Emancipation, Racism, and the Work Before Us: An Address Delivered in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, On December 4, 1863
EMANCIPATION, RACISM, AND THE WORK BEFORE US: AN ADDRESS DELIVERED IN PHILADELPHIA, PENNSYLVANIA, ON 4 DECEMBER 1863
Liberator, 29 January 1864. Other texts in National Anti-Slavery Standard, 26 December 1863; Boston Commonwealth, 1 January 1864; Proceedings of the American Anti-Slavery Society, at Its Third Decade, Held in the City of Philadelphia, Dec. 3d and 4th, 1863 (New York, 1864), 110—18; Speech File, reel 14, frames 475—83, FD Papers. DLC; Julia Ward Howe, ed., Masterpieces of Ameriean Eloquence (New York, 1900), 256—58; Foner, Life and Writings, 3 : 378—86, dated 3—4 December 1863.
The American Anti-Slavery Society had earlier resolved that its thirtieth-anniversary celebration, held on 3—4 December 1863 at Philadelphia’s Concert Hall, should be “devoted to a general review and survey of the cause." Many members, most notably William Lloyd Garrison, hoped that the convention would mark the Society’s final anniversary; with emancipation realized, they reasoned, the need for antislavery societies had disappeared. At the anniversary’s final session, following speeches by Robert Purvis. Theodore Tilton, and Henry Wilson, several convention participants called upon Douglass to speak. Received amid “great applause,” Douglass delivered what the National Anti-Slavery Standard described as “the master effort of the evening, if not of the Convention.” a speech of “eloquence, pathos and inimitable humor.” Douglass refuted Garrison’s point of view, stressing the need for continued watchfulness and agitation. He also took the opportunity, as he would at other engagements that winter, to describe his recent meeting with President Lincoln. Lib., 20 November, 11 December 1863, 5 February 1864; NASS, 12, 26 December 1863; Portland Transcript, 20 February 1864.
LADIES AND GENTLEMEN: I confess at the outset to have felt a very pro- found desire to utter a word at some period during the present meeting. As it has been repeatedly said here, it has been a meeting of reminiscences. I shall not attempt to treat you to any of my own in what I have now to say. though I have some in connection with the labors of this Society, and in
connection with my experience as an American slave, that I might not inappropriately bring before you on this occasion. I desire to be remembered among those having a word to say at this meeting, because I began my existence as a free man in this country with this association, and because I have some hopes or apprehensions. whichever you please to call them, that we shall never. as a Society, hold another decade meeting.
I well remember the first time I ever listened to the voice ofthe honored President of this association, and l have some recollection of the feelings of hope inspired by his utterances at that time.1In his third autobiography, Douglass recollects having first heard William Lloyd Garrison, president of the American Anti-Slavery Society from 1843 to 1865, speak early in 1839. Douglass, Life and Times, 213—14. Under the inspiration of those hopes, I looked forward to the abolition of slavery as a certain event in the course of a very few years. So clear were his utterances, so simple and truthful, and so adapted I conceived, to the human heart were the principles and doctrines propounded by him, that I thought five years at any rate would be all that would be required for the abolition of slavery. I thought it was only necessary for the slaves, or their friends, to lift up the hatchway of slavery’s infernal hold, to uncover the bloody scenes of American thraldom, and give the nation a peep into its horrors, its deeds of deep damnation, to arouse them to almost phrensied opposition to this foul curse. But I was mistaken. I had not been five years pelted by the mob, insulted by the crowds, shunned by the church, denounced by the ministry, ridiculed by the press, spit upon by the loafers, before I became convinced that I might perhaps live, struggle, and die., and go down to my grave, and the slaves of the South yet remain in their chains.
