The Proclamation and a Negro Army: an Address Delivered in New York, New York, on February 6, 1863
THE PROCLAMATION AND A NEGRO ARMY: AN ADDRESS
[DELIVERED IN NEW YORK, NEW YORK, ON 6 FEBRUARY 1863
Douglass' Monthly, 5: 804—08 (March 1863). Other texts in New York Times, 7 February
1863; New York Daily Tribune, 7 February 1863; New York World, 7 February 1863; Foner, Life and Writings, 3: 321-37.
A “large and enthusiastic audience" of “respectable” whites and blacks
braved the elements on the evening of 6 February 1863 to hear Douglass
expound on the Emancipation Proclamation at the Cooper Institute in New
York City. The Federal government had only recently approved the formation
of the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts Infantry, the first regiment of Northern
blacks, and Douglass took this occasion to argue for the enlistment of blacks
into the army under terms identical to those presented to whites, a theme he
would pursue frequently in succeeding months. Douglass shared the platform
with Theodore Tilton, William Wells Brown, and the Reverend Henry High-
land Garnet, who presided over the meeting and introduced Douglass “amid
applause.” After the address, Robert Hamilton performed a new song eu-
logizing John Brown, and Tilton spoke briefly on the change in Brown’s
public image that had occurred since 1861. See Appendix A, text 7, for a
précis of an alternate text. NASS, 14 February 1863: Quarles, Negro in the
Civil War, 8—9.
I congratulate you, upon what may be called the greatest event of our
nation‘s history, if not the greatest event of the century. In the eye of the
Constitution, the supreme law of the land, there is not now, and there has
not been, since the first day of January, a single slave lawfully deprived of
Liberty in any of the States now recognized as in Rebellion against the
National Government. In all those States Slavery is now in law, as in fact, a
system of lawless violence, against which the slave may lawfully defend
himself. (Cheers)
In the hurry and excitement of the moment, it is difficult to grasp the
full and complete significance of President Lincoln’s proclamation. The
change in the attitude of the Government is vast and startling. For more
than sixty years the Federal Government has been little better than a stu-
pendous engine of Slavery and oppression, through which Slavery has
ruled us, as with a rod of iron. The boast that Cotton is King1Douglass quotes the claim made by South Carolina senator James H. Hammond during congressional debates over the admission of Kansas to the Union under the Lecompton Constitution. Congressional Globe, 35th Cong, 1st. sess., 961. was no empty
boast. Assuming that our Government and people will sustain the President
and his Proclamation, we can scarcely conceive of a more complete revolu-
tion in the position of a nation. England, no longer ruled by a king, the
Pope turned Protestant, Austria—a Republic, would not present a greater
revolution.
I hail it as the doom of Slavery in all the States. I hail it as the end of all
that miserable statesmanship, which has for sixty years juggled and de-
ceived the people, by professing to reconcile what is irreconcilable. No
politician need now hope to rise to power, by crooking the pregnant hinges
of the knee to Slavery. We part company forever with that amphibious
animal called a Northern man with Southern principles. Color is no longer
a crime or a badge of bondage. At last the out-spread wings of the Ameri-
can Eagle afford shelter and protection to men of all colors, all countries.
and all climes, and the long oppressed black man may honorably fall or
gloriously flourish under the star-spangled banner. (Applause)
I stand here to-night not only as a colored man and an American, but,
by the express decision of the Attorney—General of the United States,2The son of a Virginia planter, Edward Bates (1793—1869) emigrated to Missouri in 1814 and became a lawyer. Although he served a term in Congress in the 1820s, Bates's affiliation with the emerging Whig party stymied his ambitions for higher office in the heavily Democratic state. He first gained national prominence when he presided over the Chicago River and Harbor Convention in 1847. With the decline of the Whigs, Bates became a Know-Nothing and then a Republican. coming in as a distant runner-up for the presidential nomination at the 1860 Republican National Convention, eager to appease the border states, Lincoln appointed Bates his attorney general, but Bates's conservatism on emancipation and wartime military prerogatives isolated him, first from the cabinet and then from Lincoln. He resigned as attorney general in November 1864 and after the war publicly supported Andrew Johnson against attacks from the Radical Republicans. Marvin R. Cain, Lincoln's Attorney General: Edward Bates of Missouri (Columbia. Mo., 1965); ACAB, 1: 193; DAB, 2: 48-49. as a
colored citizen, having, in common with all other citizens, a stake in the
safety, prosperity, honor, and glory of a common country.3Douglass alludes to the 29 November 1862 opinion of Attorney General Edward Bates on the entitlement of free blacks to U.S. citizenship. Responding to the Treasury Department's request for an opinion on the citizenship of a black New Jersey sea captain, Bates ruled that every free person born in the United States, irrespective of race, was “at the moment of birth prima facie a citizen." Generally overlooked by the abolitionists who applauded the opinion was Bates's additional statement that citizenship “does not necessarily depend upon nor coexist with the legal capacity to hold office and the right of suffrage," and his deliberate avoidance of ruling on the citizenship of slaves. Cain, Lincoln's Attorney General, 222—25; James M. McPherson, The Negro's Civil War: How American Negroes Felt and Acted during the War for the Union (New York, 1965), 249-50. (Cheering)
We are all liberated by this proclamation. Everybody is liberated. The
white man is liberated, the black man is liberated. the brave men now
fighting the battles of their country against rebels and traitors are now
liberated, and may strike with all their might, even if they do by thus
manfully striking hurt the Rebels, at their most sensitive point. (Applause)
I congratulate you upon this amazing change—this amazing approx-
imation toward the sacred truth of human liberty. All the space between
man’s mind and God's mind, says Parker,4Douglass probably refers to the Reverend Theodore Parker of Boston. is crowded with truths that wait
to be discovered and organized into law for the better government of
society. Mr. Lincoln has not exactly discovered a new truth, but he has
dared, in this dark hour of national peril, to apply an old truth, long ago
acknowledged in theory by the nation—a truth which carried the American
people safely through the war for independence, and one which will carry
us, as I believe, safely through the present terrible and sanguinary conflict
for national life, if we shall but faithfully live up to that great truth.
