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IX

Ever mindful of his people and seeking always to promote their welfare, Douglass was one of those who urged, in all his addresses at this period, the abolition of slavery and the arming of the negroes as the most effective means of crushing the rebellion. In 1862 he delivered a series of lectures in New England under the auspices of the recently formed Emancipation League, which contended for abolition as a military necessity.

The first or conditional emancipation proclamation was issued in September, 1862; and shortly afterward Douglass published a pamphlet for circulation in Great Britain, entitled The Slave's Appeal to Great Britain, in which he urged the English people to refuse recognition of the independence of the Confederate States. He always endeavored in his public utterances to remove the doubts and fears of those who were tempted to leave the negroes in slavery because of the difficulty of disposing of them after they became free. Douglass, with the simple, direct, primitive sense of justice that had always marked his mind, took the only true ground for the solution of the race problems of that or any other epoch,-that the situation should be met with equal and exact justice, and that his people should be allowed to do as they pleased with themselves, "subject only to the same great laws which apply to other men." He was a conspicuous figure at the meeting in Tremont Temple, Boston, on January 1, 1863, when the Emancipation Proclamation, hourly expected by an anxious gathering, finally flashed over the wires. Douglass was among the first to suggest the employment of colored troops in the Union army. In spite of all assertions to the contrary, he foresaw in the war the end of slavery. He perceived that by the enlistment of colored men not only would the Northern arms be strengthened, but his people would win an opportunity to exercise one of the highest rights of freemen, and by valor on the field of battle to remove some of the stigma that slavery had placed upon them. He strove through every channel at his command to impress his views upon the country; and his efforts helped to swell the current of opinion which found expression, after several intermediate steps, in the enlistment of two colored regiments by Governor Andrew, the famous war governor of Massachusetts, a State foremost in all good works. When Mr. Lincoln had granted permission for the recruiting of these regiments, Douglass issued through his paper a stirring appeal, which was copied in the principal journals of the Union States, exhorting his people to rally to this call, to seize this opportunity to strike a blow at slavery and win the gratitude of the country and the blessings of liberty for themselves and their posterity.

Douglass exerted himself personally in procuring enlistments, his two sons [his youngest and his oldest], Charles and Lewis, being [among] the first in New York to enlist; for the two Massachusetts regiments were recruited all over the North. Lewis H. Douglass, sergeant-major in the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts, was among the foremost on the ramparts at Fort Wagner. Both these sons of Douglass survived the war, and are now well known and respected citizens of Washington, D.C. The Fifty-fourth Massachusetts, under the gallant but ill-fated Colonel Shaw, won undying glory in the conflict; and the heroic deeds of the officers and men of this regiment are fittingly commemorated in the noble monument by St. Gaudens, recently erected on Boston Common, to stand as an inspiration of freedom and patriotism for the future and as testimony that a race which for generations had been deprived of arms and liberty could worthily bear the one and defend the other.

Douglass was instrumental in persuading the government to put colored soldiers on an equal footing with white soldiers, both as to pay and protection. In the course of these efforts he was invited to visit President Lincoln. He describes this memorable interview in detail in his Life and Times. The President welcomed him with outstretched hands, put him at once at his ease, and listened patiently and attentively to all that he had to say. Douglass maintained that colored soldiers should receive the same pay as white soldiers, should be protected and exchanged as prisoners, and should be rewarded, by promotion, for deeds of valor. The President suggested some of the difficulties to be overcome; but both he and Secretary of War Stanton, whom Douglass also visited, assured him that in the end his race should be justly treated. Stanton, before the close of the interview with him, promised Douglass a commission as assistant adjutant to General Lorenzo Thomas, then recruiting colored troops in the Mississippi Valley. But Stanton evidently changed his mind, since the commission, somewhat to Douglass's chagrin, never came to hand.

When McClellan had been relieved by Grant, and the new leader of the Union forces was fighting the stubbornly contested campaign of the Wilderness, President Lincoln again sent for Douglass, to confer with him with reference to bringing slaves in the rebel States within the Union lines, so that in the event of premature peace as many slaves as possible might be free. Douglass undertook, at the President's suggestion, to organize a band of colored scouts to go among the negroes and induce them to enter the Union lines. The plan was never carried out, owing to the rapid success of the Union arms; but the interview greatly impressed Douglass with the sincerity of the President's conviction against slavery and his desire to see the war result in its overthrow. What the colored race may have owed to the services, in such a quarter, of such an advocate as Douglass, brave, eloquent, high-principled, and an example to Lincoln of what the enslaved race was capable of, can only be imagined. That Lincoln was deeply impressed by these interviews is a matter of history.

