American Experience; The Abolitionists; Interview with David William Blight, part 5 of 6

When we get into the war, so what would be, you know, the snapshot of the abolition movement? You know, there's some other sort of garrison, and I do have a picture of the strategy that I usually want. What? Yeah, the liberator had been. Yeah, so what's garrison played in the movement? Hmm. Well, the many was the abolition movement, as we have known it for the last 20, 30 years, is losing significance and losing membership. If by membership we mean subscriptions to newspapers and so forth in the late 1850s. That's in part because the anti-slavery cause is now transformed into national politics, into high politics, into the Republican Party. And so a moral, swatianist, radical abolitionist like a William Lloyd garrison, and for that matter, even Frederick Douglass, are losing traction to this larger political phenomena. Now, garrison still, right on down to the 1860 elections, said, don't belong political parties, don't vote.

I mean, to me always, the fascinating thing about garrison has been that, I mean, one of the fascinating things about garrison and his brilliance is that on the one hand, he could morally oppose political parties. He could morally oppose political participation, which meant complicity wasn't with the evil sinful system. On the other hand, he was a deeply political man, and he understood politics, and he was evolving, of course, toward ultimately a political position, although it brought the war, a sanctioned war against slavery, to bring garrison really into political participation, and actually voting for Abraham Lincoln, the supporting Lincoln, especially after the proclamation of the emancipation. But abolitionism as a movement and as a cause is losing its solidity. It's losing its cohesion in the late 1850s. It's being in some way supplanted by a larger political entity.

Well, the movement simply changes. It becomes a much broader political anti-slavery. You've got Charles Sumner in the Senate now. You've got William H. Seward. You've got Joshua Giddings in Ohio. You've got Sam and Chase. You've got Garrett Smith, who serves, gets elected once, and moves back to New York in a hurry. You've got real abolitionist actually in the Congress now, and you've got real abolitionist in and even at the heart of the Republican Party, which is that motley coalition of political interest that comes together in 1860 and elects the president, who is now himself an abolitionist Lincoln, but is certainly anti-slavery and is certainly opposed to the future expansion of slavery, what Douglass called an anti-slavery reputation. Now, in Frederick Douglass' case, though, the 1850s is fascinating because it's the period in which he is learning his politics.

In my first book, I called him a political pragmatist, and that may seem soft, but what he really is learning is the art of politics and the art of pragmatism and the art of political persuasion. And we always have to remember that in the case of Frederick Douglass, he had no other power than the panic he could use in his editorials and his voice on the oratory circuit. It's certainly the only power he had. He had very little persuasion with anybody in an elected office, and he becomes a political abolitionist supporting the Republican Party in election years, like 1856 and 1860. And in the off-year elections, he joins and participates in and campaigns for what was called the Radical Abolition Party. General Election Year, he's a Republican, non-General Election Year, he's the Radical Abolitionist, and he was trying to find a party for his hopes. He was trying to find a party he could live in, and to a degree he found it with the Republicans, although he's never really comfortable yet with the Republicans after the Civil War, but not fully until then, but he's learning the craft in the art of politics.

And what does Douglass do in the 1860 election? He campaigned all over New York for the elimination of the property requirement for black suffrage, and he lost big time. It was a serious, and he wasn't alone in that, James McKeon-Smith and a whole bunch of other abolitionists, black and white, labored. They published these pamphlets, they talked and traveled all over the state of New York to try to get rid of this hideous law that had property requirement for black to vote, no property requirement for white to vote. It was a bitter message, though, because Lincoln carried New York fairly decisively, but the black suffrage thing went down decisively. So you got a whole lot of white people voting for Abraham Lincoln who voted no on black suffrage. So imagine that is the message you take from this, okay?

We got a swallow getting Lincoln elected. That's all for the good, but in my own state, my own neighbors do not want me really to vote. I can vote because I happen to own my own home, but most blacks don't. So this is the kind of half-loaf is what he called it, kind of politics that he had to learn to swallow and deal with, and it sets him up for the fears and disappointments he's going to experience in this secession crisis where he believes that this is going to end the way this always ends in America. They're going to meet and they're going to find some way to compromise this, and once again try to solidify federal power around slavery. And so, by using for a series of more serious reasons, it kind of played with some of the 1862s. Yep.

How does he feel about Lincoln? I think particularly if you know that the situation I can make in that series is just... Yes. Well, in 1861 and 62, the first year, even year and a half of the Civil War, Frederick Douglass was one of Abraham Lincoln's fiercest critics, critic from the left, critic from the abolitionist left, if you want to call it that. As early as September of 1861, Douglass called Lincoln the most powerful slave catcher in America because it was the official policy at that point of the Lincoln administration and of the Union Army to return any fugitive slave who escaped into Union lines. If that fugitive slave's owner was loyal to the Union, that actually became the official policy. It was called denial of asylum. It wasn't very enforceable. It was very difficult for Union officers to enforce this. But the Lincoln administration was very explicit. This is not award end slavery.

