Douglass, Lincoln, and Emancipation—Slavery: Past, Present and Future
FREDERICK DOUGLASS, ABRAHAM LINCOLN, AND EMANCIPATION
By Dr. David W. Bulla, Associate Professor
Zayed University
Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates
[email protected]
Slavery: Past, Present and Future,
Second Global Meeting
Prague, Czech Republic
Wednesday, 4 May 2016
1 Douglass, Lincoln, and Emancipation—Slavery: Past, Present and Future
Abstract
Frederick Douglass was an African American journalist who was particularly critical
of Abraham Lincoln for, from the start, not making the major cause of the U.S. Civil
War the abolition of slavery. In the summer of 1862, Lincoln began to move toward
abolition and would announce his executive order outlawing it in the rebellious states
in September of that year. Slowly, Douglass came to see Lincoln in a new light,
though he still fussed and prodded the sxiteenth president. The current study will look
at their relationship by analyzing Douglass’s journalistic writings from 1860 until
1863 to show the change toward Lincoln after the Emancipation Proclamation took
effect on 1 January1863. The Douglass-Lincoln relationship is vey important to study
today, as contemporary journalism becomes less and less industrial and more and
more personal, as it was in Douglass’s day. Indeed, there may be very important
lessons to learn from Douglass for journalists today who want to expose the evils of
contemporary slavery—which, according to one watchdog group, bulges at 35 million
people around the world in the early 21st Century. The primary document for this
study is the newspaper Douglass’ Monthly, which he published in Rochester, New
York, from 1858 to 1863.
2 Douglass, Lincoln, and Emancipation—Slavery: Past, Present and Future
Introduction
The major names of mainstream American journalism during the U.S. Civil
War included editors Horace Greeley, William Gordon Bennett, Joseph Medill, Henry
S. Raymond, Samuel Bowles, Wilbur F. Storey, Manton Marble, and Arunah S.
Abell. Greeley, whose New York Tribune was read from coast to coast, also had an
outstanding group of international journalists working for his newspaper, including a
German living in London named Karl Marx. With the exception of Greeley, none of
these big-name editors focused for long on the root cause of the American breakdown
that resulted in civil war. That journalistic role belonged to members of the fringe
press, and no editor hammered home this theme more insistently than Frederick
Douglass, a former slave. The Rochester, New York, resident was an advocacy
journalist of the first order, a man with a burning passion for abolition. He was also
very aware of how unpopular abolition was before the Civil War. After John Brown’s
raid on the federal ammunition center at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, in 1959, Douglass
moved his family first to Canada and then to England to protect from possible assaults
or kidnapping by anti-abolitionists.1 The trip to England would include a lecture tour.
The journalist also temporarily suspended his association with his monthly
newspaper, saying the trip to England—long planned—would keep him from
fulfilling his editorial duties.2
Douglass used the printing press as an agent for promoting what we today
would call a fundamental human right; that is, the right to be free and not bound to
any other man or woman. In a violently racist young nation, Douglass was among
many minority journalists who took a moral stance in their commentary on
contemporary issues, justly claiming black men to be equal to white men. Indeed,
Douglass was in the intellectual vanguard of the war on slavery. The words in his
3 Douglass, Lincoln, and Emancipation—Slavery: Past, Present and Future
newspapers were not neutral. They were written with an understanding that they
would lead to dramatic societal change.
The major theme that will be examined in the following pages is emancipation
with emphasis on the announcement of President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation
Proclamation. In essence, the Emancipation Proclamation represented the turning
point in Douglass’s relationship with Lincoln, a man for whom the journalist rarely
spared his critical barbs. Beginning in the fall of 1862, Douglass began to soften his
view of the attorney from Illinois, and after the assassination, the journalist came to
see Lincoln in more heroic terms.