Douglass supported vigorously the nomination of Lincoln for a second term, and was present at his [March 4] inauguration. And a few days later, while the inspired words of the inaugural address, long bracketed with the noblest of human utterances, were still ringing in his ears, he spoke at the meeting held in Rochester to mourn the death of the martyred President, and made one of his most eloquent and moving addresses. It was a time that wrung men's hearts, and none more than the strong-hearted man's whose race had found its liberty through him who lay dead at Washington, slain by the hand of an assassin whom slavery had spawned.

X

With the fall of slavery and the emancipation of the colored race the heroic epoch of Douglass's career may be said to have closed. The text upon which he so long had preached had been expunged from the national bible; and he had been a one-text preacher, a one-theme orator. He felt the natural reaction which comes with relief from high mental or physical tension, and wondered, somewhat sadly, what he should do with himself, and how he should earn a living. The same considerations, in varying measure, applied to others of the anti-slavery reformers. Some, unable to escape the reforming habit, turned their attention to different social evils, real or imaginary. Others, sufficiently supplied with this worlds goods for their moderate wants, withdrew from public life. Douglass was thinking of buying a farm and retiring to rural solitudes, when a new career opened up for him in the lyceum lecture field. The North was favorably disposed toward colored men. They had acquitted themselves well during the war, and had shown becoming gratitude to their deliverers. The once despised abolitionists were now popular heroes. Douglass's checkered past seemed all the more romantic in the light of the brighter present, like a novel with a pleasant ending; and those who had hung thrillingly upon his words when he denounced slavery now listened with interest to what he had to say upon other topics. He spoke sometimes on Woman Suffrage, of which he was always a consistent advocate. His most popular lecture was one on "Self-made Men." Another on "Ethnology," in which he sought a scientific basis for his claim for the negro's equality with the white man, was not so popular—with white people. The wave of enthusiasm which had swept the enfranchised slaves into what seemed at that time the safe harbor of constitutional right was not, after all, based on abstract doctrines of equality of intellect, but on an inspiring sense of justice (long dormant under the influence of slavery, but thoroughly awakened under the moral stress of the war), which conceded to every man the right of a voice in his own government and the right to an equal opportunity in life to develop such powers as he possessed, however great or small these might be.

But Douglass's work in direct behalf of his race was not yet entirely done. In fact, he realized very distinctly the vast amount of work that would be necessary to lift his people up to the level of their enlarged opportunities; and, as may be gathered from some of his published utterances, he foresaw that the process would be a long one, and that their friends might weary sometimes of waiting, and that there would be reactions toward slavery which would rob emancipation of much of its value. It was the very imminence of such backward steps, in the shape of various restrictive and oppressive laws promptly enacted by the old slave States under President Johnson's administration, that led Douglass to urge the enfranchisement of the freedmen. He maintained that in a free country there could be no safe or logical middle ground between the status of freeman and that of serf. There has been much criticism because the negro, it is said, acquired the ballot prematurely. There seemed imperative reasons, besides that of political expediency, for putting the ballot in his hands. Recent events have demonstrated that this necessity is as great now as then. The assumption that negroes—under which generalization are included all men of color, regardless of that sympathy to which kinship at least should entitle many of them—are unfit to have a voice in government is met by the words of Lincoln, which have all the weight of a political axiom: "No man can be safely trusted to govern other men without their consent." The contention that a class who constitute half the population of a State shall be entirely unrepresented in its councils, because, forsooth, their will there expressed may affect the government of another class of the same general population, is as repugnant to justice and human rights as was the institution of slavery itself. Such a condition of affairs has not the melodramatic and soul-stirring incidents of chattel slavery, but its effects can be as far-reaching and as debasing. There has been some manifestation of its possible consequences in the recent outbreaks of lynching and other race oppression in the South. The practical disfranchisement of the colored people in several States, and the apparent acquiescence by the Supreme Court in the attempted annulment, by restrictive and oppressive laws, of the war amendments to the Constitution, have brought a foretaste of what might be expected should the spirit of the Dred Scott decision become again the paramount law of the land.

On February 7, 1866, Douglass acted as chief spokesman of a committee of leading colored men of the country, who called upon President Johnson to urge the importance of enfranchisement. Mr. Johnson, true to his Southern instincts, was coldly hostile to the proposition, recounted all the arguments against it, and refused the committee an opportunity to reply. The matter was not left with Mr. Johnson, however; and the committee turned its attention to the leading Republican statesmen, in whom they found more impressionable material. Under the leadership of Senators Sumner, Wilson, Wade, and others, the matter was fully argued in Congress, the Democratic party being in opposition, as always in national politics, to any measure enlarging the rights or liberties of the colored race.

