(C) Daily Kos
This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered.
. . . . . . . . . .



Before Frederick Douglass became Lincoln's thorn and partner, he ripped the bunting off July 4 [1]

['Daily Kos Staff Emeritus', 'Backgroundurl Avatar_Large', 'Nickname', 'Joined', 'Created_At', 'Story Count', 'N_Stories', 'Comment Count', 'N_Comments', 'Popular Tags']

Date: 2022-07-04

Lincoln and Douglass were perfect exemplars of how to effect change, both within the government and without. The former slave could not have come near achieving his aims without a strong (though initially reluctant) ally in the White House. Lincoln might well have not changed his goals in the war from saving the Union to demolishing the “peculiar institution” without Douglass’ relentless criticism and exhortation.

Working on the outside and on the inside were both needed for that big change to happen. We should remember that when assessing the dreadful state of our politics today, and the value of critics outside the party process.

Douglass started out deeply unhappy with Lincoln in 1860, labeling him "an excellent slave hound" because of the soon-to-be-president’s support for the Fugitive Slave Act that required authorities in nonslave states to turn over runaways to their owners—or, rather, usually to bounty hunters. Once taken, the runaways were returned whence they came, or were often sold "down river" where a short, harsh life of overwork and savage brutality in the coastal cane fields or elsewhere typically awaited them.

Frederick Douglass, mid-1870s.

After the election, Douglass and Lincoln engaged in a public and private political pas de deux right up through the president's second election.

Lincoln's inaugural address in 1861 sparked a ferocious critique from Douglass, who repeated the "slave hound" accusation. He was disgusted that the president had spent several paragraphs of that address argumentatively defending the practice of returning slaves, even repeating the Constitution's "shall be delivered up" phrase in regard to the human property Southerners had enshrined as their right for being part of the Union in the first place.

In Douglass' view, the effect of Lincoln's trying to hang on to the border slave states—Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri—to save the Union by turning over runaways was tantamount to killing them. Some owners murdered returned runaways immediately. Others tortured them and then worked them to a quick death.

Lincoln was, as Douglass said with that slave-hound label, no different than the hunting dogs sent to sniff out and corner a runaway until the master came to collect him. Pretty strong stuff to characterize the guy who would become known as The Great Emancipator.

But Douglass wanted action in 1861. This was the moment, one of those rare crises that much later politicians would say should never be wasted. The incipient rebellion shouldn't be soothed away with concession, Douglass made clear. For him and many other abolitionists of the era, now was the time for no more delay. But delay was exactly what Lincoln was proposing on his very first day in office.

David W. Blight writes:

It is too easy to simply conclude that the black activist was out of touch with the president’s dire situation and the necessity of pragmatic overtures for peace. At this point, his was indeed a higher law than the Constitution. Without blinking, Douglass compared slavery itself, and especially any effort to return fugitive slaves to bondage, to “murder.” In the rhetoric of the lecture platform, where Douglass had few peers, he proclaimed: “Your money or your life, says the pirate; your liberty or your life, says the slaveholder. And where is the difference between the pirate and the slaveholder?” Anna Murray Douglass, the abolitionist’s first wife, to whom he was married 44 years. She died in 1882. Douglass was for some while openly contemptuous of Lincoln after that speech, in lectures and in print. Even though Lincoln had surely hoped to soothe the slavers, by the time of the inaugural in early March 1861, seven states had already seceded and the Confederacy’s opening barrage of cannon shots at Fort Sumter were less than six weeks away. Douglass desired a war speech, a war focused on ending slavery and one in which colonization—the era's buzzword for freeing slaves but also sending them "back" to Africa or to islands of the Caribbean—was not on the agenda. Lincoln still supported colonization as late as the final months of 1864.

As James Oakes writes in his 2007 book, The Radical and The Republican: Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, and the Triumph of Antislavery Politics, Douglass wanted:

no war but an Abolition War; no peace but an Abolition Peace; liberty for all, chains for none; the black man a soldier in war, a laborer in peace; a voter at the South as well as the North; America his permanent home, and all Americans his fellow countrymen. Such, fellow citizens, is my idea of the mission of the war. If accomplished, our glory as a nation will be complete, our peace will flow like a river, and our foundations will be the everlasting rocks.

Lincoln’s inaugural response was far from Douglass' only criticism. But over time, as recounted in Paul Kendrick and Stephen Kendrick's 2007 book, Douglass and Lincoln: How a Revolutionary Black Leader and a Reluctant Liberator Struggled to End Slavery and Save the Union, the born-into-bondage ship caulker from Maryland met the free-born rail splitter from Illinois and their collision and subsequent collusion had a tremendous impact on the course of the war, on slavery and, although Lincoln was by then dead, the post-Civil War amendments. The two men were unlikely and uncomfortable partners, but without their partnership the immediate post-war landscape would most likely have been quite different.