Before the war, Douglass formed a professional relationship with William
Lloyd Garrison, editor of the Liberator newspaper, to spread word about slavery’s
evils, and he wrote several autobiographies, including the 1845 American classic
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave. His newspapers—
The North Star, Frederick Douglass Weekly, Frederick Douglass’ Paper, Douglass’
Monthly, and New National Era—became standards of the abolitionist struggle, with
Rochester, New York being his primary location of his journalistic enterprises. When
Lincoln was elected in November 1860, Douglass was hopeful and praised the new
president for being “one of the most frank, honest men in political life.”3
Douglass, the Critic
After the Civil War erupted, Douglass consistently expressed dissatisfaction
with Lincoln’s policies. Even after issuance of the Emancipation Proclamation,
Douglass retained criticisms. He thought Lincoln too much of a gradualist. Douglass
also found fault with the president’s penchant for sometimes-crude humor. He wanted
the country’s chief executive to focus on abolition—to seize the moment and enact
historic change. He found Lincoln to be too political, too diplomatic, and too
4 Douglass, Lincoln, and Emancipation—Slavery: Past, Present and Future
unfocused to wage an effective war on slavery. The sense is that Douglass found the
sixteenth president to be undisciplined in this regard, and that it irked him. For
Douglass, slavery had to be front and center as the reason for fighting the war. Indeed,
he linked Southern rebellion directly with slavery: “To fight against slaveholders,
without fighting against slavery, is but a half-hearted business, and paralyzes the
hands engaged in it.”4
It was Douglass’s belief that, since Lincoln had been elected in 1860 and had
bested nemesis Stephen A. Douglas rather easily in the Electoral College, he had a
mandate to subdue the rebellion with due alacrity. Instead, Lincoln seemed to waver
throughout the first year of the war, playing political games that Douglass deemed
inappropriate and undesirable. In fact, he was far more critical of Lincoln than was
Greeley, the Tribune editor who sometimes expressed frustration with the president.
Indeed, Douglass wrote an equivalent of Greeley’s “Prayer of the Twenty Millions”
every month for the first year and a half of the war. Only when the Emancipation
Proclamation took effect in January 1863 did he begin to leaven his criticisms.
Douglass began commenting in earnest about Lincoln in summer 1860 after
the Republican convention in Chicago. In his Douglass’ Monthly in June, he wrote
that Lincoln’s nomination over William H. Seward had surprised many, and he
described Lincoln as “a radical Republican” who was fully committed to the
abolitionist doctrine described in Seward’s “Irrepressible Conflict” speech. When
Seward delivered that speech in Rochester in 1858, he impressed Douglass with his
seriousness as a statesman. Douglass had also been impressed by Lincoln’s showing
during the 1858 debates with Illinois’s Democratic Senator Stephen A. Douglas.
Lincoln had attained the highest mark of Republicanism, Douglass’ Monthly stated.
Douglass wrote that Lincoln was “a man of will and nerve” who would not back
5 Douglass, Lincoln, and Emancipation—Slavery: Past, Present and Future
down.5
After Lincoln’s election, Douglass further commented on the new president’s
views about slavery. “Mr. L., the Northern Republican candidate, while admitting the
right to hold men as slaves in the States already existing, regards such property as
peculiar, exceptional, local, generally an evil, arid, not to be extended beyond the
limits of the States where it is established by what is called positive law.”6 Yet, in the
same December 1860 article, Douglass characterized Lincoln as no real friend of the
abolition movement, predicting that Lincoln and his cabinet would be “attacked more
bitterly for their pro-slavery truckling, than for doing any anti-slavery work.” On the
abolition front, Douglass felt that he had little cause for hope on the eve of South
Carolina’s secession from the Union. In fact, he believed slavery was safe under
Lincoln. “This is our impression,” he wrote, “and we deeply regret the facts from
which it is derived.” On the other hand, Douglass did see Lincoln’s election as a
warning shot to the South and its slaveholders. The reign of slavery-friendly
presidents had been ended, as Lincoln’s election had awakened the nation “to the
consciousness of new powers.” Still, the Rochester scribe thought Lincoln too
moderate, and therefore Douglass encouraged abolitionists to continue their agitation
by writing, publishing, organizing, lecturing, and holding meetings. Eventually, he
wrote, “Slavery shall be destroyed.”7
On the eve of Lincoln’s inauguration, Douglass wondered what Lincoln’s
policy toward slavery would be. “Will Mr. L. boldly grapple with the monster of
disunion, and bring down his proud looks?” Douglass asked. “Will he call upon the
haughty slave masters, who have risen in arms, to break up the Government, to lay
down those arms, and return to loyalty, or meet the doom of traitors and rebels?”
Douglass went on, “He must do this, or do worse.—He must do this, or consent to be
6 Douglass, Lincoln, and Emancipation—Slavery: Past, Present and Future
the despised representative of a defied and humbled Government.”8
Douglass was hopeful that Lincoln would not repudiate the principle on which
he had run in the general election—opposing extension of slavery in the territories.
