners hoped to reopen the Atlantic slave trade, because after all slaves were so valuable, they wanted an opportunity for non-slave owning whites, which constituted the majority of the South to acquire slaves. You reopen the Atlantic slave trade, prices of slaves will drop, and everyone can be a slave. Many of the most esteemed Southerners in the 1850s envisioned an empire for slavery. They wanted to annex Cuba and have it part of their own slave community. They wanted to invade Central America. Have that as their slave territory.

They wanted to reverse this profound spread of free soil and of the growth of anti-slavery thought. So on the one hand, while they were successful within the context of American politics, at another level in the context of Western thought, and particularly the unbelievable spread of anti-slavery sentiment, and the ability for people to act on that and to pass laws that outlaw slavery, they are worried as hell. So, in 1859, Douglas was some of the chambers of slavery. Why do you think he was loyal to Brown, even though they must have become an apparent of the big pals of John Brown's fellow David? Douglas was a close friend of John Brown. When Douglas first met John Brown, he wrote a letter to a friend saying that I met John

Brown, he is a militant abolitionist. He said, though a white man, John Brown is in effect a black man because he feels that he himself has been pierced with the horrors of slavery. And they are extremely close. Douglas edits and approves John Brown's constitutional, which will govern those areas that Brown hopes to liberate from slavery. Initially, what Brown tells Frederick Douglass is that his scheme for ending slavery is what Brown calls the subterranean passway. Brown read everything he could on the Haitian revolution, particularly the great black leader to Saint-Li-Overture, which leads black rebels in Sandoumang to fend off the three greatest armies of Europe, the Spanish, the French, and the British army, and declare themselves a free republic.

It's the first black republic that ends slavery everywhere in Western culture. And Brown learns from reading the history of Tucson that the mountains can be indispensable for a militant warrior. So Brown's subterranean passway is going to, is that he'll make raids into slave plantations and bring slaves into the Alleghenies and have forts established in the Alleghenies up through the honorondix and run these slaves to freedom. And it will not only liberate thousands of slaves, it will disrupt the central source of property in southern communities. And Douglass thinks this is a great idea. Douglass himself was crucially involved in the Underground Railroad in Rochester. By one account, Douglass helped 400 or roughly 400 fugitives reach freedom in Canada. So he was extremely active.

And so Douglass understood the brown scheme of using the Alleghenie and the Adorondix Mountains was a very good idea. He's called to Chambersburg, Pennsylvania in mid-1859, August of 1859. And he doesn't know exactly what it's about. And when he arrives, he arrives with a black friend and colleague shield screen. There he finds out that this subterranean passway has morphed into Brown's scheme to take over the federal arsenal, Harper's Ferry, distribute arms to the slaves, create a massive slave insurrection that would end slavery throughout the south in one fell swoop because Brown and Douglass both know that the greatest nightmare in the minds of southern whites is a slave rebellion. And what's even greater than a slave rebellion like Nat Turner's rebellion is what Brown proposes because this is a slave rebellion that has whites involved, which in the southern

white mind means it has more power, has a greater chance to succeed. But still Douglass has read of nose of Harper's Ferry and he says, this is insane. Said you're entering a steel trap if you do this, you're going to die. And Douglass is what I would call a prudent revolutionary. Douglass was very pragmatic in what he decided to do. There are instances in which Douglass says that a slave owner has no right to live. If a slave kills his master, he's simply following the heroes of the revolution. But at other moments he understands the risks of using violent means. And at this point he does. And so he spends two days trying to get convinced John Brown not to raid Harper's Ferry. Brown spends the same amount of time trying to convince Douglass to go to Harper's Ferry

with him to be his right hand man. Shields green mostly listens to their debate. And at the end of this long debate, Douglass says, I'm sorry, I'm going home. I wish I could convince you not to go to Harper's Ferry. Next of luck. And Shields green, his friend and black colleague in Comrade, chooses to go with John Brown to Harper's Ferry. So at the end there's this amazing moment in which Douglass goes back to Rochester alone. And this other black man, Shields green, chooses to go with this white man to Harper's Ferry. Yeah, so two months later, Douglass is in the Bell Delphi giving his speech. Yes. And he's going to give his speech. He hears his report and he says, it was something to make the ball was told right. Yes.

So Douglass, when Douglass hears of John Brown's raid, he's in Philadelphia giving his speech. He's actually giving his speech on self-made men, which is perfect because Douglass sees himself as one of the greatest self-made men. He's risen up from a slave. He's now one of the most famous men in the country. He's one of the greatest, if not considered, the greatest orders. He understands John Brown to be a self-made man. After all, Brown came from nothing, Brown overcame bankruptcy and impoverty to become a heroic abolitionist war year. And now he hears the news that John Brown and this interracial army have been captured at Harper's Ferry. And his first reaction is both exhilaration quickly followed by horror because what Brown brings with him to Harper's Ferry is a whole cache of letters, identifying people who had communicated with him, and there are letters between Douglass and John Brown.