We live to see a better hope to-night. I participate in the profound thanksgiving expressed by all, that we do live to see this better day. I am one of those who believe that it is the mission of this war to free every slave in the United States. I am one of those who believe that we should consent to no peace which shall not be an abolition peace. I am, moreover, one of those who believe that the work of the American Anti-Slavery Society will not have been completed until the black men of the South, and the black men of the North, shall have been admitted fully and completely into the body politic of America. I look upon slavery as going the way of all the earth.2Douglass quotes from Josh. 23 : 14: “And, behold, this day I am going the way of all the earth." It is the mission of the war to put it down. But a mightier work than the abolition of slavery now looms up before the Abolitionist. This Society
was organized, if I remember rightly, for two distinct objects; one was the emancipation of the slave, and the other the elevation of the colored people. When you have taken the chains offthe slave, as I believe we shall do, we shall find a harder resistance to the second purpose of this great association than we have found even upon slavery itself.
I am hopeful, but while I am hopeful I am thoughtful withal. If I lean to either side of the controversy to which we have listened to-day, I lean to that side which implies caution, which implies apprehension, which implies a consciousness that our work is not done. Protest, affirm, hope, glorify as we may, it cannot be denied that abolitionism is still unpopular in the United States. It cannot be denied that this war is at present denounced by its opponents as an abolition war; and it is equally clear that it would not be denounced as an abolition war, if abolitionism were not odious. It is equally clear that our friends, Republicans, Unionists, Loyalists,3In an attempt to broaden support for the Lincoln administration during the Civil War, Republican politicians in several regions adopted new labels for their party. In the Ohio Valley and Middle Atlantic states an electoral coalition of Republicans and Democratic politicians who favored vigorous prosecution of the war campaigned under the banner of the “Union party.“ In the Border states pro-administration candidates preferred the patriotic-sounding Unionist or Loyalist labels to “Republican,” which still carried an antislavery connotation in that region. The convention that nominated Lincoln for a second term in I864 exchanged the name Republican for “National Union party." Mathews, Dictionary of Americanisms, 2: 1006, 1796-98. would not spin out elaborate explanations, and denials that this is the character of the war, if abolition were popular. Men accept the term Abolitionist with qualifications. They do not come out square and open-handed, and affirm themselves to be Abolitionists. As a general rule, we are attempting to explain away the charge that this is an abolition war. I hold that it is an abolition war, because slavery has proved itself stronger than the Constitution. It has proved itself stronger than the Union, and has forced upon us the necessity of putting down slavery in order to save the Union, and in order to save the Constitution. (Applause)
I look at this as an abolition war instead of being a Union war, because 1 see that the lesser is included in the greater, and that you cannot have the lesser until you have the greater. You cannot have the Union, the Constitution, and republican institutions, until you have stricken down that damning curse, and put it beyond the pale ofthe Republic. For, while it is in this country, it will make your Union impossible; it will make your Constitution impossible. I therefore call this just what the Democrats have charged it with being, an abolition war. Let us emblazon it on our banners, and
declare before the world that this is an abolition war, (applause), that it will prosper precisely in proportion as it takes upon itself this character. (Renewed applause.)
My respected friend, Mr. Purvis, called attention to the existence of prejudice against color in this country.4According to the National Anti-Slavery Standard, Robert Purvis, the first speaker at the 4 December evening session, “delivered an impassioned address, dwelling mainly upon the proscriptive spirit of caste, which, in defiance of the fundamental principles of the American govemment deprives the colored man of his political, educational and social rights, and often exposes him to insult and outrage.” NASS, 12, 26 December 1863. This gives me great cause for apprehension, if not for alarm. I am afraid of this powerful element of prejudice against color. While it exists, I want the voice of the American Anti-Slavery Society to be continually protesting, continually exposing it. While it can be said that in this most anti-slavery city in the Northern States of our Union, in the city of Philadelphia. the city of Brotherly Love, in the city of churches, the city of piety,5Douglass describes Philadelphia by several of its nicknames. In 1681 William Penn selected the Greek noun philadelphia, meaning literally “brotherly love," for the name of his new colony's capital. The nickname “City of Churches" became attached to Philadelphia