He wrote in conclusion, “Since none which does not utterly trample that principle can
be accepted by the South, we have a double assurance that there will be no
compromise, and that the contest must now be decided, and decided forever, which of
the two, Freedom or Slavery, shall give law to this Republic. Let the conflict come,
and God speed the Right, must be the wish of every true-hearted American, as well as
that of an onlooking world.”9 As for the inaugural address, Douglass gave Lincoln a
pass on the way he had routed himself to Washington from Baltimore—cloaked in
disguise, as a fugitive slave seeking freedom in the North might travel—in order to
avoid assassination. “We have no censure for the President at this point. He only did
what braver men have done. It was, doubtless, galling to his very soul to be compelled
to avail himself of the methods of the fugitive slave, with a nation howling on his
track.”10
As for the speech itself, Douglass found it “to be little better than our worst
fears, and vastly below what we had fondly hoped it might be.” Lincoln, Douglass
commented, failed to reinforce his convention commitment to confining slavery.
Douglass detected double talk in Lincoln’s inaugural address. On the one hand,
Douglass pointed out, Lincoln conceded “complete loyalty to slavery in the slave
States,” but on the other hand he stated that the federal government was perpetual and
could not be dismantled by rebellion. Douglas pronounced the latter stance
“excellent” but wrote that it came too late. “When men deliberately arm themselves
with the avowed intention of breaking up the Government; when they openly insult its
flag, capture its forts, seize its munitions of war, and organize a hostile Government,
7 Douglass, Lincoln, and Emancipation—Slavery: Past, Present and Future
and boastfully declare that they will fight before they will submit, it would seem of
little use to argue with them.” Arguing with the slave masters was like “casting pearls
before swine,” Douglass declared, and to “parley with traitors is but to increase their
insolence and audacity.” Douglass was ashamed that Lincoln had suggested it was
legally impossible for the federal government to advocate on behalf of fugitive slaves
while at the same time he had declared war on the Southern traitors. According to
Douglass, the game had come to rest completely in the advantage of Jefferson Davis
and the Confederacy.11
In September 1861, Douglass printed an open letter to Lincoln in his Monthly.
The journalist advised the president to fight the war robustly and to enlist black men
in the Union Army. Douglass appealed to God to “open the eyes of the Executive, and
the nation, to see that there can be no successful prosecution or termination of war—
no peace in this country until slavery is abolished—that the rebellion cannot be put
down until slavery is put down; in other words, that slavery is the rebellion, and the
rebellion slavery.”12 Douglass urged Lincoln to make the war not just about slavery,
but also about abolition. It was a strong statement, and while it did not seem to have
an immediate impact, a year later Lincoln would indeed make the war about ending
slavery, with his announcement of the Emancipation Proclamation on 22 September
1862. In the next edition of the Monthly, Douglass would praise John C. Frémont’s
abolition policy in Missouri—and opposed Lincoln’s countermanding Frémont’s
order. Douglass wrote, “The press of the North are nearly unanimous in condemning
the President’s letter overturning Frémont’s policy.” Douglass praised Frémont for
loving “his country better than negro slavery.”13
In January 1862, Douglass slightly toned down his criticism of the president
and trained his sights on Congress. He now focused on the aim of the war. Douglass
8 Douglass, Lincoln, and Emancipation—Slavery: Past, Present and Future
noted that most citizens of the North had come to realize that slavery must end, and
that its demise was imminent. Douglass asked why had so few in Congress similarly
recognized this reality—did they not understand the cause of the rebellion or
appreciate the true remedy? Douglass then resumed his verbal assault against Lincoln,
who, along with his cabinet, listened far too much to the Border States, in the editor’s
estimation. Douglass worried that slavery might actually come out “of the present
struggle stronger than when the struggle began.” Yet he also was hopeful. He thought
in a single day all of this could change. “God grant that that day may not be long
delayed!”14
For Douglass, standing with the slaves was a matter of common decency and
was in accordance with “the laws of God.” Therefore, he held, America must liberate
its slaves; it must emancipate them and “pay them honest wages for honest work;
dispense with the biting lash, and pay them the ready cash.” Douglass commented that
the black man had participated in every aspect of the American experiment—picking
cotton and tobacco in the Carolinas; fighting the war in Mexico; helping dig gold in
California. He concluded, “In the very extreme difference of color and features of the
negro and the Anglo-Saxon, shall be learned the highest ideas of sacredness of man
and the fullness and perfection of human brotherhood.”15
Lincoln met with a group of black men in Washington in August 1862. He
told them that it would be impossible for whites and blacks to live in the same
country. The president proposed, therefore, that black men, women, and their children
be sent away to a colony in the Caribbean or South America. In response to this
meeting, Douglass was appalled. He argued that racism was not natural, but that,
rather, one single institution—slavery—had created it. “If the colored people instead
of having been stolen and forcibly brought to the United States, had come as free
9 Douglass, Lincoln, and Emancipation—Slavery: Past, Present and Future
immigrants, like the German and the Irish, never thought of as suitable objects of
property,” he wrote, “they never would have become the objects of aversion and bitter
persecution, nor would there ever have been divulged and propagated the arrogant and
malignant nonsense about natural repellency and the incompatibility of the races.”16
Douglass added of the president: “He says to the colored people: ‘I don’t like you;
you must clear out of this country.’ ” The journalist also criticized Lincoln for not, up
to this point, “calling the blacks to arms,” even though a federal law, the Confiscation
Act of 1862, had made that possible, in Douglass’ view.17
Emancipation
Of course, the turning point for Douglass came on 22 September 1862. On that
day, five days after the narrow Union victory at Antietam in Maryland, Lincoln
announced his emancipation policy. In response to Lincoln’s abolition announcement,
Douglass wrote: “We shout with joy that we live to record this righteous decree.”18
The order took effect on January 1, 1863, and Douglass was at his analytical best.