(Cheers)
Born and reared as a slave, as I was, and wearing on my back the marks
of the slavedriver’s lash, as I do, it is natural that I should value the
Emancipation Proclamation for what it is destined to do for the slaves. I do
value it for that. It is a mighty event for the bondman, but it is a still
mightier event for the nation at large, and mighty as it is for both, the slave
and the nation, it is still mightier when viewed in its relation to the cause of
truth and justice throughout the world. It is in this last character that I prefer
to consider it. There are certain great national acts, which by their relation
to universal principles, properly belong to the whole human family, and
Abraham Lincoln’s Proclamation of the 1st of January, 1863, is one of
these acts. Henceforth that day shall take rank with the Fourth of July.
(Applause) Henceforth it becomes the date of a new and glorious era in the
history of American liberty. Henceforth it shall stand associated in the
minds of men, with all those stately steps of mankind, from the regions of
error and oppression, which have lifted them from the trial by poison and
fire to the trial by Jury—from the arbitrary will of a despot t0 the sacred
writ of habeas corpus—from abject serfdom to absolute citizenship. It will
stand in the history of civilization with Catholic Emancipation, with the
British Reform Bill,5In June 1832 the British Parliament passed a reform bill that redistributed seats in the House of Commons to give more representation to the new industrial towns. Fifty-six “rotten boroughs" with fewer than two thousand voters lost both of their seats in Parliament and an additional thirty-one boroughs with fewer than four thousand voters lost one seat. The Reform Bill of 1832 also standardized property qualifications in order to admit the upper-middle class to the electorate. John W. Derry, Reaction amid Reform, 1793-1868: England in the Early Nineteenth Century (London, 1963), 106—11. with the repeal of Com Laws and with that noble act
of Russian liberty, by which twenty millions of serfs, against the clamors
of haughty tyrants, have been released from servitude. (Loud cheering.)
Aye! It will stand with every distinguished event which marks any advance
made by mankind from the thraldom and darkness of error to the glorious
liberty of truth.
I believe in the millenium—the final perfection of the race, and hail
this Proclamation, though wrung out under the goading lash of a stern
military necessity, as one reason of the hope that is in me. Men may see in it
only a military necessity. To me it has a higher significance. It is a grand
moral necessity.
“Thrice is he armed who hath his quarrel just,
And he but naked, though wrapped up in steel,
Whose conscience with injustice is corrupted.”6Douglass quotes Henry VI, Part II, act 3. sc. 2, lines 233-35.
The conscience of the North has been troubled during all this war. It
has seen the inconsistency of fighting for Slavery. It has seen the absurdity
of killing the Rebel, while asserting the Rebel’s right to his slave. It has
seen the folly of fighting the Rebels with our soft white hands, and keeping
back our iron black hands. (Cheers)
This whole subject of the war and the President’s proclamation natu-
rally brings us to the consideration of first principles, the nature of truth and
error, and their respective powers and prospects, in the Government of
mankind. I attempt no scientific definition either of truth or of error. The
occasion does not require it. Truth is that view or theory of things which
describes them as they really are. It describes a man as a man, a horse as a
horse, and never confounds the distinction between men and horses. Error
is any and every contradiction of truth, in much or in little. The one is in its
nature a unit. The other is in its nature multitudinous. The devil gave his
name correctly when he called himself legion7Douglass alludes to Satan's reply to Jesus during the exorcism of the man in the country of the Gadarenes: “And Jesus asked him, saying, What is thy name? And he said, Legion: because many devils were entered into him." Luke 8: 30.—for there are a thousand
wrong ways to but one right way.
