Chapter Thirteen
“Give them arms, Mr. Lincoln!”
The news of Harper’s Ferry stunned Washington. “A United States arsenal attacked—Slaves stampeding!” “The madman from Kansas run amuck!” “The slaves are armed!” Panic seized the South, and Capitol Hill rocked and reeled with the shock.
Jack brought home copies of theNew York Herald, and Amelia read how the old man lay bleeding on a pallet with his two sons cold and still at his side. Governor Wise, leaning over to condemn, had drawn back before a courage, fortitude and simple faith which silenced him.
“There is an eternity behind and an eternity before,” John Brown had said, and his voice did not falter. “This little speck in the center, however long, is comparatively but a minute. The difference between your tenure and mine is trifling, and I therefore tell you to be prepared. I am prepared. You have a heavy responsibility, and it behooves you to meet it. You may dispose of me easily, but this question is still to be settled ... the end is not yet.”
“Why did he let the train through?” people asked. “Ishe crazy?”
“I came here to liberate slaves.” All his explanations were so simple. “I have acted from a sense of duty, and am content to await my fate; but I think the crowd have treated me badly.... Yesterday I could have killed whom I chose; but I had no desire to kill any person, and would not have killed a man had they not tried to kill me and my men. I could have sacked and burned the town, but did not; I have treated the persons whom I took as hostages kindly. If I had succeeded in running off slaves this time, I could have raised twenty times as many men as I have now, for a similar expedition. But I have failed.”
An old man had been stopped—a crazy old man, whose equallycrazy followers were killed or captured. It was over and very little harm done. An unpleasant incident to be soon forgotten.
But no one would have done with it. Papers throughout the country sowed John Brown’s words into every town and hamlet; preachers repeated them in their pulpits; people gathered in small knots on the roadside and shouted them defiantly or whispered them cautiously; black men and women everywhere bowed their heads and wept hot, scalding tears. And William Lloyd Garrison, the man of peace, the “non-resister,” said, “How marvelous has been the change in public opinion during thirty years of moral agitation. Ten years ago there were thousands who could not endure the slightest word of rebuke of the South; now they can swallow John Brown whole and his rifle in the bargain.”
The old man never lost his calm. Frenzy shook every slave state in the Union. Rumors spread and multiplied. Black and white men were seized, beaten, and killed. Slaves disappeared. A hue and cry arose.
“The Abolitionists! Get the Abolitionists! They are behind John Brown!”
Amelia read of letters and papers found in the farmhouse near Harper’s Ferry. “Many people are implicated! Indictments being drawn up!” She looked at Jack, her face white.
“Do you suppose—could it be—wouldhebe among them?” She bit her trembling lips.
Jack Haley frowned. He had heard talk at the office. He knew they were looking for Frederick Douglass. He knew they would hang this Negro whom they hated and feared more than a dozen white men—ifthey got him. He patted Amelia on the shoulder.
“I wouldn’t worry,” he comforted her. “Your Frederick is a smart man.”
“He might be needed to testify—he may have something to say.” Amelia was certain Frederick Douglass would not turn aside from his duty.
“He is not a fool,” Jack said, shaking his head. “The Dred Scott decision renders his word useless. No word of his can help John Brown.”
Amelia heard the bitterness in Jack’s voice and she sighed. Time had dealt kindly with Amelia. At sixty her step was more elastic, her skin smoother and her shoulders straighter than the day, fifteen years before, when she had walked away from Covey’s place. Mrs.Royall, intrepid journalist, was dead. Amelia had stayed on in the house, assumed the mortgage, and took in as roomers a score of clerks and secretaries who labored in the government buildings a few blocks away. “Miss Amelia’s” house was popular, and her rooms were in demand.
Jack had married and talked of going away, of starting his own paper, of becoming a power in one of the new publishing houses—Then suddenly, during a sleeting winter, an epidemic had struck Washington. Afterward, there had been quite a stir about “cleaning up the city.” Certain sections had got new sewers and rubbish was collected. But Jack’s wife was dead. So a grim-faced, older Jack had moved in with Amelia. He had stayed on with the paper, contemptuous of much he saw and heard. For Jack Haley, as for many people in the United States the fall of 1859, John Brown cleared the air.Somebody’s doing something, thank God!