In September, 1866, Douglass was elected a delegate from Rochester to the National Loyalists' Convention at Philadelphia, called to consider the momentous questions of government growing out of the war. While he had often attended anti-slavery conventions as the representative of a small class of abolitionists, his election to represent a large city in a national convention was so novel a departure from established usage as to provoke surprise and comment all over the country. On the way to Philadelphia he was waited upon by a committee of other delegates, who came to his seat on the train and urged upon him the impropriety of his taking a seat as a delegate. Douglass listened patiently, but declined to be moved by their arguments. He replied that he had been duly elected a delegate from Rochester, and he would represent that city in the convention. A procession of the members and friends of the convention was to take place on its opening day. Douglass was solemnly warned that, if he walked in the procession, he would probably be mobbed. But he had been mobbed before, more than once, and had lived through it; and he promptly presented himself at the place of assembly. His reception by his fellow-delegates was not cordial, and he seemed condemned to march alone in the procession, when Theodore Tilton, at that time editor of the Independent, paired off with him, and marched by his side through the streets of the Quaker City. The result was gratifying alike to Douglass and the friends of liberty and progress. He was cheered enthusiastically all along the line of march, and became as popular in the convention as he had hitherto been neglected.

A romantic incident of this march was a pleasant meeting, on the street, with a daughter of Mrs. Lucretia Auld, the mistress who had treated him kindly during his childhood on the Lloyd plantation. The Aulds had always taken an interest in Douglass's career,—he had, indeed, given the family a wide though not altogether enviable reputation in his books and lectures,—and this good lady had followed the procession for miles, that she might have the opportunity to speak to her grandfather's former slave and see him walk in the procession.

In the convention "the ever-ready and imperial Douglass," as Colonel Higginson describes him, spoke in behalf of his race. The convention, however, divided upon the question of negro suffrage, and adjourned without decisive action. But under President Grant's administration the Fourteenth Amendment was passed, and by the solemn sanction of the Constitution the ballot was conferred upon the black men upon the same terms as those upon which it was enjoyed by the whites.

XI

It is perhaps fitting, before we take leave of Douglass, to give some estimate of the remarkable oratory which gave him his hold upon the past generation. For, while his labors as editor and in other directions were of great value to the cause of freedom, it is upon his genius as an orator that his fame must ultimately rest.

While Douglass's color put him in a class by himself among great orators, and although his slave past threw around him an element of romance that added charm to his eloquence, these were mere incidental elements of distinction. The North was full of fugitive slaves, and more than one had passionately proclaimed his wrongs. There were several colored orators who stood high in the councils of the abolitionists and did good service for the cause of humanity.

Douglass possessed, in large measure, the physical equipment most impressive in an orator. He was a man of magnificent figure, tall, strong, his head crowned with a mass of hair which made a striking element of his appearance. He had deep-set and flashing eyes, a firm, well-moulded chin, a countenance somewhat severe in repose, but capable of a wide range of expression. His voice was rich and melodious, and of great carrying power. One writer, who knew him in the early days of his connection with the abolitionists, says of him, in Johnson's Sketches of Lynn:

"He was not then the polished orator he has since become, but even at that early date he gave promise of the grand part he was to play in the conflict which was to end in the destruction of the system that had so long cursed his race…. He was more than six feet in height; and his majestic form, as he rose to speak, straight as an arrow, muscular yet lithe and graceful, his flashing eye, and more than all his voice, that rivalled Webster's in its richness and in the depth and sonorousness of its cadences, made up such an ideal of an orator as the listeners never forgot. And they never forgot his burning words, his pathos, nor the rich play of his humor."

The poet William Howitt said of him on his departure from England in 1847, "He has appeared in this country before the most accomplished audiences, who were surprised, not only at his talent, but at his extraordinary information."

In Ireland he was introduced as "the black O'Connell,"—a high compliment; for O'Connell was at that time the idol of the Irish people. In Scotland they called him the "black Douglass [Douglas]," after his prototype in The Lady of the Lake, because of his fìre and vigor. In Rochester he was called the "swarthy Ajax," from his indignant denunciation and defiance of the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, which came like a flash of lightning to blast the hopes of the anti-slavery people.

