In this past Friday’s Disunion in the New York Times, David W. Blight revisits Frederick Douglass and his reaction to the early weeks of the Lincoln Administration. Blight finds, “The two months following Lincoln’s inauguration found Frederick Douglass struggling to understand and bitterly demoralized by the president’s policies, but also exhilarated by the outbreak of war at Fort Sumter.” Virtually all of his piece though focuses on Douglass’ dark days following Abraham Lincoln’s inauguration, asserting Frederick Douglass even briefly toyed with the idea of emigration.
David Blight finishes his piece by writing:
It is a pity that Blight ends his Disunion essay with the war’s outbreak because by May 1861 Frederick Douglass was truly a man transformed. Writing in Douglass’ Monthly, he greeted with enthusiasm the war fervor in the North after the assault on Fort Sumter. Douglass exclaimed, “But what a change now greets us! The Government is aroused, the dead North is alive, and its divided people united. Never was a change so sudden, so universal, and so portentous. The whole North, East and West is in arms. Drums are beating, men are enlisting, companies forming, regiments marching, banners are flying, and money is pouring into the national treasury to put an end to the slaveholding rebellion.”
Douglass was renewed and energized by the outbreak of the war because like his one-time mentor, William Lloyd Garrison, he saw in the nascent conflict as an opportunity to destroy forever the institution of slavery. In the May 1861 issue of Douglass’ Monthly, Frederick Douglass described his plan to accomplish this goal in an essay entitled, “How to End the War.” He laid out his prescription clearly and forcefully in the first paragraph, writing:
Douglass also believed a war to destroy slavery must involve African Americans in the fight. “The sooner this rebellion is put out of its misery, the better for all concerned,” he opined. “This can be done at once, by ‘carrying the war into Africa.’ Let the slaves and free colored people be called into service, and formed into a liberating army, to march into the South and raise the banner of Emancipation among the slaves.”
Douglass realized the weight of white opinion in the North in May 1861 was against arming even free blacks, let alone slaves, noting an offer of Boston blacks after the Fort Sumter attack to enlist for military service quickly had been rejected. So he made a point that soon would have a significant impact on public sentiment in the free states about slavery: that the Confederacy was putting slaves to work in its war effort. He stated:
To Douglass, the rebels, by employing their slaves as military laborers provided ample justification for the North to enlist African Americans as soldiers. He wrote:
Frederick Douglass finished his essay by lamenting that the national government for too long had sought to appease slaveholders, which in his opinion had in the end only encouraged their rebellion–which justified a short, harsh war which would leave white Southerners forfeit of their slaves. Douglass saw such a conflict as the only way the North could atone for its past sins in regard to slavery and preserve the Union. “Until the nation shall repent of this weakness and folly,” he wrote, “until they shall make the cause of their country the cause of freedom, until they shall strike down slavery, the source and center of this gigantic rebellion, they don’t deserve the support of a single sable arm, nor will it succeed in crushing the cause of our present troubles.”
Truly, between early April and May 1861, Frederick Douglass was a man transformed. No longer was he David W. Blight’s demoralized man considering emigration, but a passionate and energized leader ready to use his formidable intelligence and eloquence to redeem his country by destroying the institution that had blighted his youth and in which millions of his race were still trapped.