Nevertheless, truth as one, shall be more than a match for error as a
thousand—and all nations shall yet be brought into harmony with its
absolute requirements. Either in the truth, or man himself, there is a
compensating force, which renders him, in a high sense superior to the
numerical advantages of error. By some means or other, whatever may be
said of innate depravity. men do and will in the end prefer truth to error,
and the right way to the wrong one.
When we meet with facts in our experience of the world, which seem to
contradict this, the explanation can always be found in considerations
entirely apart from the qualities of truth on the one hand, and of error on the
other. Men never prefer the crooked to the straight road, because the one is
crooked and the other is straight. It is always done because of some fancied
advantage gained, or some disadvantage avoided—and done in the name
of expediency, as choosing the least between two evils.
But little hope would there be for this world covered with error as with
a cloud of thick darkness, and studded with all abounding injustice, wrong,
oppression, intemperance, and monopolies, bigotry, superstition, King-
craft, priest-craft, pride of race, prejudice of color, chattel-slavery—the
grand sum of all human woes, and villanies[—lif there were not in man,
deep down, and it may be very deep down, in his soul or in the truth itself,
an elective power, or an attractive force, call it by what name you will,
which makes truth in her simple beauty and excellence, ever preferred to
the grim and ghastly powers of error.
Hence, though this life voyage of ours offers a thousand opportunities
to drown, to only one of being saved; hence, though the sea is broad, and
the ship is narrow; hence, though the billows are mighty, and the bark frail,
there is a power on board, a captain at the helm whose presence forbids
despair even in the darkest hours.
The hope of the world—the progress of nations—the triumph of the
truth and the reign of reason and righteousness among men are conditioned
on free discussion. Good old John Brown (loud applause) was a madman at
Harper’s Ferry. Two years pass away, and the nation is as mad as he.
(Great cheering.) Every General and every soldier that now goes in good
faith to Old Virginia, goes there for the very purpose that sent honest John
Brown to Harper’s Ferry. (Renewed cheers.)
After discussing the momentous power of Free Speech, he continued:
One of the peculiarities of our times compels notice here. Parties have to
some extent changed sides on the subject of free speech. The men who
would a few years ago mob and hang Abolitionists for exercising the sacred
right of free thought and speech, have all at once become the most urgent
for the largest liberty of speech. And I must say, detestable as are the
motives that have brought them to the defense of free speech, I think they
have the right in the controversy. I do not know where I would limit the
right of simple utterance of opinion. If any one is base enough to spit upon
the grave of his mother, or to shout for Jefferson Davis, let him, and do not
lock him up for it. (Cheering) After that almost inspired announcement of
equal rights contained in the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson has
left us nothing more worthy of his profound mind than his saying that error
may be safely tolerated where truth is left free to combat it.8Douglass compares the sentiments of the Declaration of Independence with the assertion in Thomas Jefferson's second inaugural address that “error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it." H. A. Washington, ed., The Writings of Thomas Jefferson: Being His Auto-biography, Correspondence, Reports, Messages, Addresses, and Other Writings, Official and Private, 8 vols. (Washington, D.C., 1853—54), 8: 3. Equally true,
though not always equally manifest, is it that error can never be safely
tolerated when truth is not left free to combat it. Whence came the terrible
conflict which now rocks our land with the thundering tramp of hostile
armies? Why does the cold and greedy earth now drink up the warm red
blood of our patriot sons, brothers, husbands, and fathers—carrying sor-
row and agony into every household? Many answers have been returned to
these questions. This, however, is the true one. A stupendous error, long
tolerated, and protected even from discussion, held too sacred to be called
in question, has at last become belligerent and snatched the sword of
treason for permanent dominion.
Nothing strange has happened unto us; the result has been reached
naturally. Our trouble is a logical part of the conflict of ages, past, present.
and future. It will go on. It cannot be stopped. Here, as elsewhere, the fire
will go out only when the fuel is exhausted. The moral chemistry of the
universe makes peace between Liberty and Slavery impossible. Moral
necessity is upon the slaveholders to stand up for Slavery. The dream and
delusion of the hour is the thought of restoring the country to the condition
it occupied previous to the war. What good would come of such restora-
tion? What is the tremendous war but the ripened fruit of that past condi-
tion? Our present, horrible as it is, is the legitimate child of our previous;
and to go back to what we were is simply to ask us to come back again to
what we are. The conflict has changed its form from words to blows, and it
may change again from blows to words; but the conflict itself, in one form
or the other, will go on till truth is slain or error is driven from the field.
(Cheers)
Much as I hate Slavery, and glad as I should be to see it instantly
abolished, I would consent gladly to any peace if but the right of speech,
and the liberty of peaceably assembling could be secured in every part of
the Union. (Applause) When error consents to reason, truth may also
consent to reason. But when error takes the sword, truth must also take the
sword. Not to do this, and to cry out “peace at any price,” is to desert the
truth, and give up the world to the powers of darkness. The man who now
preaches peace, preaches treason to his country and to the paramount
claims of truth and justice.