Soon after the war ended and until his death 30 years later, Douglass had strong praise for Lincoln, although he did not fail to criticize. For example, on April 14, 1876, Douglass said in a commemoration speech delivered the day before the 11th anniversary of the president's assassination (which is worth reading in its entirety for the full flavor):

Fellow-citizens, ours is no new-born zeal and devotion—merely a thing of this moment. The name of Abraham Lincoln was near and dear to our hearts in the darkest and most perilous hours of the Republic. We were no more ashamed of him when shrouded in clouds of darkness, of doubt, and defeat than when we saw him crowned with victory, honor, and glory. Douglass with his second wife, Helen Pitts Douglass, seated, and her sister, Eva Pitts. He married her in 1884 to a firestorm of criticism because she was white. His response was that his first wife was the color of his mother and his second wife the color of his father. Our faith in him was often taxed and strained to the uttermost, but it never failed. When he tarried long in the mountain; when he strangely told us that we were the cause of the war; when he still more strangely told us that we were to leave the land in which we were born; when he refused to employ our arms in defense of the Union; when, after accepting our services as colored soldiers, he refused to retaliate [against] our murder and torture as colored prisoners; when he told us he would save the Union if he could with slavery; when he revoked the Proclamation of Emancipation of General Fremont; when he refused to remove the popular commander of the Army of the Potomac, in the days of its inaction and defeat, who was more zealous in his efforts to protect slavery than to suppress rebellion; when we saw all this, and more, we were at times grieved, stunned, and greatly bewildered; but our hearts believed while they ached and bled. Nor was this, even at that time, a blind and unreasoning superstition. Despite the mist and haze that surrounded him; despite the tumult, the hurry, and confusion of the hour, we were able to take a comprehensive view of Abraham Lincoln, and to make reasonable allowance for the circumstances of his position. We saw him, measured him, and estimated him; not by stray utterances to injudicious and tedious delegations, who often tried his patience; not by isolated facts torn from their connection; not by any partial and imperfect glimpses, caught at inopportune moments; but by a broad survey, in the light of the stern logic of great events, and in view of that divinity which shapes our ends, rough hew them how we will, we came to the conclusion that the hour and the man of our redemption had somehow met in the person of Abraham Lincoln. It mattered little to us what language he might employ on special occasions; it mattered little to us, when we fully knew him, whether he was swift or slow in his movements; it was enough for us that Abraham Lincoln was at the head of a great movement, and was in living and earnest sympathy with that movement, which, in the nature of things, must go on until slavery should be utterly and forever abolished in the United States.

Excerpts from Douglass’ scathing 1852 Independence Day Speech

Frederick Douglass, late 1870s.

Nearly a decade before the two men began their clash of ideas and synthesis of tactics, Douglass gave an Independence Day speech on July 5 in Rochester, New York, that tells the grim truth of the era into which he was born and shows clearly from where all that anger shown in the early years of Lincoln's presidency was derived. As historian Eric Foner wrote in 2004:

At an Independence Day meeting sponsored by the Rochester Ladies' Anti-Slavery Society in 1852, the former slave Frederick Douglass delivered one of the nineteenth century's greatest orations. His theme was the contradiction between American slavery and American freedom. Douglass did not mince words. He spoke of a government that mouthed the language of liberty yet committed "crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages"; of patriotism reduced to "swelling vanity"; of hypocrisy destroying the country's "moral power abroad." Although slavery is gone, Douglass's critique remains as relevant as in 1852. But so too does his optimism that the days of empire are over, and that in the modern world abuses cannot permanently be hidden from the light of day. Douglass, not the leaders of a slave-holding republic, was the genuine patriot, who called on his listeners to reclaim the "great principles" of the Declaration from those who had defiled and betrayed them. That is a truly patriotic goal for our own Fourth of July.

Here are excerpts of the speech Douglass gave in Rochester, where he had founded the abolitionist newspaper The North Star. (If you prefer, you can listen to a piece of the speech delivered by James Earl Jones.) At the time the speech was given, the Fugitive Slave Act allowed owners of human beings to hunt them down or send their agents and bounty hunters into any state or U.S. territory, capture any slave (or Black person thought to be a slave), and ship them back from whence they had escaped—or to some even less pleasant place.

To make these excerpts more readable, I have added numerous paragraph breaks that do not appear at the linked site.

[END]
---
[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2022/7/4/2107159/-Before-Frederick-Douglass-became-Lincoln-s-thorn-and-partner-he-ripped-the-bunting-off-July-4

Published and (C) by Daily Kos
Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified.

via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds:
gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/