because of the large number of religious edifices towering above its early nineteenth-century skyline. Alexander, Nicknames and Sobriqnets, 189: George R. Stewart, American Place-Names: A Concise and Selective Dictionary for the Continental United States of America (New York, 1970), 370. that the most genteel and respectable colored lady or gentleman may be kicked out of your commonest streetcar, we are in danger of a compromise. While it can be said that black men, fighting bravely for this country, are asked to take $7 per month, while the government lays down as a rule or criterion of pay a complexional one, we are in danger of a compromise. While to be radical is to be unpopular, we are in danger of a compromise. While we have a large minority, called Democratic, in every State of the North, we have a powerful nucleus for most infernal re-action in favor of slavery. I know it is said that we have recently achieved vast political victories. I am glad of it. I value those victories, however, more for what they have prevented than for what they have actually accomplished. I should have been doubly sad at seeing any one of these States wheel into line with the Peace Democracy.6The term Peace Democrat originated in the highly partisan rhetoric of Nonhem politics during the Civil War. By 1863 some northem Democrats such as Clement Vallandigham of Ohio and Femando Wood of New York publicly endorsed an armistice to end hostilities and negotiations to restore the Union. Republicans used these statements to brand the bulk of Democrats with favoring peace at any price. Denying that anything short of Union military victory could reunite the nation, the Republicans accused the Peace Democrats of being at best fools or at worst traitors. Mathews, Dictionary of Americanisms, 2 : 1212; Silbey, Respectable Minority, 92, 100-05, 166. But, however it may be in the State of Pennsylvania, I know that you may look
for abolition in the creed ofany party in New York with a microscope, and you will not find a single line of anti-slavery there. The victories were Union victories, victories to save the Union in such ways as the country may devise to save it.7Douglass characterizes the spirit ofthe 1863 campaign in New York. On 2 September 1863 a Union party state convention representing the Republicans and a small number of prowar Democrats met in Syracuse to nominate candidates and adopt a platform. The convention's original declaration of principles was silent on the controversial issue of emancipation. At the very end of the proceedings, an additional resolution was added to the party's platform endorsing Lincoln‘s Emancipation Proclamation “as a war measure, thoroughly legal and justifiable." In the subsequent campaign, however, Unionist nominees generally ignored the slavery question and stressed their party's support for a vigorous prosecution of the war. New York Daily Tribune, 3 September 1863; New York Times, 3 September 1863; Flick, History of New York, 7 : 116—17. But whatever may have been the meaning of these majorities in regard to the Union, we know one thing, that the minorities, at least, mean slavery. They mean submission. They mean the degradation of the colored man. They mean everything but open rebellion against the Federal government in the South. But the mob, the rioters in the city of New York, convert that city into a hell, and its lower orders into demons, and dash out the brains of little children against the curbstones;8In March 1863, when it had become clear that recruitment could not keep pace with Union amiy requirements, Congress passed a conscription act. Legal attempts by Democratic politicians such as New York govemor Horatio Seymour to block enforcement of the draft failed, and the drawing of names began in New York City on 11 July 1863. Two days later a mob composed mainly of foreign-bom laborers sacked the city's draft headquarters and looted and burned homes and businesses. A major target ofthe mob was the city‘s black population. Rioters lynched at least a dozen blacks, burned a black orphanage, and plundered and terrorized black neighborhoods. Local authorities proved unable to quell the violence, and Federal troops fresh from the Gettysburg battlefield had to be rushed to New York City. Order was not restored until 16 July. James McCague, The Second Rebellion: The Story of the New York City Draft Riots of 1863 (New York, 1968); Eugene Converse Murdock, Patriotism Limited, 1862—1865: The Civil War Draft and the Bounty System ([Kent, Ohio], 1967), 63—80. and they mean anything and everything that the Devil exacts at their hands. While we had in this State a majority of but 15,000 over this pro-slavery Democratic party, they have a mighty minority, a dangerous minority.9In October 1863 Republican Andrew G. Curtin was reelected governor of Pennsylvania by a vote of 269,506 to 254,171 over Democratic candidate George W. Woodward. Sobel and Raimo, Biographical Directory of Governors, 3 : 1310—11; William H. Egle, ed., Andrew Gregg Curtin: His Life and Services (Philadelphia, 1895), 159—66. Keep in mind when these minorities were gotten. Powerful as they are, they were gotten when slavery, with bloody hands, was stabbing at the very heart of the nation itself. With all that disadvantage, they have piled up these powerful minorities.