The slaveholders are fighting for Slavery. The boldness with which
they avow this object would astonish the world, but that the world knows
that cunning, not courage, is the cause of their making it. They know that
all attempt at concealment would be absurd and fruitless. They are fighting
for Slavery[—]and the slave system being against nature—they are fight-
ing against the eternal laws of nature, and though they should for a time
succeed—dissolve the Union, capture a part of our territory, compel the
North to sue for peace, and obtain peace upon the usual terms of compro-
mise by which the South gets all and the North nothing, (Laughter and
cheers) Nature with the aid of free discussion would set herself right in the
end. Great is truth, great is humanity, and they must prevail. (Cheering) A
great man once said it was useless to re-enact the laws of God, meaning
thereby the laws of Nature. But a greater man than he will yet teach the
world that it is useless to re-enact any other laws with any hope of their
permanence.
There are said to be some towns in this country which are finished,
nothing more will or can be done for them, and that they might be fenced in
without detriment. There are individuals of the same description whose
greatest alarm seems to be that things may change after they are dead.
(Cheers.) As the nerves of one of your dwellers in a finished town would be
shocked by the sound of a hammer, those of our respectable Hunkers are
shocked by the sound of a newly discovered truth. (Laughter and ap-
plause.) They recognize it as a disturber of the world’s peace. But the
world, like the fish preached to in the stream, moves on in obedience to the
laws of its being, bearing away all excresences and imperfections in its
progress. It has its periods of illumination as well as of darkness, and often
bounds forward a greater distance in a single year than in an age before.
The rosy morning light of a great truth breaks upon the vision of some early
riser—and straightway he wakes up the drowsy world with the announce-
ment of the day and the work. Sleepy people don’t like to be disturbed.
They hate the troubler, call him names, draw their curtains, close their
blinds, turn their backs to the light—but the sun rises nevertheless, and the
most conservative Hunker of them all is compelled in time to acknowledge
it. (Cheers)
Less than one hundred years ago it is said that the people of the West
Coast of Ireland thought that the proper way to attach a horse to a plow was
by the tail. (Laughter.) It seemed to them that that was what the tail was
made for. (Laughter.) Only two hundred years ago, we are told by the
pious Godwin,9Morgan Godwyn. that the Christian people of the British West Indies thought
it a sin to baptize persons of color who were slaves. The argument against
such baptism was quite logical. They said that negroes are property, and it
is not right to baptize property; and a learned divine thought it necessary to
write a book to prove that it was not a sin to baptize a negro. (Laughter.)
At a time less remote than that, even in New England, now so remark-
able for its enlightenment and its liberality, if any aged woman were in any
wise distinguished for talent, and a little eccentric withal, as most gifted
women are supposed to be, she stood a smart chance of being hanged as a
witch. New England has outgrown this folly, and is condemned by some
who reproach her, for refusing now to fall in with the barbarism of Slavery.
At one time to hate and despise a Jew, simply for being a Jew, was almost a
Christian virtue. The Jews were treated with every species of indignity,
and not allowed to learn trades, nor to live in the same part of the city with
other people. Now kings cannot go to war without the consent of a Jew.
The Jew has come up, and the negro will come up by and by.
The world is not much older than it was when to torture and burn men
for a difference of speculative religious belief was deemed simple fidelity
to the Christian faith. All the wisdom of Boston could devise no better way
a hundred years ago to cure a woman of Quakerism than by the cart-
whip.10Douglass refers to the persecution of the Quakers by the Puritan leaders of Massachusetts in the seventeenth, not the eighteenth, century. Fearing contamination of their colony's religious principles, Puritan leaders enacted laws in the 1650s that forbade Friends to enter Massachusetts on pain of whipping and expulsion for first offenders and hanging for repeated violators. Quaker missionaries continued to travel to Massachusetts to spread their doctrines, and, equally undaunted, the Puritan leaders scourged and expelled scores of Quaker intruders of both sexes and executed several, including Mary Dyer, who had courted martyrdom by returning. A royal writ in 1661 curbed the worst of these atrocities, but the infamous “Cart and Whip Act" was still being applied to Quakers as late as 1677. George A. Selleck, Quakers in Boston, 1695—1964: Three Centuries of Friends in Boston and Cambridge (Boston, 1976), 1—25; Rufus M. Jones, The Quakers in the American Colonies (London, 1911), 63—11O. Roger Williams11Roger Williams (c. 1603—83), London-born and Cambridge-educated religious nonconformist and founder of Rhode Island, came in 1631 to the Massachusetts Bay colony, where he settled in Salem as a minister. Williams publicly condemned the colony's Puritan leaders for granting the civil government authority over religious matters and also denied that the royal charter gave the colonists any legitimate claims to Indian lands. When the colony’s leaders attempted to arrest and expel him for his heresies, Williams fled Massachusetts in the winter of 1635—36 and sought refuge with the Pokanoket Indians whom he had earlier befriended. The following summer he removed to the Narragansett Bay area, founding a colony chartered in 1644 as the Providence Plantations. Williams's colony was unique in its time for its democratic form of government, complete separation of church and state, and honest dealings with the Indians. Cyclone Covey, The Gentle Radical: A Biography of Roger Williams (New York, 1966); ACAB, 6: 531—33; DAB, 20: 286—89. found more toleration among the Indians of
Rhode Island than among the Puritans of Massachusetts. It is only thirty
years ago when gentlemen of property and standing in the very Athens of
America12Boston, Massachusetts. felt it a patriotic duty to mob Wm. L. Garrison and break up a
woman’s Anti-Slavery prayer-meeting. Only two years ago there remained
enough of this brutality and barbarism in Boston to block the streets of that
city with a mob of 10,000 men clamoring for the blood of an eminent
Boston citizen, for simply daring to speak against Slavery.