The Union Army does not exist to bring slaves into their lines and liberate them by no means. That same fall, Lincoln, you know, reprimands John C. Framon out in Missouri who passed his own sort of personal emancipation act among the Missouri slaves and Lincoln said, oh no, you didn't. And he immediately, you know, turned over turns. Douglass hated that. Douglass said, isn't it obvious, my audience? Isn't it obvious, President Lincoln, that in order to win this war, you've got to fight with both hands. The South seceded to defend their slave system. You are going to have to attack that slave system to defeat the South. He's already arguing that. And so he sees Lincoln as the power in the way. And he has some vicious editorials about Lincoln right into the summer of 1862. Now, part of that is based on the fact that again, he has no access to the White House here. He has only limited access even to the power brokers of the Republican Party.

But his attitudes toward Lincoln begin to change some in the summer of 1862. And of course, they do change after the preliminary emancipation proclamation of September 62. However, as a moment in August, the third week of August 1862, when Lincoln caused five black ministers to the White House to meet with him, they were basically hand picked and they were relative unknowns into the White House with journalists sitting there. It was all quite staged for public consumption and Lincoln holds this meeting. It's actually Abraham Lincoln's worst racial moment publicly, I think of his life. At that moment is August of 62. Lincoln already has a draft of the preliminary emancipation proclamation sitting in a drawer with the war department. Nobody knows this. But he calls in each five ministers and he has this back and forth with them. Mostly he gives them a speech. He says, without the presence of your people in this country, we wouldn't even have this war.

Furthermore, the only outcome that can come of this needs to be colonization. I would like, he tries to recruit these black men to lead efforts to colonize black folk out of the United States, whether that's in South America, the Caribbean or Liberian Africa is not determined yet. This is the beginning of the Lincoln administration's colonization schemes, which are very serious, for which they eventually in 1863 are going to try to recruit Frederick Douglass to be their colonization czar and nothing animated Douglass's anger quite as much as that. But nevertheless, at that meeting, and finally, Lincoln basically says to them, this is a single race country. The best hope for your people are going to be outside of this country and have this interview, if you want, published that way, covered and published. When Douglass saw this in the paper and read the transcripts of this, he was deeply disappointed. He was frankly outraged.

I wouldn't say he couldn't believe it, because by then he believed anything. The irony is, of course, that this is the very moment. And I'm not suggesting that Lincoln is just the great puppeteer here, some people would like to argue. This is the very moment that Lincoln not only has a preliminary man's patient proclamation sitting on a drawer, waiting for some kind of military success, so that he can actually launch it. But he also has written his famous letter to Horace Greeley at the New York Herald Tribune, answering Greeley's so-called letter of 20 millions, which was Greeley's way of demanding that Lincoln free the slaves to win the war. And Lincoln says, if I could save the Union by freeing all the slaves I would, if I could save the Union by freeing some I wouldn't, I could save the Union by freeing none of the slaves I would, but my principal objective is to save the Union and not free the slaves. And he wrote that, of course, for public consumption that had published in a Washington, BC newspaper and not in the York Herald Tribune, that was spread all over the country.

So you've got Lincoln operating on many different fronts here and frequencies that Douglas doesn't fully grasp at that moment. But what he does grasp is that basically Abraham Lincoln had a journalistically covered interview with five black so-called leaders, none of whom were the important black abolitionists, and by the way Douglas wasn't invited, saying to them, you don't have a future in this country. There's a war is all about you and all about your people, but I want you actually to help us create schemes to leave here. Nothing was more anathema to Douglas's conception of the meaning and purpose of the war, quite like that. Because it's followed within a month by the Battle of Antietam, 22nd of September, preliminary emancipation proclamation, and Douglas's response to that was extraordinary. He doesn't quite know what to make of it. It's only a preliminary emancipation proclamation.

It's not going to be really going to affect the January 1st. So he's still worried. He's worried again. There's going to be some kind of compromise out of this. Can't be entirely sure. Is it really a carrot and stick thing Lincoln is playing with the South? But he changes his tune about Lincoln. He doesn't change his tune about colonization by any means. Then comes Lincoln's State of the Union, or Annual Message in December, where once again Lincoln made a vehement case for colonizing blacks out of the country, and Douglas was disgusted with that. But then came January 1st. And that was, in some ways, the turning point of Frederick Douglass's life, one of them, and certainly the turning point in the historical life of African-American. And from that point on, Douglass's approach to his attitudes about his conception of Abraham Lincoln would begin to change markedly. And then particularly change markedly in 1863 and 1864, when he has his two famous meetings with Lincoln at the White House.