We have work to do, friends and fellow—citizens. to look after these minorities. The day that shall see Jeff Davis fling down his Montgomery
Constitution,10On 11 March 1861, after five weeks of deliberations at Montgomery, Alabama, the Provisional Congress of the Confederate States of America unanimously adopted a permanent constitution for their new government. Thomas, Confederate Nation, 57-58, 62—66; Eaton, Southern Confederacy, 43—44. and call home his Generals, will be the most trying day to the virtue of this people that this country has ever seen. When the slaveholders shall give up the contest, and ask for re-admission into the Union, then, as Mr. Wilson has told us, we shall see the trying time in this country.11 Senator Henry Wilson of Massachusetts preceded Douglass in addressing the American Anti-Slavery Society convention. In the remarks to which Douglass alludes, Wilson warned the abolitionists not to believe that the Emancipation Proclamation had won the battle against slavery. Wilson declared: “We are to be tried--the government is to be tried. . . . Yet, while we are to be tried, I believe we shall remain firm, true,. and faithful, and that we shall triumph." Lib., 25 December 1863; NASS, 26 December 1863; American Anti-Slavery Society, Proceedings . . . at Its Third Decade, 102—10. Your Democracy will clamor for peace and for restoring the old order of things, because that old order of things was the life of the Democratic party. “You do take away mine house, when you take away the prop that sustains my house,” and the support of the Democratic party we all know to be slavery. The Democratic party is for war for slavery; it is for peace for slavery; it is for the habeas corpus for slavery; it is against the habeas corpus for slavery; it was for the Florida war for slavery; it was for the Mexican war for slavery; it is for jury trial for traitors for slavery; it is against jury trial for men claimed as fugitive slaves for slavery. It has but one principle, one master; and it is guided, governed and directed by it. I say that with this party among us, flaunting its banners in our faces, with the New York World scattered broadcast over the North, with the New York Express, with the mother and father and devil of them all, the New York Herald, (applause), with those papers flooding our land, and coupling the term Abolitionist with all manner of coarse epithets,12The New York World had been an independent religious newspaper until purchased by a committee of Democratic party leaders in September 1862. The prestige of its sponsors and the talent of its young editor, Manton Marble, quickly attracted a national readership for the World. Although heavily partisan, the World gave editorial support to a vigorous prosecution of the war. The New York Evening Express, founded in 1836 by James and Erastus Brooks, shifted political allegiance in the 1850s from the Whigs to the Know-Nothings and finally to the Democrats. During the Civil War the Express criticized the Lincoln administration and supported the Peace Democrat's position. Since its founding in 1835, the New York Herald, under the editorship of James Gordon Bennett, had become one of the most influential newspapers in the country. In 1860 the Herald endorsed Stephen A. called for sectional compromise in the secession crisis. Although critical of the administration's emancipation policy and its arbitrary arrests of opponents, the Herald gave qualified support to Lincoln's reelection in 1864. Harper, Lincoln and the Press, 252-61, 318—24; Silbey, Respectable Minority, 64-65; Randall, Constitutional Problems under Lincoln, 487—88; ACAB, 1: 386—87; DAB, 2: 195-99. in all our
hotels, at all our crossings, our highways, and byways, and railways, all over the country, there is work to be done—a good deal of work to be done.
I have said that our work will not be done until the colored man is admitted a full member in good and regular standing into the American body politic. Men have very nice ideas about the body politic where I have travelled; and they don’t like the idea of having the negro in the body politic. He may remain in this country, for he will be useful as a laborer, valuable perhaps in time of trouble as a helper; but to make him a full and complete citizen, a legal voter, that would be contaminating the body politic. I was a little curious, some years ago, to find out what sort of a thing this body politic was; and I was very anxious to know especially about what amount of baseness, brutality, coarseness, ignorance, and bestiality, could find its way into the body politic; and l was not long in finding it out. I took my stand near the little hole through which the body politic put its votes. (Laughter) And first among the mob, I saw Ignorance, unable to read its vote, asking me to read it, by the way, (great laughter), depositing its vote in the body politic. Next I saw a man stepping up to the body politic, casting in his vote, having a black eye, and another one ready to be blacked, having been engaged in a street fight. I saw, again, Pat, fresh from the Emerald Isle. with the delightful brogue peculiar to him, stepping up—not walking. but leaning upon the arms of two of his friends, unable to stand. passing into the body politic! I came to the conclusion that this body politic was, after all, not quite so pure a body as the representation of its friends would lead us to believe.