These facts are notorious and oft repeated. I mention them here not to
cast reproach but as a part of the struggle between truth and error, and as a
proof of progress. Fortunately for mankind, error is a bad reasoner. It can
fight better than it can reason. It can make mouths, call names, and fling
brickbats, but cannot reason except to damage itself. All the powers of the
universe fight steadily against it. Brooks could knock down the Senator,13Preston Smith Brooks and Charles Sumner.
but the whole South in arms could not knock down the Senator’s argument.
Such is my confidence in the potency of truth, in the power of reason, I
hold that had the right of free discussion been preserved during the last
thirty years, had the Northern parties and politicians been half so diligent in
protecting this high constitutional right, from the first ruthlessly struck
down all over the South, as they have been in framing laws for the recap-
ture of poor, toil-worn and foot-sore slaves, we should now have no
Slavery to breed Rebellion, nor war, black with dismal terror, to drench
our land with blood, and fill our dwellings with sorrow and mourning.
Slavery would have fallen as it fell in the West Indies, as it has fallen in the
Free States, as it has fallen in Russia, and elsewhere, and as it will fall
everywhere, when men can assail it with the weapons of reason and the
facts of experience. (Applause)
No men better understand the moral weakness of Slavery than the
slaveholders themselves. The simple ones among them may think the
system strong in reason; but the leading minds at the South know and
confess the contrary. The Columbia (S.C.) Telegraph only echoed the
sentiment of the whole South when it said thirty years ago:
“Let us declare through the public journals of the country that the
question of Slavery is not and shall not be open to discussion, that the
moment any private individual shall attempt to lecture upon its evils and
immorality, and the necessity of putting means in operation to secure us
from them, in that same moment, his tongue shall be cut out and cast upon a
dung hill."14This quotation was correctly attributed to the Columbia (SC) Telescope in Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, Fifth Annual Report (Boston, 1837), 36.
The Augusta (Ga) Chronicle, of the same period, speaking of one who
had attempted thus to lecture, says:
“He should have been hanged up as high as Haman, to rot till the wind
whistled through his bones. The cry of the whole South should be death to
the Abolitionists, wherever found.”
The Lords of the Lash have often boasted of late that discussion has
convinced them that Slavery is right. That in this respect they are wiser
than Washington, who desired to see Slavery abolished, and would gladly
give his vote for such abolition; wiser than Jefferson, who said he trembled
for his country when he reflected that God was just, and that his justice
would not sleep forever;15Douglass paraphrases Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, 163. wiser than Franklin, who was President of the
first Abolition Society in America;16The nation's oldest antislavery society was founded in Philadelphia in 1775, but the Revolutionary War interrupted its activities. In 1787 the group reorganized itself as “The Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery, the Relief of free Negroes unlawfully held in bondage, and for Improving the Condition of the African Race" and elected Benjamin Franklin to be its president. Locke, Anti-Slavery in America, 97—98. wiser than Madison, who did not
wish to have it seen in the Constitution that there could be any such thing as
property in man; wiser than the Congress of 1807, which abolished the
Slave Trade,17In the years following the Revolution every state passed its own ban on the foreign slave trade, but when South Carolina rescinded its prohibition in 1803, interest was revived in national legislation to end the practice as of 1808, the earliest it could be prohibited according to Article 1. Section 9, of the Constitution. In his annual message of December 1806, President Thomas Jefferson suggested that Congress act to stop U.S. citizens from participating “in those violations of human rights which have been so long continued on the unoffending inhabitants of Africa" as soon as constitutionally permissible. Even though Congress, after considerable debate, forbade Americans to engage in the international slave trade after 31 December 1807, antislavery groups were disappointed with several provisions of the legislation. The punishment for slaving, five to ten years of imprisonment plus a fine, was criticized as much too lenient; also condemned was “forfeiture” and sale into slavery of all Africans in the custody of captured slavers. The latter abuse was ended in 1819 when a new law ordered the return to Africa of captives of slave traders. Donald L. Robinson, Slavery in the Structure of American Politics (New York, I971), 323-37, 343; Locke, Anti-Slavery in America, 149—56. and wiser than the men of 1787, who abolished Slavery in
all the Territory then belonging to the United States.18Douglass alludes to the passage of the Northwest Ordinance of I787.