There's a lot of ground. Why do you think Lincoln came around in that situation? Well, Lincoln grew toward the mass-patient proclamation, and the ultimate enforcement of the policy is one thing to announce it, yet also had to be enforced. It's worth remembering the mass-patient proclamation was in military order by the commander-in-chief to his troops. He was ordering union officers, union army and navy, to free slaves, now wherever they found him. He was also declaring slaves free in the states in rebellion, the states of the seceded states of the Confederacy. But Lincoln's progress toward the mass-patient is, of course, fascinating. He had always been morally opposed to slavery. He had been saying that since the 1830s and the 1840s.

He'd always said slavery is a moral wrong, a violation of basic natural rights. But I didn't mean he believed that racial equality was either possible, or likely, or to happen in any kind of secure way, or with any kind of speed. Lincoln believed black folk. We can see this in the debates with Stephen Douglas in 1858. He believed black people had the basic rights and liberties named in the Declaration of Independence. He said that explicitly. Right to live liberty in the pursuit of happiness. They had natural rights. Civil rights, political rights, rights before law, citizenship, to for matter. The war made Abraham Lincoln an emancipator. It had to, to win the war. Now the problem we always have with this issue, though, is we like our Abraham Lincoln clean and pure. We like our Abraham Lincoln's good moralists, or evil and immoral. Right?

We don't like ambiguity about our great presidents or our great leaders. But in some ways, we should be frankly grateful. The Lincoln had this capacity for growth on this question. It wasn't just utterly a cynical policy of necessity by any means. It was actually a courageous act by a man who struggled to get to it. He had come to believe clearly in 1862 to win the war. You were going to have to, if not crush and destroy slavery, you're going to have to really threaten it. And I think by 63 he knows you're going to have to crush and destroy it. You can't defeat the South when the scale of the war became what it did in 1862. And as Union Army's penetrated more and more and more of the South, you could not make war on the South. You could not defeat the South without defeating slavery itself.

So on that level, yes, it becomes a series of military practical measures to win. On the other hand, we have Lincoln in unforgettable language and transcendent words. They're up there in the Lincoln Memorial in the wall telling us that this has become the new destiny of the United States. If the Union is to be saved, if the Union is to be preserved, my first responsibility is, if it's to be saved, a new country, a new constitution, a new history is going to come out of this. And it's going to be rooted in the freedom of these people. And something is going to have to be done to make them citizens. And probably something is going to have to be done to make them equal. He actually used the word equality in the Gettysburg address. He didn't know where that's going yet. He actually used the language of equal suffrage in 65, just before he died about black soldiers. So it's really a great story of a man moving and growing toward both a practical, political military view of emancipation and a moral view of it.

What's fascinating about Frederick Douglass' relationship with Lincoln on this, and I and others have written about this, is that they start out in very different places in 1861, but frankly, by 63 and 64 and 65, they come almost to exactly the same position. When Lincoln gave the second inaugural, Douglass was in the audience. Back about row 12 or 14. Douglass tells us that he remembers seeing Lincoln sitting there next to Andrew Johnson. He remembers seeing Lincoln Pat Johnson on the knee and point to Douglass is though he was saying, that's Frederick Douglass.

Douglass had no invitation to go to the White House for the reception after the inaugural address, but he decided he was going to go anyway. He tells us he walked Pennsylvania Avenue. In the mud, he walked Pennsylvania Avenue behind the president's carriage as part of the crowd. He just went up to the line of the White House, got in line, went up to the officers at the door and said, I'd like to enter, and they said, well, you can't. You can't enter. You have no invitation. They didn't tell you can't because you're black, but that's part of what was going on. He said, well, you please send a message through to the president in his aid. Frederick Douglass is out here. I want to hear. Words find they came back. He said, let him in. And he finally got into the east room. He saw Lincoln. He tells the story. He saw Lincoln's headway above everybody and Lincoln saw him and they finally meet. And we have eyewitness. We do have one eyewitness that this actually did, that the meaning actually happened. And Douglass tells us that, and they, of course, already met twice before, that Lincoln asked him, so please, Mr. Douglass, what did you think of my speech? And Douglass said he'd demure himself, Mr. President, attend to your guest. You don't need to know what I think. No, no, no.