“The slave hopes to gain his liberty, the slaveholders fear the loss of Slaves, and
northern doughfaces fear the loss of political power,” he wrote in his Monthly. “It is a
pivotal period in our national history—the great day which is to determine the destiny
not only of the American Republic, but that of the American continent.” As for
Lincoln, Douglass saw the sixteenth president as having put into motion something
that the prairie lawyer could not stop. In the January 1863 issue, Douglass wrote,
“Powerful as Mr. Lincoln is, he is now the hands of the clock. He cannot change the
pivotal character of the day.”19 Douglass’s praise of Lincoln was mild. He wrote that
Northerners had been patient with the president but were not enthusiastic about his
presidency, and that they trusted the president more for his honesty than his ability.
Still, despite the mild praise, now Lincoln and Douglass began a new phase in their
10 Douglass, Lincoln, and Emancipation—Slavery: Past, Present and Future
relationship, and the two men would meet three separate times at the White House in
the next two years.20
In March 1863, Douglass reprinted a speech he had given at Rochester’s
Cooper Institute that described slavery in the rebellious states as “a system of lawless
violence, against which the slave may lawfully defend himself.” He added that it was
difficult to determine the full extent of Lincoln’s proclamation. The federal
government, Douglass observed, had for six decades been nothing more “than a
stupendous engine of Slavery and oppression, through which Slavery has ruled us, as
with a rod of iron.” If the Northern people would sustain Lincoln, the president would
affect a complete revolution against “miserable statesmanship, which for sixty years
juggled and deceived the people, by professing to reconcile what was irreconcilable.
No politician,” Douglass said, “need now hope to rise to power by crooking the
pregnant hinges of the knee to Slavery.”21 Douglass said the proclamation liberated all
Americans, and that the rebellious slave owners had fought against “the eternal laws
of nature.” He argued that nature, with the aid of free political discourse, would
correct the course of history, ending the Constitution’s clause that allowed for slavery.
Douglass wrote the Civil War now was a conflict to abolish slavery. “The process
may be long and tedious, but the event will come at last.”22
Furthermore, he pointed out, black Americans could now contribute to the
cause. In his March 1863 issue, Douglas wrote that the “paper Proclamation must now
be made iron, lead, and fire by the prompt employment of the negroes’ arms in this
contest.” Northerners who opposed enlisting black troops were not thinking straight,
he argued. Would these Northern men rather be drowned than be saved by a black
man, or rather have their homes burned to the ground than have black men extinguish
the flames? As he often did, Douglass turned to patriotic rhetoric. “What a glorious
11 Douglass, Lincoln, and Emancipation—Slavery: Past, Present and Future
day when Slavery shall be no more in this country, when we have blotted out this
system of wrong, and made this United States in fact and in truth what is it in
theory—the land of the Free and the Home of the Brave.”20 The use of words from the
American national anthem drilled home that being anti-slavery was a matter of
patriotism, not just a single issue relating to the black man. In April, Douglass would
write that the country could not be safe “while a single vestige of Slavery remains.”23
While the Emancipation Proclamation was a turning point for Douglass in his
view of Lincoln, the journalist still occasionally cast a critical eye in the direction of
the president. In August 1863 he expressed his indignation about the treatment of
black soldiers, including unequal pay, harsh treatment in the field, and a dearth of
opportunities for promotion. With a strong push from Secretary of War Edwin M.