Amelia continued to scan the papers, dreading to see Frederick Douglass’ name. And one day she did, but as she read farther a smile lit up her face. The story was an angry denunciation of “this Frederick Douglass” by Governor Wise of Virginia. Douglass, he announced, had slipped through their fingers. He was known to have boarded a British steamer bound for England. “Could I overtake that vessel,” the Governor was quoted as saying, “I would take him from her deck at any cost.”
Off the coast of Labrador, in weather four degrees below zero, theScotiastrained and groaned. There was something fiercely satisfying to one passenger in the struggle with the elements. Frederick Douglass, pacing the icy deck or tossing in his cabin, felt that the skyshouldbe black. The watersshouldfoam and dash, the windsshouldhowl; for John Brown lay in prison and his brave sons were dead!
Back in Concord, the gentle Thoreau was ringing the town bell and crying in the streets, “Old John Brown is dead—John Brown the immortal lives!”
By the time Douglass docked at Liverpool, England was as much alive to what had happened at Harper’s Ferry as the United States. Once more Douglass was called to Scotland and Ireland—this time to give an account of the men who had thus flung away their lives in a desperate effort to free the slaves.
Having accepted an invitation to speak in Paris, he wrote for a passport. A suspicion current at the time, that a conspiracy againstthe life of Napoleon III was afoot in England, had stiffened the French passport system. Douglass, wishing to avoid any delay, wrote directly to the Honorable George Dallas, United States Minister in London. That gentleman refused to grant the passport at all on the ground that Frederick Douglass was not a citizen of the United States. Douglass’ English friends gaped at the Ministry letter. The “man without a country,” however, merely shrugged his shoulders.
“I forget too easily,” he said. “Now I’ll write to the French minister.”
Within a few days he had his answer—a “special permit” for Frederick Douglass to visit “indefinitely” in any part of France. He was packed to go when a cable from home arrived.
Little Annie was dead. The sudden loss of his baby daughter seemed to climax all the pain and heartbreak of these months.
Heedless now of peril to himself, he took the first outgoing steamer for Portland, Maine.
During the seventeen dragging days of his voyage, Douglass resolved to make one stop even before going home. He had two graves now to visit—Annie’s and John Brown’s. Annie too had loved the old man. She would not mind if her father went directly to the house in the Adirondacks.
No one was expecting the haggard dark man who descended from the train at North Elba. He could not find a driver to take him up to John Brown’s house. But from the livery stable he secured a horse. And so he rode up through the Indian Pass gorge, between two overhanging black walls, and came out under tall, white clouds above wine-colored mountains rising in a blue mist. And there beside a still, green pool, reflecting a white summit in its depths, he saw the house, with its abandoned sawmill.
Mrs. Brown exhibited no surprise when he stood before her. Her husband’s strength sustained her now. John Brown and the sons that she had borne were no longer hers. They belonged to all the peoples of the world. She greeted Frederick Douglass with a smile.
“I’ve been expecting you. Come in, my friend.” She talked quietly, transmitting to him John Brown’s final words and admonitions. Then she rose. “He left something for you.”
“Oh—John!” Until that moment he had listened without interrupting, his eyes on the woman’s expressive face. The words broke from him unbidden.
At her gesture, he followed her up the bare stairs and into thebedroom that had been hers and John Brown’s. The roof sloped down; he had to stoop a little, standing beside her before the faded, furled flag and rusty musket in the corner. She nodded her head, but could not speak.
“For me?” Douglass’ words came in a whisper.
“He wanted you to have them.” She had turned to the chest of drawers and handed him an envelope.
“He sent this in one of my letters. I was to give it to you when you came.”
His hands were trembling as he drew forth the single white sheet on which were written two lines.
“I know I have not failed because you live. Go forward, and some day unfurl my flag in the land of the free. Farewell.” And then was sprawled, “John Brown.”
He left the farmhouse with the musket in his hands. They had wrapped the flag carefully, and he laid it across his shoulders. So many times she had stood in the narrow doorway and watched John Brown ride away. He had never looked back. But on this evening the rider paused when he came to the top of the hill. He paused and looked back down into the valley. His eyes found the spot where John Brown lay beside his sons. She could not see his lips move, nor could she hear his words—words the winds of the Adirondacks carried away:
“I promise you, John Brown. As I live, I promise you.”
Then he waved his hand to John Brown’s widow and was gone.