They tell us that discussion has made them thus wise. Discussion
indeed! Discussion which only permits one side to be heard, and compels
the other to remain silent, would be likely to produce just such a result. The
slaveholder has spoken but the slave has remained dumb. On the side of the
oppressor is power, on the side of the slave weakness. The whole array of
Southern lawyers, priests, and politicians—the whole power of the South-
ern press, pulpit, and platform have for 30 years stifled the very groans of
the millions in bondage. Valuing itself at twenty hundred millions of
dollars—a mountain of gold—it has bribed and bought up all the subtle
machinery of religion, science, and law, in favor of Slavery. While de-
nouncing rails, tar and feathers, faggots and fire against any who should
dare call in question the accursed system of Slavery, and this they call
discussion. Thus the moral eyes of Southern society were put out. They
banished from among them every moral antidote for the dreadful evil of
Slavery and have chosen to walk blindfold[ed] in to the very jaws of death.
I confess that when I consider the common people of the South, es-
pecially helpless women and children, who are often startled at midnight,
and made to leave their beds and homes, half clad. to find their way to the
woods through darkness, rain, mud, and snow. I feel something like pity
for these people, while I feel a burning indignation, for those who have
blinded and deceived them. Under the whole heavens there never was a
people more completely given over to believe a lie that they might be
destroyed. They are suffering all the horrors of war at this moment because
[they were] deluded by their moral teachers, both at the North and at the
South. Look at it! If they went to the church where men profess to speak by
the authority of God, what did they hear on the subject of Slavery? Why,
this: That Jesus Christ and his Apostles, though they walked in the pres-
ence of Roman Slavery—which was far more severe than ours—nowhere
condemned the system; that the New Testament prescribed and enjoined
obedience from slaves to their masters; that even to catch and return
runaway slaves was in accordance with apostolic example, and that the
main feature of the Fugitive Slave bill was in harmony with Paul’s Epistle
to Philemon. ( Laughter.) They learned from their moral teachers that they
might whip, hold, buy, and sell men and women, innocently, for Slavery
was of Divine appointment, established by the law of Christ. Slaveholders
are the modern Abrahams, Isaacs and Jacobs in the Church of God. (Re—
newed laughter.)
Such was the teaching at the South. Was the case much better at the
North? You know and I know that even here. the black mantle of Slavery
was everywhere flaunted in our faces from Northern pulpits. If at any time
during the last thirty years preceding the firing upon Fort Sumter any
slaveholder had consulted the leading divines of the North as to the sin-
fulness of Slavery, he would have found that the teachings of the Northern
pulpit differed very little from that of the South. A few heterodox, and still
fewer orthodox ministers, filling humble pulpits and living upon small
salaries, have espoused the cause of the slave; but the ministers of high
standing—the $5,000 divines—were almost to a man on the side of Slav-
ery, and did their best to defend the system from the assaults of the Aboli-
tionists. They steadily denied the inherent sinfulness of Slavery and so far
from being rebuked as an offender, the slaveholder was received and
welcomed as a saint.
Every influential pulpit of Rochester, where 1 live, was open to
slaveholders so lately as two or three years ago. The old school General
Assembly met there—the city survived it—at that time. (Laughter and
applause.) The late Dr. Thornwall, a champion, alike of Secession and of
Slavery, was there.19When the Old School Presbyterian Church in the United States of America met in General Assembly in Rochester, New York, on 17—30 May 1860, one of the delegates was the Reverend James Henley Thornwell (1812—62) of South Carolina. Thornwell graduated from South Carolina College and spent most of his career there, first as a faculty member and eventually as president. In 1855 he became both professor of theology at the Presbyterian Theological Seminary in Columbia, South Carolina, and pastor of that city's Presbyterian Church. Thomwell achieved national prominence among Old School Presbyterians, but in his sermons and writings he championed southern rights and principles and in 1861 led in the establishment of a separate Old School Presbyterian Assembly for the Confederate states. Presbyterian Church of the United States, Minutes of the General Assembly, 1860, 9—58; Alfred Nevin. ed., Encyclopedia of the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America (Philadelphia, 1884), 941—42; NCAB, 11: 33-34 He was courted and welcomed by every prominent
pulpit of the city, while that faithful champion of the rights of human
nature, Dr. George B. Cheever, was coldly repulsed from all such pulpits.