I know it will be said that I ask you to make the black man a voter in the South. Yet you are for having brutality and ignorance introduced into the ballot-box. It is said that the colored man is ignorant, and therefore he shall not vote. In saying this, you lay down a rule for the black man that you apply to no other class of your citizens. I will hear nothing of degradation nor of ignorance against the black man. If he knows enough to be hanged, he knows enough to vote. If he knows an honest man from a thief, he knows much more than some of our white voters. If he knows as much when sober as an Irishman knows when drunk, he knows enough to vote. If he knows enough to take up arms in defence of this government, and bare his breast to the storm of rebel artillery, he knows enough to vote. (Great applause.)
Away with this talk of the want of knowledge on the part of the negro! I am about as big a negro as you will find anywhere about town; and any man that does not believe I know enough to vote, let him try it. I think I can
convince him that I do. Let him run for office in my district, and solicit my vote, and I will show him.
All I ask, however, in regard to the blacks, is that whatever rule you adopt, whether of intelligence or wealth, as the condition of voting, you should apply it equally to the black man. Do that, and I am satisfied, and eternal justice is satisfied. Liberty, fraternity, equality, are satisfied; and the country will move on harmoniously.
Mr. President, I have a patriotic argument in favor of insisting upon the immediate enfranchisement of the slaves of the South; and it is this. When this rebellion shall have been put down, when the arms shall have fallen from the guilty hand oftraitors, you will need the friendship of the slaves of the South, of those millions there. Four or five million men are not of inconsiderable importance at anytime; but they will be doubly important when you come to reorganize and reestablish republican institutions in the South. Will you mock those bondmen by breaking their chains with one hand, and with the other giving their rebel masters the elective franchise and robbing them of theirs? I tell you the negro is your friend. But you will make him not only your friend in sentiment and heart by enfranchising him, you will thus make him your best defender, your best protector against the traitors and the descendants of those traitors who will inherit the hate, the bitter revenge which shall crystalize all over the South, and seek to circumvent the government that they could not throw off. You will need the black man there as a watchman and patrol; and you may need him as a soldier. You may need him to uphold in peace, as he is now upholding in war, the star-spangled banner. (Applause) I wish our excellent friend, Senator Wilson, would bend his energies to this point as well as the other—to let the negro have a vote. It will be helping him from the jaws of the wolf. We are surrounded by those who, like the wolf, will use their jaws, if you give the elective franchise to the descendants of the traitors, and keep it from the black man. We ought to be voters there! We ought to be members of Congress! (Applause) You may as well make up your minds that you have got to see something dark down that way! There is no way to get rid of it. I am a candidate already! (Applause)
For twenty-five years, Mr. President, you know that when I got as far South as Philadelphia, I felt that I was rubbing against my prison wall, and could not go any further. I dared not go over yonder into Delaware.13Douglass escaped from slavery in 1838 and did not reenter a slave state until passing through Delaware and Maryland on his way to Washington, DC, in July 1863. Quarles, FD, 210—11.