And so Douglass suddenly becomes the most wanted man in the United States. He hides out at a friend's place in Philadelphia, and in fact, he finds out from the telegraph operator in Philadelphia that the president of the United States, on down, has put out the equivalent of an all-points bulletin, all the feds are now scouring the country for Frederick Douglass. And so he understands that he needs to flee the country else. He's going to be sent to Harper's Ferry as an accomplice and chances are he's going to die. He sends a note to his son, tells his son to destroy all the correspondence with Brown in his home, and he safely makes it to Canada. And once he's in Canada, he actually writes a letter that he publishes in northern newspaper in which he justifies John Brown's actions by saying that he is not opposed to conspiring against the United States government to using violence if he thinks it will work, if he

thinks it will be successful. For the rest of his life, Douglass considers John Brown a martyr, a Christ-like martyr, one of the greatest heroes in the 19th century. And ultimately, Frederick Douglass says that John Brown began the war that ultimately ended slavery. Yeah, and this is just a panel question, but did the police go to his house in Rochester? Douglass's home in Rochester, fortunately his son had burned letters. Douglass was lucky to escape to Canada. In fact, one of his close friends, Adely Ossin, allowed him to have him stay with her overnight. And he was able to make it to Canada, in part because of his fame, because he had a number

of friends and sympathizers who helped him out, had Douglass not been the famous individual he was. Chances of him escaping safely to Canada would have been much slimmer. And it's because the letters they found were that incriminating, and it's a little lunch but they have all this stuff on here at Smith and the others, why would Douglass look? The Douglass, because Douglass was wanted more than any of the other conspirators in John Brown's raid, far more than Garrett Smith, Thomas Wentworth, Higginson, more than Sam Agurdley Howe, because Douglass was a black man. And Douglass was one of the most effective and orders and individuals who could convert and who could sway public opinion in the North.

So if we can capture and silence Douglass, that is a coup. Pro slavery people wanted nothing more than to be able to muzzle and to silence Frederick Douglass. So he comes home of the election campaign that's heating up, how do you feel about Lincoln and the Republican? How did Douglass, let me rephrase that. When Douglass returns from England and the election of 1860 is heating up, Douglass was cautiously hopeful about Abraham Lincoln. His first choice for a Republican candidate was actually William Seward and Sam and Chase, because they were much more vigorously anti-slavery than was Lincoln. William Seward had been famous for a speech in the Senate in which he embraced the higher law.

There is a higher law than the Constitution that calls slavery evil that we need to adhere to. William Seward had in another speech in Congress emphasized a battle, a fundamental battle between slavery and freedom that had to be reconciled one way or another. And Sam and Chase knew John Brown in Ohio. Sam and Chase had given money in support of John Brown. Sam and Chase had corresponded with John Brown and after John Brown's raid, the Democratic press gets a hold of these letters and plaster on the front page of the newspaper. And Douglass, who was a shrewd political analyst, argues that because of John Brown's raid, it costs Seward or Chase the Republican nomination. He said because of Brown's raid, Lincoln, it now opens the way for a more conservative Republican to be elected.

And he is cautiously hopeful. And the one hand Douglass understands that the Republican Party is in a certain respect and a revolutionary party because this is the first party that acquires mad, that has mass support, whose central platform is to say that slavery is evil. Slavery is immoral and social evil that needs to be contained with the goal of the ultimate extinction of slavery. Now there are many aspects of the Republican platform that Douglass opposed, the Republican Party, like the free soil party before it, believe that it was unconstitutional to interfere with slavery where it existed. And the vast majority of Republicans endorsed colonization as one of the means to end slavery Lincoln did. And so Douglass is initially cautiously hopeful about Lincoln. He would have been at the time more enthusiastic about Seward, more enthusiastic about Chase

because of their longer standing record in their opposition to slavery. But he knew that Lincoln hated slavery, knew that Lincoln considered slavery an evil. That optimism changes dramatically with the Lincoln's first inaugural address. And in fact, in Lincoln's first inaugural address, that's the closest that Frederick Douglass ever comes to abandoning his faith that the nation can ever fulfill the ideals of the declaration and become a true democracy in the immediate wake of Lincoln's first inaugural Douglass plans a trip to Haiti with a goal of eventually settling there and advocating that other black settled there. Why does the first inaugural so outrage Douglass? Lincoln says two things in the first inaugural that totally sent him over the edge. And I should say to defend Lincoln when Lincoln gives his first inaugural speech, seven states

have already seceded. The Confederacy has already been formed. Lincoln's chief aim in his inaugural addresses to conciliate with southerners, to prevent the upper south from seceding and to convince those states and the Confederacy that's already been formed to return to the Union. And congressmen in the north have also been conciliating, in fact, roughly a week before that inaugural address, congress passes a new constitutional amendment. It's the 13th Amendment. We know of the 13th Amendment as the amendment to abolished slavery. The first 13th Amendment is an amendment that guarantees slavery in the slave states forever. And Lincoln in his inaugural address approves and supports that amendment. In his inaugural address, Lincoln also vows to add even more teeth to the fugitive slave law to uphold the law.