Douglass’ homecoming was weighted with sorrow. But in the mountains of North Elba he had drawn strength. He was able to comfort the grieving mother and the older children. For the first time in years he sat quietly with his three fine sons. He told Rosetta how pretty she was—like her mother in the days of the plum-colored wedding dress. The family closed its ranks, coming very close together. Douglass managed to remain in his house nearly a month before knowledge got around that he was back in the country. Then a letter from William Lloyd Garrison summoned him:
The investigating committee appointed by Congress is being called off. The net thrown out over the country yielded very little. As you know, Captain Brown implicated nobody. To the end he insisted that he and he alone was responsible for all that happened, that he had many friends, but noinstigators. In their efforts this committee has signally failed. Now they have asked to be discharged. It is my opinion that the men engaged in this investigation expect soon to be in rebellion themselves, and not a rebellion for liberty, like that of John Brown, but a rebellion for slavery. It is possible that they see that by using their Senatorial power in search of rebels they may be whetting a knife for their own throats. At any rate the country will soon be relieved of the Congressional drag-net, so your liberty is no longer threatened. We are planning a memorial to the grand old man here at Tremont Temple and want you to speak. I know you’ll come.
The investigating committee appointed by Congress is being called off. The net thrown out over the country yielded very little. As you know, Captain Brown implicated nobody. To the end he insisted that he and he alone was responsible for all that happened, that he had many friends, but noinstigators. In their efforts this committee has signally failed. Now they have asked to be discharged. It is my opinion that the men engaged in this investigation expect soon to be in rebellion themselves, and not a rebellion for liberty, like that of John Brown, but a rebellion for slavery. It is possible that they see that by using their Senatorial power in search of rebels they may be whetting a knife for their own throats. At any rate the country will soon be relieved of the Congressional drag-net, so your liberty is no longer threatened. We are planning a memorial to the grand old man here at Tremont Temple and want you to speak. I know you’ll come.
Douglass hastened to Boston. The great mass meeting was more than a memorial. It was a political and social conclave. Arguments and differences of opinions were laid aside. They had a line of action. Douglass saw that he had returned to the United States in time for vital service.
“It enabled me to participate in the most important and memorable presidential canvass ever witnesses in the United States,” he wrote, looking back on it later, “and to labor for the election of a man who in the order of events was destined to do a greater service to his country and to mankind than any man who had gone before him in the presidential office. It was a great thing to me to be permitted to bear some humble part in this. It was a great thing to achieve American independence when we numbered three millions, but it was a greater thing to save this country from dismemberment and ruin when it numbered thirty millions. He alone of all our presidents was to have the opportunity to destroy slavery, and to lift into manhood millions of his countrymen hitherto held as chattels and numbered with the beasts of the field.”[19]
Not for nearly a hundred years was the country to see such a presidential campaign as the one waged in 1860.
Garrison was drawn into the fray early. He mocked the Democrats when they tore themselves apart at their convention in Charleston and cheered “an independent Southern republic.” With the Democrats divided, the Republicans would win; and into the Republican party now came the Abolitionists—including William Lloyd Garrison. Douglass was very happy.
A few weeks before the Republicans met in convention at Chicago, Frederick Douglass at his home in Rochester had a caller. The man identified himself as a tradesman from Springfield, Illinois.
“I’m here, lookin’ over the shippin’ of some goods, and I took the liberty to come see you, Mr. Douglass,” he said, resting his hands on his knotty knees.
“I’m very glad you did, sir.” Douglass waited for the man to reveal his errand. He leaned forward.
“I ain’t a talkin’ man, Mr. Douglass. I’m much more for doin’.” Douglass smiled his approval. The man lowered his tone. “More than once I took on goods for Reverend Rankin.”
Douglass knew instantly what he meant. John Rankin was one of Ohio’s most daring Underground Railroad agents. Douglass’ face lit up, and for the second time he grasped his visitor’s rough hand.
“Any Rankin man is a hundredfold welcome in my house! What can I do for you?”
“Jus’ listen and think on what I’m sayin’. We got a man out our way we’re namin’ for president!”
The unexpected announcement caught Douglass up short.
“But I thought—” The man waved him to silence.