Twenty years ago, when I attended the first Decade meeting of this Society, as I came along the vales and hills of Gettysburg, my good friends, the anti-slavery people along there, warned me to remain in the house during the daytime and travel in the night, lest I should be kidnapped, and carried over into Maryland. My good friend Dr. Fussell was one of the number who did not think it safe for me to attend an anti-slavery meeting along the borders of this State.14On his way to the Diennial Convention of the American Anti-Slavery Society held in Philadelphia on 4—7 December 1843, Douglass lectured in Pittsburgh and several other Pennsylvania towns. No record exists of the warnings that Douglass remembers having received while on this tour. His reference to a Dr. Fussell is probably to either Bartholomew Fussell of York, Pennsylvania, or Edwin Fussell of Pendleton, Indiana, both Hicksite Quakers and physicians. Bartholomew Fussell was one of the founders of the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1833. His nephew, Edwin (?—1882), was a Garrisonian abolitionist who had braved a mob in Pendleton when he had hosted Douglass in his home that previous September. In 1844, Edwin moved to the Philadelphia area, where he continued to practice medicine. NASS, 14 December 1843: Lib., 15, 22 December 1843; Holland, Frederick Douglass, 95—96. I can go down there now. I have been to Washington to see the President; and as you were not there, perhaps you may like to know how the President of the United States received a black man at the White House.15In the company of Senator Samuel C. Pomeroy of Kansas, Douglass had an interview with Lincoln at the White House on 1O August 1863. Douglass's account of this meeting appears in Allen Thorndikc Rice, ed., Reminiscenes of Abraham Lincoln by Distinguished Men of His Time (New York, 1886), 187—89, and in Douglass, Life and Times, 381—84. Douglass to George L. Steams, 12 August 1863, Abraham Barker Scrap Book. PHi; Tyler Dennett, ed., Lincoln and the Civil War in the Diaries and Letters of John Hay (New York, 1939), 79; Quarles, Lincoln and the Negro, 168. I will tell you how he received me—just as you have seen one gentleman receive another! (great applause); with a hand and a voice well-balanced between a kind cordiality and a respectful reserve. I tell you I felt big there. (Laughter.) Let me tell you how I got to him; because every body can’t get to him. He has to be a little guarded in admitting spectators. The manner in getting to him gave me an idea that the cause was rolling on. The stairway was crowded with applicants. Some of them looked eager: and I have no doubt some of them had a purpose in being there, and wanted to see the President for the good of the country! They were white, and as I was the only dark spot among them, I expectled to have a wait at least half a day; I have heard of men waiting a week; but in two minutes after I sent in my card, the messenger came out, and respectfully invited “Mr. Douglass” in. I could hear, in the eager multitude outside, as they saw me pressing and elbowing my way through, the remark, “Yes, damn it, I knew they would let the nigger through,” in a kind of despairing voice—aPeace Democrat, I suppose. (Laughter.) When I went in, the President was
sitting in his usual position, I was told, with his feet in different parts of the room, taking it easy. (Laughter.) Don’t put this down, Mr. Reporter, I pray you; for I am going down there again to-morrow. (Laughter.) As I came in and approached him, the President began to rise, and he continued to rise until he stood over me (laughter); and he reached out his hand and said, “Mr. Douglass, I know you; I have read about you, and Mr. Seward16William H. Seward. has told me about you;” putting me quite at ease at once.
Now you will want to know how I was impressed by him. I will tell you that, too. He impressed me as being just what every one of you have been in the habit of calling him—an honest man. (Applause) I never met with a man, who, on the first blush, impressed me more entirely with his sincerity, with his devotion to his country, and with his determination to save it at all hazards. (Applause) He told me (I think he did me more honor than I deserve), that I had made a little speech somewhere in New York, and it had got into the papers, and among the things I had said was this: That if I were called upon to state what I regarded as the most sad and most disheartening feature in our present political and military situation, it would not be the various disasters experienced by our armies and our navies, on flood and field, but it would be the tardy, hesitating and vacillating policy of the President of the United States;17Although Douglass criticized Lincoln in many speeches early in the war, this particular reference is to his lecture delivered at Boston's Tremont Temple on 5 February 1862 and again at New York City‘s Cooper Institute on 12 February 1862. DM, 4 : 613— 16 (March 1862); New York Daily Tribune, 13 February 1862. and the President said to me, “Mr. Douglass, I have been charged with being tardy, and the like;” and he went on, and partly admitted that he might seem slow; but he said, “I am charged with vacillating; but, Mr. Douglass, I do not think that charge can be sustained; I think it cannot be shown that when I have once taken a position, I have ever retreated from it.” (Applause) That I regarded as the most significant point in what he said during our interview. I told him that he had been somewhat slow in proclaiming equal protection to our colored soldiers and prisoners; and he said that the country needed talking up to that point.18On 30 July 1863 Lincoln signed an order pledging the U.S. govemment to “give the same protection to all its soldiers, and if the enemy shall sell or enslave anyone because of his color, the offense shall be punished by retaliation upon the enemy's prisoners in our possession.