In his speeches and writings, Douglass laid out his vision of this new America. “We stand in our place today and wage war, not merely for our selves, but for the whole world; not for this generation, but for unborn generations, and for all time,” Douglass declared in his “Mission of the War” speech in 1864. The North, Douglass insisted, was “like the south, fighting for National unity; a unity of which the great principles of liberty and equality, and not slavery and class superiority, are the corner stone.”
One of the most crucial developments in what Douglass hoped, and many in the white North feared, would become an “abolition war” was the recruitment of Black soldiers. By 1862, President Abraham Lincoln had authorized the recruitment of Black troops, and two of Douglass’s sons, Charles and Lewis, had enlisted. But the Northern reaction to that decision illustrated another one of Douglass’s observations, that an America that truly lived up to its own beliefs would have to confront prejudice in the North as much as rebellion in the South.
“The recruitment of black soldiers did not produce an instantaneous change in northern racial attitudes. Indeed, to some degree it intensified the Democratic backlash against emancipation and exacerbated racial tensions in the army,” the historian James McPherson writes in Battle Cry of Freedom. “The black regiments reflected the Jim Crow mores of the society that reluctantly accepted them: they were segregated, given less pay than white soldiers, commanded by white officers some of whom regarded their men as ‘niggers,’ and intended for use mainly as garrison and labor battalions.”
Douglass was no stranger to such attitudes. “It came to be a no[t] uncommon thing to hear men denouncing South Carolina and Massachusetts in the same breath,” Douglass wrote, “and in the same measure of disapproval.” He had faced jeering racist mobs at his Northern speeches; he had bitterly denounced the Lincoln administration’s flirtations with “colonizing” the Black population of the United States to Africa; and he had warned the proslavery “peace camp” that “as to giving the slave States new guarantees for the safety of slavery…the South does not want them, and the North could not give them if the South could accept them.”
When Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, Douglass would get his abolition war. Yet Douglass understood that many in the North believed that “abolition, though now a vast power, is still odious.” Such people, he said, “despise the only measure that can save the country”—that is, the end of slavery.
Douglass predicted in 1863 that “a mightier work than the abolition of slavery” lay ahead. This was an understatement. The lingering hatred of abolition and racial equality, North and South, would eventually cement into a fierce opposition to Black political rights. Early in Reconstruction, Douglass would be provided with a glimpse of the North’s lingering ambivalence toward Black freedom. Elected a delegate to the National Loyalists’ Convention in 1866, he would be urged by his Republican colleagues not to attend.
“They dreaded the clamor of social equality and amalgamation which would be raised against the party, in consequence of this startling innovation,” Douglass wrote of it years later. “They, dear fellows, found it much more agreeable to talk of the principles of liberty as glittering generalities, than to reduce those principles to practice.”
Southern rebellion had forced the Union to adopt Brown’s methods for the abolition of slavery, but it was nevertheless a long way from Douglass’s vision of inclusive nationhood. Only Southern intransigence and violent resistance would persuade Republicans in Congress to adopt the Fourteenth and Fifteenth amendments, establishing birthright citizenship and barring discrimination in voting on the basis of race. Although a believer in woman suffrage, Douglass would endure a bitter split with his white feminist allies, who saw the Fifteenth Amendment’s enfranchisement of Black men but not women as a grave insult, disgusted that “Patrick, Sambo, Hans, and Yung Tung” would be enfranchised before them.
But the freedoms of the Reconstruction amendments would be short-lived, at least for Black people. Whether because of the terrorism of the white supremacist so-called Redeemers in the South who overthrew the Reconstruction governments by force and intimidation, or because of the Republican-appointed Supreme Court justices who rendered the Reconstruction amendments to the Constitution useless to the emancipated, Douglass’s dream of a new nation proved more elusive than it must have seemed at the war’s end.
“The Reconstruction amendments do not occupy the prominent place in public consciousness of other pivotal documents of our history, such as the Bill of Rights and Declaration of Independence,” the historian Eric Foner has written. “But even if we are unaware of it, Reconstruction remains part of our lives, or to put it another way, key issues confronting American society today are in some ways Reconstruction questions.”
Even today, American political conflicts are defined by the limits of American citizenship and who is allowed to claim it. In this sense, Douglass understood that until Black Americans could claim full citizenship, the nation he envisioned could not exist.
“Men talk of the Negro problem. There is no Negro problem,” Douglass declared in 1894, as the shadow of Jim Crow fell across the nation. “The problem is whether the American people have honesty enough, loyalty enough, honor enough, patriotism enough to live up to their Constitution.” More than a century later, that problem is still with us.
1864–1869
THE CIVIL WAR
Jamelle Bouie
By August 1864, as General William T. Sherman prepared his forces for an assault on Atlanta, nearly 400,000 enslaved people had escaped to Union lines. They had won themselves freedom in the process.
As fighting intensified, tens of thousands would join the Union Army as soldiers alongside their freeborn counterparts. By the war’s end, approximately 180,000 African Americans fought in thirty-nine major engagements as soldiers in the U.S. Colored Troops.
But the significance of Black soldiers went beyond their military prowess. Every revolution produces a class of people committed to its fulfillment. The Civil War was no exception. The free and freed men who took up arms for the Union would, in the war’s aftermath, become an important force for equal rights and democracy, part of a vanguard of Americans who fought to give meaning to the great sacrifice of the war.
At the start of the Civil War, the Lincoln administration didn’t want Black soldiers. When “300 reliable colored free citizens” of Washington, D.C., offered to defend the city from Confederate attack, the War Department rejected them. Likewise, at various points in 1861 and 1862, President Lincoln pushed back against efforts to arm former slaves. When battlefield commanders tried to organize Black regiments in Kansas, occupied Louisiana, and the Sea Islands of South Carolina, the Lincoln administration refused to authorize them.
Lincoln’s resistance was met with the pressure and advocacy of abolitionists, Black leaders, and radical Republicans. These advocates made the case that the Union could win the war and end slavery if it embraced African Americans as soldiers.