“Yep! I know. You Easterners got your man all picked out. I ain’t sayin’ nothin’ ’bout Mr. Seward. I donno him. But the boys out Westdoknow Abe Lincoln—and we’re gonna back him!”
“Abe Lincoln?” Douglass was puzzled. “I never heard of him.”
“Nope? Well, it don’t matter. You will!”
He was gone then, leaving Frederick Douglass very thoughtful. The Westerner was right. Senator William Seward, a tried and true antislavery man, had been picked. The only question had been whether or not the entire party would accept such a known radical.
Douglass reached Chicago the evening before the nominations were taken up. He found the city decked out with fence rails which they said “Honest Abe” had split. Evidently the people in the streets knew him, the cab drivers and farmers in from the surrounding country. They stood on street corners, buttonholed workmen hurrying home from work, and they talked about “our man.”
Something was in the air. The convention was a bedlam. Even while the thunder of applause that had greeted the nomination of William Seward still hung in the far corners of the hall, Norman B. Judd, standing on a high chair, nominated the man who habitually referred to himself as a “jackleg lawyer.” The roar that greeted Lincoln’s name spread to the packed street outside and kept up until theSeward men were silenced. The cheering died away in the hall, as they began taking the third ballot; but the steady roar in the street found an echo in the chamber, when it was found that Lincoln had received two hundred thirty-one and a half votes, lacking just one and a half votes for nomination. Then Ohio gave its four votes to the “rail-splitter,” and Abraham Lincoln became the Republican candidate for President of the United States.
Three candidates were in the field. Stephen A. Douglas, absolute leader of the Democratic party in the West, had been nominated at Baltimore after a bitter and barren fight at Charleston. The “seceding” Southern wing of the party had nominated John C. Breckinridge. Three candidates and one issue,slavery.
Stephen Douglas’ position was: Slavery or no slavery in any territory is entirely the affair of the white inhabitants of such territory. If they choose to have it, it is their right; if they choose not to have it, they have a right to exclude or prohibit it. Neither Congress nor the people of the Union, outside of said territory, have any right to meddle with or trouble themselves about the matter.
The Democrats of Illinois laughed at the others for hailing forth the Kentuckian. But Breckinridge represented the powerful slavocracy which said: The citizen of any state has a right to migrate to any territory, taking with him anything which is property by the law of his own sure, and hold, enjoy, and be protected in the use of, such property in said territory. And Congress is bound to furnish him protection wherever necessary, with or without the co-operation of the territorial legislature.
Abraham Lincoln’s voice had never been heard by the nation. Easterners waited with misgivings to hear what the gangling backwoods lawyer would say. He did not mince words: Slavery can exist only by virtue of municipal law; and there is no law for it in the territories and no power to enact one. Congress can establish or legalize slavery nowhere but is bound to prohibit it in, or exclude it from, any and every Federal territory, whenever and wherever there shall be necessity for such exclusion or prohibition.
Frederick Douglass was convinced not only by his words but by the fact that Abraham Lincoln was so clearly the choice of the people who knew him. He threw his pen and voice into the contest. Many of the Abolitionists hung back; many an “old guard” politician sulked. Wendell Phillips dug up evidence that Lincoln had supported enforcement of the hated Fugitive Slave Law in Illinois.
But Douglass shook his leonine mane and campaigned throughout New York State and in Boston, Philadelphia, Cleveland, Chicago—wherever Negroes could vote.
“Here is a man who knows your weariness,” he told them. “This is your opportunity to make your voice heard. Send Lincoln to the White House! Strengthen his hand that he may fight for you!”
Fear gripped the South. They called Lincoln the “Black Republican.” No longer was the North divided. Young Republicans organized marching clubs and tramped through the city streets; torchlight processions turned night into day:John Brown’s body lies a-moldering in the grave.... A new singing could be heard in the remotest pine woods of the South:
“Oh, freedomOh, freedom!Oh, freedom ovah me—An’ befo’ I’d be a slaveI’d be buried in mah graveAn’ go home to my LawdAn’ be free.”
“Oh, freedomOh, freedom!Oh, freedom ovah me—An’ befo’ I’d be a slaveI’d be buried in mah graveAn’ go home to my LawdAn’ be free.”
“Oh, freedomOh, freedom!
“Oh, freedom
Oh, freedom!
Oh, freedom ovah me—An’ befo’ I’d be a slaveI’d be buried in mah graveAn’ go home to my LawdAn’ be free.”
