Part III (continued 2)

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:

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 he appeared 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 the farmhouses of Virginia to guard the masters and help them hold their slaves.

The war was not going well. In the North Star and 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 which should 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:

Chapter Fourteen

Came January 1, 1863

The tall man’s footsteps made no sound upon the thick rug. Muffled and hushed, his weary pacing left no mark upon the warp and woof underneath his feet. No sign at all of all the hours he had been walking back and forth, no sound.

To save the Union—this was the aim and purpose of everything he did. He had offered concession after concession—he had sent men out to die to hold the Union together and he had seen the horror of their dying. And yet no end in sight. Could it be that God had turned his face away? Was He revolted by the stench of slavery? Was this the measure He required?

The President had sought to reason with them. In his last annual message to Congress he had proposed a constitutional amendment by which any state abolishing slavery by or before the year 1900 should be entitled to full compensation from the Federal government. So far he had postponed the day when a slave owner must take a loss. Nothing had come of the proposal—nothing.

To save the Union! Would emancipation drive the border states into revolt? Would it let loose a terror in the night that would destroy and rape and pillage all the land? He had been amply warned. Or were the Abolitionists right? George Thompson, the Englishman, had been very convincing; the President had talked with William Lloyd Garrison, who all these years had never wavered from his stand; and in this very room he had received the Negro, Frederick Douglass.

Douglass had stated his case so well, so completely, so wrapped in logic that the President had found himself defending his position to the ex-slave. He had sat quietly, listened patiently, and then spoken.

“It is the only way, Mr. Lincoln, the only way to save the Union,” Douglass said.

Outside, the day was dark and lowering. The sun hid behind banks of muddy clouds; dirty snow lay heaped against the Capitol. The tall man dropped to his knees and buried his haggard face in his hands. “Thy will be done, oh God, Thy will!” He, Abraham Lincoln, fourteenth president of the United States, would stake his honor, his good name, all that he had to give, to preserve the Union. And down through the ages men would judge him by one day’s deed. He rose from his knees, turned and pulled the cord that summoned his secretary.

In Boston they were waiting. This was the day when the government was to set its face against slavery. Though the conditions on which the President had promised to withhold the proclamation had not been complied with, there was room for doubt and fear. Mr. Lincoln was a man of tender heart and boundless patience; no man could tell to what lengths he might go for peace and reconciliation. An emancipation proclamation would end all compromises with slavery, change the entire conduct of the war, give it a new aim.

They held watch-meetings in all the colored churches on New Year’s Eve and went on to a great mass meeting in Tremont Temple, which extended through the day and evening. A grand jubilee concert in Music Hall was scheduled for the afternoon. They expected the President’s proclamation to reach the city by noon. But the day wore on, and fears arose that it might not, after all, be forthcoming.

The orchestra played Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, the chorus sang Handel’s Hallelujah Chorus, Ralph Waldo Emerson read his “Boston Hymn,” written for the occasion—but still no word. A line of messengers was set up between the telegraph office and the platform of Tremont Temple. William Wells Brown, the Reverend Mr. Grimes, Miss Anna Dickinson, Frederick Douglass—all had said their lines. But speaking or listening to speeches was not the thing for which people had come together today. They were waiting.

Eight, nine, ten o’clock came and went, and still no word. Frederick Douglass walked to the edge of the platform. He stood there without saying a word, and before the awful stillness of his helplessness the stirrings of the crowd quieted. His voice was hoarse.

“Ladies and gentlemen—I know the time for argument has passed. Our ears are not attuned to logic or the sound of many words. It is the trumpet of jubilee which we await.”

“Amen, God of our fathers, hear!” The fervent prayer had come from a black man who had dropped to his knees on the platform behind Douglass. There was a responding murmur from the crowd. Douglass stood a moment with his head bowed. Then he continued:

“We are watching for the dawn of a new day. We are waiting for the answer to the agonizing prayers of centuries. We—” His eyes were caught by a movement in the crowd packed around the doors. He held his breath. A man ran down the aisle.

“It’s coming—It’s coming over the wires! Now!” he shouted.

The shout that went up from the crowd carried the glad tidings to the streets. Men and women screamed—they tossed their hats into the air—strangers embraced one another, weeping. Garrison, standing in the gallery, was cheered madly; Harriet Beecher Stowe, her bonnet awry, tears streaming down her cheeks, was lifted to a bench. After a while they quieted down to hear the reading of the text ... “are, and henceforward shall be, free.” Then the Reverend Charles Rue, the black man behind Douglass, lifted his magnificent voice and led them as they sang,

Cables carried the news across the Atlantic. Crowds thronged the streets of London and Liverpool. Three thousand workmen of Manchester, many of them present sufferers from the cotton famine, adopted by acclamation an address to President Lincoln congratulating him on the Proclamation. George Thompson led a similar meeting in Lancashire, and in Exeter Hall a great demonstration meeting was addressed by John Stuart Mill.

But it was from the deep, deep South that the sweetest music came. It was an old song—old as the first man, lifting himself from the mire and slime of some dark river bed and feeling the warm sun upon his face, old as the song they sang crossing the Red Sea, old as the throbbing of drums deep in the jungles, old as the song of all men everywhere who would be free. It was a new song, the loveliest thing born this side of the seas, fresh and verdant and young, full as the promise of this new America—the Delta’s rich, black earth; the tall, thick trees upon a thousand hills; the fairy, jeweled beauty of the bayous; the rolling plains of the Mississippi. Black folks made a song that day.

They crouched in their cabins, hushed and still. Old men and women who had prayed so long—broken, close to the end, they waited for this glorious thing. Young men and women, leashed in their strength, twisted in bondage—they waited. Mothers grasped their babies in their arms—waiting.

Some of them listened for a clap of thunder that would rend the world apart. Some strained their eyes toward the sky, waiting for God upon a cloud to bring them freedom. Anything was possible, they whispered, waiting.

They recognized His shining angels when they came: a tired and dirty soldier, in a torn and tattered uniform; a grizzled old man hobbling out from town; a breathless woman, finding her way through the swamp to tell them; a gaunt, white “cracker” risking his life to let them know; a fleet-footed black boy, running, running down the road. These were the messengers who brought them word.

And the song of joy went up. Free! Free! Free! Black men and women lifted their quivering hands and shouted across the fields. The rocks and trees, the rivers and the mountains echoed their voices—the universe was glad the morning freedom’s song rang in the South.