“ Basler, Collected Works of Lincoln, 6 : 357. He hesitated in regard to it when he felt that the country was not ready for it. He knew that the colored man throughout this country was a despised man, a hated man, and he knew that if he at first
came out with such a proclamation, all the hatred which is poured on the head of the negro race would be visited on his Administration. He said that there was preparatory work needed, and that that preparatory work had been done. And he added, “Remember this, Mr. Douglass; remember that Milliken’s Bend, Port Hudson, and Fort Wagner are recent events; and that these were necessary to prepare the way for this very proclamation of mine.”19Lincoln's reference was to three battles in 1863 in which black Union troops demonstrated their courage and military competence. On 27 May 1863 two black regiments raised in Louisiana made repeated charges, despite heavy casualties, on Confederate fortifications at Port Hudson in that state. On 7 June 1863 two other black Louisiana regiments repulsed a Confederate attack on their camp at Milliken's Bend in hand-to-hand combat. On the night of 18-19 July 1863, the black Fifty-fourth Massachusetts Infantry Regiment sustained 247 casualties while spearheading an unsuccessful attack on Fort Wagner, South Carolina. The complimentary official reports ofthe black soldiers' performance in these battles helped to erase much of the widespread doubt about the wisdom of black enlistment. Quarles, Negro in the Civil War, 12—21, 214-25; Cornish, Sable Arm, 142— 156; Boatner, Civil War Dictionary, 301, 663. I thought it was reasonable; but I came to the conclusion that while Abraham Lincoln will not go down to posterity as Abraham the Great, or as Abraham the Wise, or as Abraham the Eloquent, although he is all three, wise, great, and eloquent, he will go down to posterity, if the country is saved, as Honest Abraham, (applause); and going down thus, his name may be written anywhere in this wide world of ours side by side with that of Washington, without disparaging the latter. (Cheers.)
But we are not to be saved by the captain this time, but by the crew. We are not to be saved by Abraham Lincoln, but by that power behind the throne, greater than the throne itself. You and I and all of us have this matter in hand. Men talk about saving the Union, and restoring the Union as it was. They delude themselves with the miserable idea that that old Union can be brought to life again. That old Union, whose canonized bones we so quietly inurned under the shattered walls of Sumter, can never come to life again. It is dead, and you cannot put life into it. The first shot fired at the walls of Sumter caused it to fall as dead as the body of Julius Caesar when stabbed by Brutus.20Douglass alludes to the murder of Roman general Julius Caesar by Marcus Junius Brutus in the Senate on the Ides of March, 44 B.C. William Smith, ed., Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology, 3 vols. (Boston, 1849), 1 : 510, 539, 553—54. We do not want it. We have outlived the old Union. We had outlived it long before the rebellion came to tell us—l mean the Union under the old pro-slavery interpretation of it—and had become ashamed of it. The South hated it with our anti-slavery interpretation, and the North hated it with the Southern interpretation of its requirements. We had already come to think with horror of the idea of being called
upon here in our churches and literary societies, to take up arms and go down South, and pour the leaden death into the breasts ofthe slaves, in case they should rise for liberty; and the better part of the people did not mean to do it. They shuddered at the idea of so sacrilegious a crime. They had already become utterly disgusted with the idea ofplaying the part of bloodhounds for the slave-masters, and watch-dogs for the plantations. They had come to detest the principle upon which the slaveholding States had a larger representation in Congress than the free States. They had come to think that the little finger of dear old John Brown was worth more to the world than all the slaveholders in Virginia put together. (Applause) What business, then, have we to fight for the old Union? We are not fighting for it. We are fighting for something incomparably better than the old Union. We are fighting for unity; unity of object, unity of institutions, in which there shall be no North, no South, no East, no West, no black, no white, but a solidarity of the nation, making every slave free, and every free man a voter. (Great applause.)