Oh, freedom ovah me—
An’ befo’ I’d be a slave
I’d be buried in mah grave
An’ go home to my Lawd
An’ be free.”
On November 6, Wendell Phillips congratulated Frederick Douglass: “For the first time in our history, the slave has chosen a President of the United States.”
Garrison and Douglass decided to attend the inauguration together.
“I want to show you the White House, Douglass. You must see the Capitol to which you have sent Lincoln.”
Douglass smiled. He had never been in Washington, and he was glad they were together again.
Garrison was far from well. The winter months had tried his failing strength. After electing Lincoln, the North drew back, in large part disclaiming all participation in the “insult” to their “sister states” in the South. The press took on a conciliatory tone toward slavery and a corresponding bitterness toward antislavery men and measures. From Massachusetts to Missouri, antislavery meetings were ruthlessly stoned. The second John Brown Memorial at Tremont Temple was broken up by a mob, some of the wealthiest citizens of Boston taking part in the assault on Douglass and the other speakers. Howling gangs followed Wendell Phillips for three days wherever heappeared on the pavements of his native city, and hoodlums broke the windowpanes in Douglass’ Rochester printing shop.
These things weighed heavily on Garrison’s spirits. For a while he had been uplifted by the belief that moral persuasion was winning over large sections of the country. Now he saw them fearfully grasping their possessions—repudiating everything except their “God-given” right to pile up dollars.
But across the country stalked one more grim man. His face was turned to the east—to the rising sun; his lanky, bony body rose endless on a prop of worn, out-size shoes.
And deep in the hollows of the South, behind the lonesome pine trees draped with moss, down in the corners of the cotton fields, in the middle of the night—the slaves were whispering. And their words rumbled like drums along the ground: “Mistah Linkum is a-comin’! Praise da Lawd!”
Washington was an armed city. “The new President of the United States will be inaugurated—” General Scott was as good as his word. But the crowds did not cheer when Abraham Lincoln appeared. There was a hush, as if all the world knew it was a solemn moment.
Douglass looked on the gaunt, strange beauty of that thin face—the resemblance to John Brown was startling—and as he bared his head, Douglass whispered, “He’s our man, John Brown. He’s our man!”
Amelia saw Frederick Douglass in the crowd. She tugged frantically at Jack Haley’s arm.
“Look! Look!” she said. “It’s him!”
Jack, turning his head, recognized the man he had heard speak years ago in Providence, Rhode Island. Older, yes, broader and grown in stature, but undoubtedly it was the same head, the same wild, sweeping mane.
As the crowd began to disperse and Douglass turned, he felt a light pull on his sleeve and looked down on a slight, white-haired woman whose piquant upturned face and bright blue eyes were vaguely familiar.
“Mr. Douglass?” Her voice fluttered in her throat.
“At your service, ma’am.” Douglass managed to make a little bow, though the crowd pressed upon them. Her eyes widened.
“Still the same lovely manners!” she said. At this the tall man at her elbow spoke.
“Mr. Douglass, you will pardon us. I am Jack Haley, and this is Mrs. Amelia Kemp.”
“Don’t you remember me—Frederick?” She smiled wistfully as she said his name, and the years dissolved. He remembered the dahlias.
“Miss Amelia!” He took her hand, and his somber face lit up with delight.
“Could you come with us? Have you a little time?” Her words were bubbling over.
Douglass turned to Garrison, who was regarding the scene with some misgiving. They two were far from safe in Washington.
“I think we’d better leave at once,” he said with a frown.
Douglass’ face showed his disappointment. He said, and it was clear he meant it, “I’m terribly sorry, Miss Amelia.”
Jack Haley turned to Garrison. His voice was low.
“I understand the situation, sir. But if I drove you directly to our house, I assure you we shall encounter no difficulties. We would be honored.”
Once more Douglass looked hopefully at Garrison. The older man shrugged his shoulders.
The fringed-top carryall stood at the curb. Garrison helped Amelia into the back seat and sat down beside her. Douglass climbed into the front seat with Jack. As Jack picked up the reins, Douglass grinned and said, “I could drive, you know.”
Jack gave a short laugh. “I realize, Mr. Douglass, that we’re uncivilized down here. But stranger things than this are seen on Pennsylvania Avenue. Relax, we’ll get home all right.”
