who took, after thirty procedures, the needle
and silk. A new compromise: take down
the statue, hooded and noosed, put into storage.
Concede: still only one woman is whole.
IV.
Concede in favor of balance.
Let the state petition for statehood.
Let the state say who is free.
Let the state enslave.
Let the state set the terms
for enslavement: three years.
The Lash Law.
Let the state set the clock for exile
once the term is complete.
Let the state call it grace:
three years for women,
two years for men.
Let the state refuse to ratify
the amendments: 14th and 15th.
Let the state Jim Crow before Jim Crow:
whites-only on every border.
Let the state keep its balance
in 1959 and ’73,
on campus in 1988,
or on the light rail in 2017:
a bat in its hand, a knife
in its hand, blood on its hand.
V.
They set the terms, rigged
the clock, the ship, colonized
the land. They would see us
free but gone.
Compromise.
But we convened,
decided the land that held
our blood, our kin—
decided we would stay,
show that one way
could be another.
VI.
Track the fissure of the first compromise,
then the second, then another running
fugitive through the foundation.
Follow it one century
to my great-grandmother’s birth.
A century more: just past her death.
It wasn’t that long ago
I was sitting on her porch swing,
hoping for a breeze.
It wasn’t that long ago
we were in the twenty-fourth state,
our bodies undoing the roads.
It wasn’t that long ago,
the latitude migrated, anchored
to the southern border: history looped.
This isn’t America.
It’s nothing else.
1859–1864
FREDERICK DOUGLASS
Adam Serwer
By 1859, Frederick Douglass was a fugitive again.
The formerly enslaved Douglass had famously escaped bondage in 1838, fled north, and become one of the most eloquent abolitionist orators in the country. But in October 1859 his friend John Brown had led a failed raid on the federal arsenal in Harper’s Ferry, Virginia, hoping to start a slave insurrection and end the peculiar institution for good. Douglass knew of Brown’s scheme but had declined to participate. Yet his association with Brown had made him a wanted man, and he fled to Britain rather than face trial in Virginia.
Douglass would later write in his autobiography Life and Times of Frederick Douglass that he felt Brown “was about to rivet the fetters more firmly than ever on the limbs of the enslaved.” Despite Brown’s entreaties, Douglass recalled, “my discretion or my cowardice made me proof against the dear old man’s eloquence—perhaps it was something of both which determined my course.”
As for his escape, “I knew if my enemies could not prove me guilty of the offence of being with John Brown, they could prove that I was Frederick Douglass,” the orator wrote, “and I knew that all Virginia, were I once in her clutches, would say ‘Let him be hanged.’ ” He took pleasure in the irony, however, that it was the men who wanted him clapped in chains who would themselves soon rise up in armed insurrection. Perhaps, Douglass wrote, the Democrats on the Senate committee investigating Brown’s failed rebellion “saw that by using their senatorial power in search of rebels they might be whetting a knife for their own throats.”
If Brown was a lone radical in 1859, several events would enlist the North in a quest for the violent abolition of slavery by 1861. In the interim, Douglass had quietly returned to the United States to mourn the death of his ten-year-old daughter, Annie. As the Southern Confederacy rose, each state proclaiming the principle of human bondage at the center of the rebellion, Douglass was convinced the North would ultimately see the necessity of abolishing slavery. After all, the catalyst for the South’s secession was the election of Abraham Lincoln, who by that point had merely vowed to limit slavery’s expansion, not to abolish it. But if the South could not maintain its control over American democracy through the expansion of slave states, then it would destroy it through insurrection.
During this period, Douglass became more than just an orator or a journalist: he became a prophet of a United States who embodied the courage of its convictions, a country that, as Douglass put it, “shall not brand the Declaration of Independence as a lie.” At the time, it was horror to the white South and a foolish dream to much of the white North. Today Douglass’s vision of America is so pervasive that even its strongest opponents pretend to believe in it: an America that actually recognizes that all are created equal, where the rights of citizenship are not abridged on the basis of accidents of birth.
“The republic was undergoing a second founding, and Douglass felt more than ready to be one of its fathers,” historian David Blight writes in his biography of Douglass. “The old nation might now be bludgeoned into ruin, and a new one imagined.”
Yet Douglass also understood intimately that much of the white North, and not just the South, would have to drastically revise its vision of America. Although Northern states had abolished slavery, most had also severely restricted Black rights and suffrage. Right up until the beginning of the war, many Northern whites, even those hostile to slavery, saw abolitionists as just as culpable for the sectional conflict as slave owners. Abolitionists faced murder, censorship, and mob violence, even in Northern states like Pennsylvania and New Hampshire.