And Douglass reads this and says, I'm out of here. How does he react to those important things? The reason that Douglass doesn't go to Haiti is because for something there. Since southerners bomb fort sumpner, Frederick Douglass understands that this is now a golden opportunity to end slavery. And so he stays. He understands that with war, now abolitionists are united. No longer is garrison and garrisonians advocating disunion. And one of the great threats that most whites saw of abolitionists is that the abolitionists threatened the union, threatened to disunite the union, threatened to make southerners leave the country. Well now that's already happened. And suddenly abolitionists are looking prophetic. There they seem now to be having had anticipated all of these things that are happening.

And in the immediate wake of fort sumpner, abolitionists are accorded and a newfound respect that they had never experienced before. In the wake of fort sumpner, abolitionists meeting are triple quadruple in size by a mass of whites. And Douglass says in the immediate wake of fort sumpner, the easiest, for sumpner. Yeah. Okay. For sumpner. Sumpter. I have a hard time pronouncing that. In the immediate wake of fort sumpner, Douglass argues that the easiest way to end the war is to emancipate slaves. Because by emancipating slaves, it means that the union is taking the moral high ground. It means that now we have not only all the blacks in the north on our side, but Douglass understands that we now have a third of the population in the southern states now on

our side. And so Douglass from the beginning understands that emancipation is not only taking a moral high ground, it's part of the war effort itself. Now that position was seen as too progressive, too threatening, too most Republicans, Lincoln and the Lincoln administration was deeply worried about the border states, that is the union slave states, Maryland. Maryland. Well, you know, we'll do this generation, and so we'll actually jump forward to August 62. Okay. Okay. So this is now played out. Okay. Okay. How did Douglass feel about Lincoln by the summer 62 before the primary problem? By the summer of 62, Douglass was deeply frustrated by Lincoln's continued refusal to turn the war into an explicitly a war to end slavery and to issue an emancipation proclamation.

Douglass believed that Congress was far more in the forefront than Lincoln was. Congress had passed the First Confiscation Act in August of 1861, which stipulated that any slave who reaches union lines can be confiscated. I'm sorry, I'll drop again just because, again, it'll be more detailed. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. So I just really want to focus on the administration. Right. In 1862. So in 1862, Douglass, in August of 1862, Douglass was deeply frustrated. One of the things in particular that frustrated him is that Lincoln calls a meeting with a group of blacks in his office in 1862. And he tells them that it's in their best interests to leave the country. And he advocates colonization.

And he, not only that, he says that the war is really black's fault. That it had not been for the presence of blacks, there would be no war. And Douglass is just furious, and in fact, in response to Lincoln's public address telling these blacks to leave the country, telling blacks to embrace colonization, telling the blacks that hey, the war is their fault anyway. Douglass says that Lincoln is a representative American racist. And how did Douglass feel about Lincoln after the end of January 1st? After January 1st of 1862, and really beginning when Lincoln issues his preliminary emancipation proclamation in the immediate wake of the battle of Antietam, Douglass's attitude toward

Lincoln profoundly radically permanently changed. He considered him an ally. He considered him a crucial aid in his own mission to achieve universal emancipation. And in fact, Douglass called the emancipation proclamation one of the most important documents in American history. Douglass said that the emancipation proclamation should be celebrated along with the declaration of independence as the two twin births of liberty. Now unlike many whites, especially after the war, Douglass always understood that emancipation was like a large chain. And the emancipation proclamation was a crucial link in that chain. But three months after the emancipation proclamation, in explaining emancipation, Douglass said that the emancipation is one link, blacks freed themselves.

Because of the war now, blacks in the South, they flocked to Union lines as never before. Before the war, for most blacks to become free, they had to flee a thousand miles or thousands of miles. Now with the Union Army throughout the South, they could flee ten miles or fifty miles and reach Union lines. And they took advantage of that. The military was also instrumental in ending slavery. So emancipation needs to be seen as this long chain with crucial links in it. And so for the rest of his life, Douglass argued that emancipation was a result of blacks themselves, the Union Army, emancipation proclamation, Congress, whereas most white Americans today continue to say that Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves. No more. No more. This shows the end of Abraham Lincoln. We've got about four half minutes, but I was going to change things.