So they drove down the avenue past soldiers and visitors and legislators, all intent upon their own affairs. Louisiana Avenue with its wide greensward and early violets was loveliest of all.
For two days in the short period before the guns opened fire at Fort Sumter, Frederick Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison rested from their labors on a shaded side-street off Louisiana Avenue.
Up North the countryside was still locked in the hard rigors of winter, but here spring was in the air. He walked out in the yard, and told Miss Amelia about his big sons who kept the paper going during his many absences.
Succulent odors rose like incense from Amelia’s kitchen—Maryland fried chicken, served with snowy mounds of rice, popovers and cherry pie—their fragrance hung in the air and brought her lodgers tumbling down from their rooms to inquire, “What’s going on here?”
Amelia told them about her guests, swearing them to secrecy. They tiptoed out into the hall and peeped into the living room. On the second evening Miss Amelia gave in to their urgent requests.
“A few of my young friends to meet you, Frederick. You won’t mind?” After supper they gathered round. Far into the night they asked questions and talked together, the ex-slave and young Americans who sorted mail, ran errands and wrote the letters of the legislators on Capitol Hill.
They were the boys who would have to drag their broken bodies across stubble fields, who would lie like filthy, grotesque rag dolls in the mud. They were the girls who would be childless or widowed or old before their lives had bloomed.
“It’s been wonderful here, Miss Amelia.” Douglas held her hand in parting.
“I’ve been proud to have you, Frederick.” Her blue eyes looked up into his, and Douglass saw her tears.
He stooped and kissed her on the soft, withered cheek.
They said the war was inevitable. Madmen cannot hear words of reason. On only one thing was Lincoln unswerving—to preserve the Union. As concession after concession was made, it became more and more evident that this was what the slaveholders did not want. They were sick to death of the Union! In Georgia, Tennessee, North Carolina and Virginia white men struggled against the octopus of slavery. They did all they could to prevent the break. But the slavers had control—they had the power, they had the money, and they had the slaves.
So there was war, and slaves were set to digging ditches and building barricades.
From the beginning Frederick Douglass saw in the war the end of slavery. Much happened the first two years to shake his faith. Secretary of State William Seward instructed United States ministers to say to the governments where they were stationed that “terminate however it might, the status of no class of the people of the United States would be changed by the rebellion; slaves will be slaves still, and masters will be masters still.” General McClellan and General Butler warned the slaves in advance that “if any attempt was made by them to gain their freedom it would be suppressed with an iron hand.” Douglass grew sick with despair when President Lincoln quickly withdrew the emancipation proclamation made by General John C. Frémont in Missouri. Union soldiers were even stationed about thefarmhouses of Virginia to guard the masters and help them hold their slaves.
The war was not going well. In theNorth Starand from the platform, Douglass reminded the North that it was fighting with one hand only, when it might strike effectually with two. The Northern states fought with their soft white hand, while they kept their black iron hand chained and helpless behind them. They fought the effect while they protected the cause. The Union would never prosper in the war until the Negro was enlisted, Douglass said.
On every side they howled him down.
“Give the blacks arms, and loyal men of the North will throw down their guns and go home!”
“This is the white man’s country and the white man’s war!”
“It would inflict an intolerable wound upon the pride and spirit of white soldiers to see niggers in the United States uniform.”
“Anyhow, niggers won’t fight—the crack of his old master’s whip will send him scampering in terror from the field.”
They made jokes about it.
White men died at Bull Run, Ball’s Bluff, Big Bethel, and Fredericksburg. The Union Army needed more soldiers. They began drafting men—white men. In blind rage the whites turned on the helpless blacks.
“Why should we fight for you?” they screamed. On the streets of New York, black men and women were beaten, their workshops and stores destroyed, their homes burned. They burned the Colored Orphan Asylum in New York. Not all the children could be dragged from the blazing building.
Douglass wrote letters to Congress and got up petitions. “Let us fight!” he pleaded. “Give us arms!”
He pointed out that the South was sustaining itself and its army with Negro labor. At last General Butler at Fort Monroe announced the policy of treating the slaves as “contrabands” to be made useful to the Union cause. General Phelps, in command at Carrollton, Louisiana, advocated the same plan. The story of how the slaves flocked into these camps, how they worked, how they were glad to sustain their half-starved bodies on scraps left over by the soldiers, how they endured any and all hardships for this opportunity to do something to “hep Massa Linkum win da war” cannot be told here. But it convinced the administration that the Negro could be useful.