He claims, Lincoln said, there's no man in America whose opinion in my speech I wanted more than yours. And Douglass says, well, then I respond and I said, Mr. President, that was a sacred effort. Now, I think what those words actually mean, whether he actually said precisely those words or not, is that Douglass had been writing that speech for Lincoln for three and a half years. And that Lincoln wrote the second inaugural, which explicitly says to the world forever, this war was caused by slavery. Its principle result is the end of slavery and all shall be done to make sure slavery dies in this war. Douglass has been making that argument ever since Fort Sumter. He's been writing that speech for Lincoln for years, but that Lincoln gave that speech, with what was important about it, the President gave that speech. Not an abolitionist. The President had become the abolitionist through the forces of history, through the forces of War Hand, the forces within his own soul.

It's an extraordinary example of how history makes people do things, but people also have to be ready willing and able to do those things as well. Did you want me to go back to any of those earlier? You had wanted me to explain his escape and that sort of... Yeah, in the wake of proclamation of mass, mass patient proclamation, Douglass became practically overnight a recruiter of black troops, quite willingly. And we easily forget that the proclamation itself authorized the recruiting of black troops. So Douglass engaged this immediately, published the famous broadside men of colored arms by March of 1863, which is an extraordinary manifesto of what it means to be a soldier.

If you put the letters US on you and you have a cartridge box on your belt and a shoulder, I mean a musket on your shoulder, they can never deny you citizenship. Douglass embraced recruiting black troops because it had become their war now. It truly was a war not only sanctioned against the South, it was a sanctioned war to destroy slavery. It was the fondest hope of his entire public life, for that matter is the whole personal life. Now, so he became a recruiter for the 54th Massachusetts and by his count recruited about 100 of the nearly 1000 members of it, two of whom were his sons. Now, he does not tell us anything about the conversations he had, would he had told us, or would one of his sons had written a letter and told us, what went on when he sat down with Lewis, who was 21, and Charles, who was only 19 going on 20.

Frederick Jr., he didn't recruit him, he was even younger. Yeah, in 19 and 20, 20 year olds, you're two sons, what do you, what do the father say to his son when he's recruiting him into the army? How many fathers ever recruit their sons? I mean Teddy Roosevelt did and famously wanted him to get killed in the World War I. We don't know what he said to them. What we do know is that it weighed on him enormously as it only could. We know this much, when the 54th Massachusetts had its famous march in Boston, down Beacon Street, commemorated today by the great St. Gordon's Memorial, led by their Colonel, 27-year-old Robert Shaw, they stopped in front of Shaw's own house on Beacon Street and on the balcony that day. A huge crowd in the 54th marching in formation were none other than Governor Andrew, the Shaw family, William Lloyd Garrison,

Frederick Douglass in a host of other abolitionists, and were told Garrison stood there with his hand on a bust of John Browner. Now Douglass left as soon as the troops passed him, continued down the street, Douglass immediately left and took a carriage to the wharf, and met the troops at the troop ship, and got on the ship with his sons. All the way out to its called Hall, which is really the outer reaches of Boston Harbor. He actually went on the boat with the ship as far out as he could get, and they could put him in a dinghy and take him ashore, as though he was trying to hug them to the last minute. And he took the dinghy ashore and let his sons go, and of course, one of his sons, Lewis, was in the battle of Fort Wagner. His other son, Charles, was not at Fort Wagner because he was too sick. He was an infirmary, and that's about all we know about that situation.

I can tell you this. I actually have co-authored a play about Frederick Douglass, and it's not been publicly performed yet, but one of the scenes I invented was the conversation between Douglass and his son, Lewis. In order to try to understand that, I went back through history and fiction, and even the Bible to find as many cases I could have fathers asking their sons to go to war. I don't doubt for a minute that we don't know what that conversation was, but I don't doubt for a minute that Douglass probably imposed on his sons a sense of duty larger than themselves, in a sense that somehow they should join this for the good of all black people. And I don't know what he said, of course, but we can only guess at what Lewis and Charles must have thought.

Is my dad recruiting me to go fight for the liberty that he may be not too old to fight for? Am I my father's surrogate? In whatever terms they came to understand that, it's an extraordinary moment. A father recruiting a son to go perhaps die in war for something larger than themselves, and for a cause Douglass has given all of his public life. But what a burden to put on your son. They didn't tell him, no, I don't know how they could have told him, no. And by the way, both sons, Lewis and Charles, veterans of the 54, survivors of the 54, particularly Lewis, his oldest son, was a very prominent and fond of veterans' activities that rest of his life, always had himself photographed in the Union uniform. None of his sons were much in the way of successful in business or professions, but deeply proud of the fact that they'd been in the 54. Of course, they were survivors, they could be proud.