What was true of Rochester three years ago, and true of the whole North,
would become true again if this war were settled on the basis of compro-
mise. Nay, I should expect that the Press would be fettered at the North
nearly as heavily as it is at the South. Slavery would be welcomed and
honored in Northern pulpits, with a servility more disgusting and shocking
than ever before.
Why do I make these remarks? I will tell you. Much as I value the
present apparent hostility to Slavery at the North, I plainly see that it is less
the outgrowth of high and intelligent moral conviction against Slavery. as
such, than because of the trouble its friends have brought upon the country.
I would have Slavery hated for that and more. A man that hates Slavery
only for what it does to the white man, stands ready to embrace it the
moment its injuries are confined to the black man, and he ceases to feel
those injuries in his own person. (Cheers) I confess, if I could possibly
doubt the salvation of this nation, it would not be because the traitors and
Rebels are strong, but because we are weak at this vital point. There is yet
among us a cowardly shrinking from a full and frank acknowledgment of
the manhood of the negro, and a whole-souled recognition of his power to
help in the great struggle through which we are passing. (Cheers)
But to proceed: The saying that the children of this world are in their
day and generation wiser than the children of light,20Douglass alludes to Luke 16: 8. is verified in the
history of the conflict between Slavery and Freedom. History will accord
to the Abolitionists a large measure of wisdom, and heroic courage and
fortitude in assailing Slavery in its strongholds of Church and State; but it
cannot award to them that prophetic vision that sees the end from the
beginning. It is fortunate, I think, that they did not see it—fortunate that
they walked by faith and not by sight.21Douglass paraphrases 2 Cor. 5: 7. Could they have foreseen their
country torn and rent by the giant footsteps of this terrible rebellion—could
they have seen a million of men, confronting each other, discussing the
question of Slavery with cannon—could they have seen the rivers red with
blood, and the fields whitened with human bones, they might have shrunk
back from the moral contest, and thus only have postponed this physical
contest to a future day, and upon a more dreadful scale than the one now
going on.
From the very first the enemies of Abolitionism comprehended one
feature in the nature of the contest between Freedom and Slavery. They
saw at least the evils attendant on that conflict. Merchants saw their trade
with the South embarrassed and ruined. Churches saw their denominations
divided. The old political parties saw their organizations broken up. States-
men saw the Union dissolved and terrible border wars inaugurated. Wor-
shiping at mammon’s altar themselves they knew the mighty hold which
mammon held upon its Southern worshipers. They said that the
slaveholders would strike down the Government before they would give up
Slavery. They predicted that the South would secede if we did not stop
talking and voting against Slavery. By their very predictions, they helped
on the fulfillment. The South was flattered and encouraged by what was
thus expected of her by leading men at the North. She doubtless expected
that those who said she would dissolve her connection with the Union
without once denouncing her doing so as a crime, recognized her right to
do so, and would rather think her wanting in spirit if she did not do so,
Foreseeing the evils thus predicted, these men cried with one accord:
“Give us the Union; give us Slavery and prosperity; give us Slavery and
peace; give us error, if Slavery be an error; and as for what you call truth
and human liberty, crucify them.”
The world has seen no greater example of patience and perseverance
than that exhibited by the Abolitionists in meeting the objections of their
opponents. Weapons of war they had cast from the battle. No Abolitionist
ever drew sword against Slavery until Slavery drew its exterminating
sword against Liberty on the soil of Kansas. It was only after he saw his
brave sons hunted like felons and shot down like wolves, that noble old
John Brown went to Harper’s Ferry.22Although only one of John Brown's sons, Frederick, was killed in Kansas, two others, Jason and John Brown, Jr., were arrested and imprisoned for their antislavery activities there. Oates, To Purge This Land, 143—52, 168—69, 173; Ohio Historical Society, Inventory and Calendar, John Brown, Jr. Papers, 1—2. (Cheers) Until this, Anti-Slavery
men, of all shades of opinion were eminently peaceful. The grand mistake
of the Abolitionists was in supposing the American people better than they
were. They did not see that an evil so gigantic as Slavery, so interwoven
with the social arrangements, manners, and morals of the country, could
not be removed without something like the social earthquake now upon us.