Stanton, Congress considered a bill that proposed equal pay for black soldiers, but
conservatives opposed it. Some African-American soldiers in the Union Army refused
to accept any pay until they received equal treatment.
The South refused an exchange of black Union prisoners for white
Confederate prisoners. Douglass was aghast because he said black men were not
fighting for political or financial gain, “to affirm their manhood, to strike for liberty
and country.” The journalist railed at Lincoln for not condemning retaliation against
black prisoners. What set Douglass off this time was the fact that Lincoln had
complained about the Confederate government’s refusal to exchange two white
officers whom it planned to execute. For the time being, Douglass believed Lincoln to
be just as responsible for the murder of captured ex-slave soldiers as was Jefferson
Davis. Douglass argued for retaliation, not passivity: “For every black prisoner slain
in cold blood,” he wrote, “Mr. Jefferson Davis should be made to understand that one
rebel officer shall suffer death, and for every colored soldier sold into slavery, a rebel
12 Douglass, Lincoln, and Emancipation—Slavery: Past, Present and Future
shall be held as a hostage. For our Government to do less than this is to deserve the
indignation and execration of mankind.”24
In the summer of 1864, Congress finally passed an equal-pay law. While
Douglass was vindicated, he also had grown exhausted by his efforts. He announced
that he no longer would publish his monthly newspaper. He was ready for a new
cause—the right to vote, the most important privilege of full citizenship. Yet he
conceded that as he travelled around the country, many Americans did not “like the
idea of having the Negro in the body politic.” Douglass admitted that even whites
with good intentions opposed voting by “ignorant” black men. Douglass would have
none of that. “I will hear nothing of degradation of or ignorance against the black
man. If he knows enough to be hanged, he knows enough to vote.”25 Also that
summer, Lincoln shared a letter with Douglass that the president was writing in
response to a peace proposal to which Greeley was trying to get both the North and
South to agree. Douglass flatly told Lincoln no when he heard that the negotiated
peace would not include abolition.26
Conclusion
Douglass closed his Monthly newspaper in August 1863, so he did not have a
journalistic platform on which to comment on Lincoln’s pushing the Thirteenth
Amendment through Congress in January and February 1865. However, Douglass did
make a speech about the amendment in May of that year and found little fault with
Lincoln and the Republicans for their legislative handiwork. In fact, Douglass
attended the second inaugural address in March 1863 and afterwards told Lincoln that
the speech was a “sacred effort.”27 Of course, another man, named John Wilkes
Booth, also attended the second inaugural, and for the actor Lincoln’s words were the
catalyst that spurned him towards his brutal and mortal act a month later.
13 Douglass, Lincoln, and Emancipation—Slavery: Past, Present and Future
Yet Douglass did caution about how the Thirteenth Amendment would play
out and urged the American Anti-Slavery Society not to disband. Douglass said in
that May 1865 speech: “The South, by unfriendly legislation, could make our liberty,
under that provision, a delusion, a mockery, and a snare, and I hold that ground now.
What advantage is a provision like this Amendment to the black man, if the
Legislature of any State can to-morrow declare that no black man’s testimony shall be
received in a court of law?”28 Thus, Douglass was always skeptical, even though
Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation and now the Thirteenth Amendment had
outlawed slavery. Douglass knew equality would be a long march for the AfricanAmerican in North America.
And what of Lincoln? How did he see the sixteenth president in the long run?
Eleven years after the president’s assassination, the journalist would call Lincoln the
“first martyr President of the United States” in a speech dedicating the Freedom
Monument in Washington, D.C.29 Douglass criticized Lincoln’s gradualism on
slavery, but acknowledged that he was a white president whose main constituency
was white. It was impossible, Douglass knew, for Lincoln simply to ignore the
political and social realities of his times. Douglass noted that Lincoln came to the
White House publicly opposed only to extension of slavery to the territories. He did
not oppose slavery in the states where it already existed, was willing to send fugitives
back to their masters, and would overturn John C. Frémont’s emancipation order in
Missouri.