The second step was to give Negroes a peculiar costume whichshould distinguish them from soldiers and yet mark them as part of the loyal force. Finally so many Negroes presented themselves that it was proposed to give the laborers something better than spades and shovels with which to defend themselves in case of emergency.
“Still later it was proposed to make them soldiers,” Douglass wrote, “but soldiers without blue uniform, soldiers with a mark upon them to show that they were inferior to other soldiers; soldiers with a badge of degradation upon them. However, once in the army as a laborer, once there with a red shirt on his back and a pistol in his belt, the Negro was not long in appearing on the field as a soldier. But still, he was not to be a soldier in the sense, and on an equal footing, with white soldiers. It was given out that he was not to be employed in the open field with white troops ... doing battle and winning victories for the Union cause ... in the teeth of his old masters; but that he should be made to garrison forts in yellow-fever and otherwise unhealthy localities of the South, to save the health of the white soldiers; and, in order to keep up the distinction further, the black soldiers were to have only half the wages of the white soldiers, and were to be commanded entirely by white commissioned officers.”
Negroes all over the North looked at each other with drawn faces.
Almost the cup was too bitter. But up from the South came stories of how black fugitives were offering themselves as slaves to the Union armies—of the terrible retaliation meted out to them if caught—of how the Northern armies were falling back.
Then President Lincoln gave Governor Andrew of Massachusetts permission to raise two colored regiments. The day the news broke, Douglass came home waving his paper in the air. Anna’s face blanched. Up from the table rose her two sons, Lewis and Charles.
“We’ll be the first!” They dashed off to sign up. Young Frederic was in Buffalo that morning. When he got back, he heard where they had gone, and turned to follow them.
“Wait! Wait!” The mother’s cry was heartbroken.
His father too said, “Wait.” Then Douglass explained.
“This is only the first, my son. We’ll have other regiments. There will be many regiments before the war is won. We must recruit black men from every state in our country—South as well as North.” He looked at his tall son and sighed. “Unfortunately, I am known. I would be stopped before I could reach them in the South. Here is a job for some brave man.”
They faced each other calmly, father and son, and neither was afraid.
“I understand, sir. I will go!”
A few evenings later, before an overflow audience at Corinthian Hall in Rochester, Frederick Douglass delivered an address which may be placed beside Patrick Henry’s in Virginia. It appeared later in leading journals throughout the North and West under the caption “Men of Color, to Arms!”
“Action! Action, not criticism, is the plain duty of this hour. Words are now useful only as they stimulate to blows. The office of speech now is only to point out when, where, and how to strike to the best advantage.” This was Douglass the spellbinder, Douglass, who had lifted thousands cheering to their feet in England, Ireland, and Scotland. “From East to West, from North to South, the sky is written all over ‘Now or Never.’ Liberty won by white men alone would lose half its luster.... Who would be free themselves must strike the blow.”
The applause swept across the country. White men read these words and were shamed in their prejudices; poor men read them and thanked God for Frederick Douglass; black men read them and hurried to recruiting offices.
They were in the crowd on Boston Common the morning the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts marched away—a father and a mother come to see their two sons off to war. Douglass was not thinking of the credit due him for the formation of the first Negro regiment. He was remembering how Lewis had always wanted a pony and the way Charlie always left his shoes in the middle of the floor, to be stumbled over. He tried to stay the trembling in Anna’s arm by pressing it close to his side. He wished he had somehow managed to get that pony.
The soldiers were standing at ease in the street when Charlie saw her. He waved his hand, and though he did not yell, she saw his lips form the words, “Hi, Mom!” She saw him nudge his brother and then—
They were marching, holding their colors high, the sun glinting on polished bayonets and reflected in their eyes. They marched away behind their gallant Captain Shaw, and as they went they sang a song:
“John Brown’s body lies a-moldering in the graveBut his soul goes marching on.”
“John Brown’s body lies a-moldering in the graveBut his soul goes marching on.”
“John Brown’s body lies a-moldering in the graveBut his soul goes marching on.”
“John Brown’s body lies a-moldering in the grave
But his soul goes marching on.”