Douglass possessed in unusual degree the faculty of swaying his audience, sometimes against their maturer judgment. There is something in the argument from first principles which, if presented with force and eloquence, never fails to appeal to those who are not blinded by self-interest or deep-seated prejudice. Douglass's argument was that of the Declaration of Independence,—"that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That, to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed." The writer may be pardoned for this quotation; for there are times when we seem to forget that now and here, no less than in ancient Rome, "eternal vigilance is the price of liberty." Douglass brushed aside all sophistries about Constitutional guarantees, and vested rights, and inferior races, and, having postulated the right of men to be free, maintained that negroes were men, and offered himself as a proof of his assertion,—an argument that few had the temerity to deny. If it were answered that he was only half a negro, he would reply that slavery made no such distinction, and as a still more irrefutable argument would point to his friend, Samuel R. Ward, who often accompanied him on the platform,—an eloquent and effective orator, of whom Wendell Phillips said that "he was so black that, if he would shut his eyes, one could not see him." It was difficult for an auditor to avoid assent to such arguments, presented with all the force and fire of genius, relieved by a ready wit, a contagious humor, and a tear-compelling power rarely excelled.

"As a speaker," says one of his contemporaries, "he has few equals. It is not declamation, but oratory, power of description. He watches the tide of discussion, and dashes into it at once with all the tact of the forum or the bar. He has art, argument, sarcasm, pathos,—all that first-rate men show in their master efforts."

His readiness was admirably illustrated in the running debate with Captain Rynders, a ward politician and gambler of New York, who led a gang of roughs with the intention of breaking up the meeting of the American Anti-slavery Society in New York City, May 7, 1850. The newspapers had announced the proposed meeting in language calculated to excite riot. Rynders packed the meeting with rowdies, and himself occupied a seat on the platform. Some remark by Mr. Garrison, the first speaker, provoked a demonstration of hostility. When this was finally quelled by a promise to permit one of the Rynders party to reply, Mr. Garrison finished his speech. He was followed by a prosy individual, who branded the negro as brother to the monkey. Douglass, perceiving that the speaker was wearying even his own friends, intervened at an opportune moment, captured the audience by a timely display of wit, and then improved the occasion by a long and effective speech. When Douglass offered himself as a refutation of the last speaker's argument, Rynders replied that Douglass was half white. Douglass thereupon greeted Rynders as his half-brother, and made this expression the catchword of his speech. When Rynders interrupted from time to time, he was silenced with a laugh. He appears to have been a somewhat philosophic scoundrel, with an appreciation of humor that permitted the meeting to proceed to an orderly close. Douglass's speech was the feature of the evening. "That gifted man," said Garrison, in whose Life and Times a graphic description of this famous meeting is given, "effectually put to shame his assailants by his wit and eloquence."

A speech delivered by Douglass at Concord, New Hampshire, is thus described by another writer: "He gradually let out the outraged humanity that was laboring in him, in indignant and terrible speech…. There was great oratory in his speech, but more of dignity and earnestness than what we call eloquence. He was an insurgent slave, taking hold on the rights of speech, and charging on his tyrants the bondage of his race."

In Holland's biography of Douglass extracts are given from letters of distinguished contemporaries who knew the orator. Colonel T.W. Higginson writes thus: "I have hardly heard his equal, in grasp upon an audience, in dramatic presentation, in striking at the pith of an ethical question, and in single [signal] illustrations and examples." Another writes, in reference to the impromptu speech delivered at the meeting at Rochester on the death of Lincoln: "I have heard Webster and Clay in their best moments, Channing and Beecher in their highest inspirations. I never heard truer eloquence. I never saw profounder impression."

The published speeches of Douglass, of which examples may be found scattered throughout his various autobiographies, reveal something of the powers thus characterized, though, like other printed speeches, they lose by being put in type. But one can easily imagine their effect upon a sympathetic or receptive audience, when delivered with flashing eye and deep-toned resonant voice by a man whose complexion and past history gave him the highest right to describe and denounce the iniquities of slavery and contend for the rights of a race. In later years, when brighter days had dawned for his people, and age had dimmed the recollection of his sufferings and tempered his animosities, he became more charitable to his old enemies; but in the vigor of his manhood, with the memory of his wrongs and those of his race fresh upon him, he possessed that indispensable quality of the true reformer: he went straight to the root of the evil, and made no admissions and no compromises. Slavery for him was conceived in greed, born in sin, cradled in shame, and worthy of utter and relentless condemnation. He had the quality of directness and simplicity. When Collins would have turned the abolition influence to the support of a communistic scheme, Douglass opposed it vehemently. Slavery was the evil they were fighting, and their cause would be rendered still more unpopular if they ran after strange gods.