While the faith of African-Americans in Lincoln often was “taxed and strained
to the uttermost,” it “never failed,” Douglass observed. Blacks, he argued, needed to
have a “comprehensive view” of Lincoln, and they had “to make reasonable
allowance for the circumstances of his position.” Regardless, Lincoln “was at the end
14 Douglass, Lincoln, and Emancipation—Slavery: Past, Present and Future
of a great movement.” Douglass said the long view was that Lincoln did ultimately
free the slaves and lifted black men “to the heights of liberty and manhood.” Could
any black man ever forget 1 January 1863, the day the Emancipation Proclamation
took effect? “In that happy hour,” Douglass wrote, “we forgot all the delay, and forgot
all tardiness, forgot that the President had bribed rebels to lay down their arms by a
promise to withhold that bolt which would smite the slave-system with destruction.”30
Douglass came to view January 1 each year as a hallowed day, as important as the
Fourth of July.31 After the war, as African-American newspapers began to take off,
January 1 and both Lincoln and Douglass’ birthdays would become days to celebrate
each year.32 Yet, as much as he changed his view on Lincoln, the journalist never
totally forgave the president for not making abolition the casus belli of the Civil War
from the start. Douglass also tempered his praise because of Lincoln’s continual
advocacy of voluntary colonization.
Today, in the first quarter of the twenty-first century, slavery remains a major
international issue, although one that has far less salience than the decline in the price
of oil, the European refugee crisis, or the American presidential election. The world’s
nations and their leaders would prefer to think of slavery as an ancient problem long
solved. However, one nonaligned group has found that the number of slaves in the
world exceeds 35 million people. It will take an advocacy journalist with a website
and a steady beat in social media to raise awareness of the issue. The media tools may
be different, but the opportunity is similar to the one Douglass had in the middle of
the nineteenth century.
Notes
1
Amanda Foreman, A World on Fire: An Epic History of Two Nations Divided
(London, UK: Allen Lane, 2010), 46.
15 Douglass, Lincoln, and Emancipation—Slavery: Past, Present and Future
2
Ford Risley, Abolition and the Press: The Moral Struggle against Slavery
(Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2008), 149.
3
Douglass’ Monthly, June 1860.
4
Douglass’ Monthly, Rochester, NY, July 1861.
5
Douglass’ Monthly, June 1860.
6
Douglass’ Monthly, December 1860.
7
Douglass’ Monthly, December 1860.
8
Douglass’ Monthly, March 1861.
9
Douglass’ Monthly, March 1861.
10
Douglass’ Monthly, April 1861.
11
Douglass’ Monthly, April 1861.
12
Douglass’ Monthly, September 1861. 13
Douglass’ Monthly, October 1861.
14
Douglass’ Monthly, January 1862.
15
Douglass’ Monthly, March 1862.
16
Douglass’ Monthly, September 1862.
17
Douglass’ Monthly, September 1862. The Lincoln administration interpreted the
Confiscation Act of 1862 as only allowing freed slaves to be informants about
Confederate activities. Intelligence was the parameter and nothing more would be
tolerated, at least until January 1, 1863.
18
Douglass’ Monthly, October 1862.
19
Douglass’ Monthly, January 1863.
20
Henry L. Gates Jr., Lincoln on Race & Slavery (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 2009), lx.
21
Douglass’ Monthly, March 1863.
22
Douglass’ Monthly, March 1863.
23
Douglass’ Monthly, April 1863.
16 Douglass, Lincoln, and Emancipation—Slavery: Past, Present and Future
24
Douglass’ Monthly, August 1863.
25
Frederick Douglass, “Our Work Is Not Done,” December 3, 1863.
26
Donald, Lincoln (London, UK: Jonathan Cape, 1995), 527.
27
Donald, 568. A fair number of the people in attendance at the second inaugural
address were African-Americans, including Douglass. To get to Lincoln to tell him
what he thought of the speech, Douglass had to get through two racist guards at the
White House who did not want to allow the journalist to enter. See Gates, xlix.
28
Frederick Douglass, Speech to Anti-Slavery Society, May 1865.
29
Frederick Douglass, Speech at the Unveiling of the Freedman’s Monument,
Washington, DC, April 14, 1876.
30
Frederick Douglass, Speech at the Unveiling of the Freedman’s Monument,
Washington, DC, April 14, 1876.
31
William R. Blair, “Celebrating Freedom: The Problem of Emancipation in Public
Commemoration,” in Lincoln’s Proclamation: Emancipation Reconsidered, ed. by
William A. Blair and Karen F. Youngers (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North
Carolina Press, 2009), 200.
32
Lincoln was born on 12 February 1809. Douglass’ date of birth was sometime in
February 1818. The exact day is not known.
17