http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/05/06/lincoln-douglass-and-the-double-tongued-document/?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=thab1
May 6, 2011, 9:30 pm
Lincoln, Douglass and the ‘Double-Tongued Document’
By DAVID W. BLIGHT Disunion follows the Civil War as it unfolded.
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. He had no interest in the new president’s oratorical olive branches to the seceded South, his poetry about the “mystic chords of memory” or the “better angels of our nature.” Indeed, Douglass despised the olive branches, calling the speech “little better than our worst fears,” and a “double-tongued document, capable of two constructions,” concealing rather than declaring a “definite policy.”
Library of Congress Frederick Douglass
In his brutal critique of Lincoln’s address, published in late March in his Monthly newspaper, Douglass had drawn from his own deep well of radical antislavery arguments. The frustrated abolitionist, like many in his camp, wanted a full-throated denunciation of Southern secessionists and, in effect, a declaration of war on slavery and slaveholders. That, of course, Lincoln would not and could not do at that point in time; rather, he spent the weeks after his inauguration reaching out to unionist sentiment in the South, appealing to what he mistakenly hoped were cool heads in the seceded states to consider some conciliatory measures that might hold the nation together.
True, Lincoln firmly rejected secession as unlawful, and he promised that the “Union… will constitutionally defend, and maintain itself.” But, to Douglass’s dismay, he also vowed to enforce all the laws, including the fugitive slave clause of the Constitution. Lincoln quoted the Constitution itself, saying that runaway slaves “shall be delivered up.” He even implied that the only legitimate controversy on this issue was whether federal or state authority should be exercised to seize and return runaway slaves.
These efforts of Lincoln’s to assuage Southern fears of Republicans deeply disturbed Douglass, a former fugitive slave who wore the runaway’s travail on his body and in his soul. On this question Douglass had no sympathy with Lincoln’s sensitive plight nor his constitutionalism; all morality was on the side of the human rights of the fugitive slave. Equally disappointing was Lincoln’s reiteration of his oft-repeated intention to “have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists.” Douglass knew that this was a political and legal stance by the president, and he grasped, at least tentatively, that Lincoln viewed slavery as morally wrong. But what mattered now in this late stage of the secession crisis, and with the looming test over whether Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor would be defended, was, in the abolitionist’s view, the resolve to fight rather than kowtow to the wishes of the Slave Power. Douglass had wanted a war-maker’s inaugural, not a negotiator’s diplomatic appeal for calm and mystic unity.
Initially, Douglass blistered Lincoln with both satire and contempt. He lampooned the secretive, quiet way Lincoln had arrived in Washington, likening the scene to the way the “poor, hunted fugitive slave reaches the North, in disguise… evading pursuers, by the underground railroad… crawling and dodging under the sable wing of night.” Douglass wondered how “galling” it must have been to the president-elect to feel like “a fugitive slave, with a nation howling on his track.” But Douglass’s anger became fiercer yet. Lincoln’s acknowledgment of the South’s “right of property” in slaves seemed to this former slave only “weakness … and conciliation towards the tyrants and traitors.” Douglass demanded “rebuke” and not “palliations.” The embittered editor imagined Lincoln on bended knee to slaveholders, performing as an “excellent slave hound” and the “most dangerous advocate of slave-hunting and slave-catching in the land.”
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?”
In those last weeks of peace Douglass begged his readers to see the impending crisis in such stark terms and to prepare to treat secessionists and all who would follow them as thieves and murderers operating in the dark. To this abolitionist, the secession movement was an attempt to destroy the United States, and to permanently extinguish any humane future for him or his people. All who would abet or even negotiate with that cause were partners with injustice and on the wrong side of history.
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There were elements of Lincoln’s address from which Douglass took a “slight gleam of relief.” Lincoln did embrace “safeguards” against free blacks being captured and enslaved as fugitives. Douglass acknowledged this, however backhandedly, as a recognition that blacks possessed some human rights and that slavery itself was inhumane. But in his close reading of Lincoln’s address, Douglass could only conclude with fear and distress that it simply “remains to be seen whether the Federal Government” would be “powerless for liberty, and only powerful for slavery.” On that note of near despair Douglass rested his uneasy case against, as well as to some extent for, “our first modern antislavery President.”
So uncertain of the future was Douglass that in early April, just before the firing on Fort Sumter, he wrote an article in his paper announcing “A Trip to Haiti.” He had booked passage for himself and his daughter, Rosetta, on a steamer out of New Haven to visit the island nation and to observe the emigration project there led by the American abolitionist James Redpath.
Douglass waxed romantic about both the legacy of the Haitian Revolution and the black republic that resulted, as well as the “beams of a tropical sun,” and his desire to inhale the “fragrance of tropical breezes.” Worry over the current crisis and fear that blacks might have no future in the United States, Douglass said he spoke for many of his black countrymen in wishing for a “place of retreat, an asylum from the apprehended storm which is about to beat pitilessly upon them.”
So, even he, a long opponent of black emigration schemes that would remove his people from their native North America, declared his personal interest in a “tour of observation” and potential exile. But just before going to press with his April edition, he added a postscript declaring that since the article was “put in type,” recent events — namely, the assault on Fort Sumter — had wrought “a tremendous revolution in all things pertaining to the possible future of the colored people of the United States.” His long anticipated war was on. “This,” he announced, “is no time for us to leave the country.”
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David W. Blight teaches American history at Yale. He is the author of the forthcoming “American Oracle: The Civil War in the Civil Rights Era” and is working on a biography of Frederick Douglass.
Donations can be sent to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD 21218. Ph: 410-366-1637; Email: mobuszewski [at] verizon.net
"The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles. The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their lives." Eugene Victor Debs
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