They ought to have known that the huge Leviathan would cause the deep to
boil—aye, to howl, and hiss, and foam in sevenfold agony.23Douglass paraphrases the description of the whale from Job 41: 1—34. Great how-
ever, as was our mistake, incomparably greater and vastly more harmful
was the mistake of those who flattered themselves and the nation that all
was peace and prosperity, and that the nation had nothing to fear from
anything but Abolitionists. They thought that this nation could go on year
after year and century after century, outraging and trampling upon the
sacred rights of human nature, and that it could still enjoy peace, and
prosperity. To them the world was without a moral Government and might
was right. The war now on our hands is sometimes described as a school for
the moral education of the nation. I like the designation. It certainly is a
school, and a very severe and costly one. But who will say that it will not be
worth all it costs if it shall correct our errors concerning Slavery and free us
from that barbarism. (Applause)
Slavery from the first has not only been our great national crime, but
our great national scandal and mistake. The first grand error of which this
war is likely to cure us is: That a nation can outlaw one part of its people
without endangering the rights and liberties of all the people. They will
learn that they cannot put a chain on the ankle of the bondmen without
finding the other end of it about their own necks. Hitherto the white laborer
has been deluded into the belief that to degrade the black laborer is to
elevate the white. We shall learn by-and-by that labor will always be
degraded where idleness is the badge of respectability. Whence came the
degrading phrases, fast growing popular before the war, “hireling labor,”
"greasy mechanics,” “mudsills of society.” The laborer should be
“owned by the capitalists. ’ ’—Poor “white trash’ ’—and a dozen others of
the same class: They come from Slavery. I think I never saw anywhere
such contempt for poor white people as in the South. (Loud cheers.) Gen.
Butler24Benjamin Franklin Butler. has only made a discovery which any man having two eyes could
not fail to make in the South, that the war of the Rebels—is a war of the rich
against the poor. Let Slavery go down with the war., and let labor cease to
be fettered, chained, flogged, and branded. Let it be paid honest wages for
honest work, and then we shall see as never before, the laborers in all
sections of this country rising to respectability and power. (Cheers.)
That this war is to abolish Slavery I have no manner of doubt. The
process may be long and tedious. but the event will come at last. It is
among the undoubted certainties of the future. (Cheering) It is objected to
the Proclamation of Freedom, that it only abolishes Slavery in the Rebel
States. To me it seems a blunder that Slavery was not declared abolished
everywhere in the Republic. Slavery anywhere endangers the National
cause, and should perish everywhere. (Loud applause.) But even in this
omission of the Proclamation the evil is more seeming than real. When
Virginia is a free State, Maryland cannot be a slave State. When Missouri
is a free State, Kentucky cannot be a slave State. (Cheers) Slavery must
stand or fall together. Strike it at either extreme—either on the head or at
the heel, and it dies. A brick knocked down at either end of the row brings
every brick in it to the ground. (Applause) You have heard the story of the
Irishman who paid the price of two spurs—but refused to carry away but
one; on the ground, as he said, that if he could make one side of his horse
go, he would risk the other. (Laughter and cheering.) So I say, if we can
strike down Slavery in the Rebel States, I will risk the downfall of Slavery
in the Border States. (Cheering)
It is again objected to this Proclamation that it is only an ink and paper
proclamation. I admit it. The objector might go a step further, and assert
that there was a time when this Proclamation was only a thought, a senti-
ment, an idea—a hope of some radical Abolitionist—for such it truly was.
But what of it? The world has never advanced a single inch in the right
direction, when the movement could not be traced to some such small
beginning. The bill abolishing Slavery, and giving freedom to eight hun-
dred thousand people in the West Indies, was a paper bill. The Reform bill,
that broke up the rotten borough system in England, was a paper bill. The
act of Catholic Emancipation was a paper act; and so was the bill repealing
the Corn Laws. Greater than all, our own Declaration of Independence was
at one time but ink and paper. (Cheering) The freedom of the American
colonies dates from no particular battle during the war. No man can tell
upon what particular day we won our national independence. But the birth
of our freedom is fixed on the day of the going forth of the Declaration of
Independence. In like manner aftercoming generations will celebrate the
first of January as the day which brought liberty and manhood to the
American slaves. (Loud cheers.) How shall this be done? I answer: That
the paper Proclamation must now be made iron, lead and fire, by the
prompt—employment of the negro's arm in this contest. (Great applause.) I
hold that the Proclamation, good as it is, will be worthless—a miserable
mockery—unless the nation shall so far conquer its prejudice as to wel-
come into the army full-grown black men to help fight the battles of the
Republic. (Renewed applause.)
I know it is said that the negroes won’t fight. But I distrust the accuser.
In one breath the Copperheads25During the Civil War, Republican politicians frequently charged that Democratic oppositionto many Union war policies was evidence of treasonous sympathy for the Confederate cause. Republicans styled their political Opponents “Copperheads” after a venomous snake that lies in ambush and strikes without warning. Recent scholarship generally dismisses the accusations of northern Democratic disloyalty as a product of overheated wartime partisan spirit. Mathews, Dictionary of Americanisms, 1: 392; Silbey, Respectable Minority, 166- 69, 243. tell you that the slaves won’t fight, and in
the next they tell you that the only effect of the Proclamation is to make the
slaves cut their masters’ throats (laughter) and stir up insurrections all over
the South. The same men tell you that the negroes are lazy and good for
nothing, and in the next breath they tell you that they will all come North
and take the labor away from the laboring white men here. (Laughter and
cheers.) In one breath they tell you that the negro can never learn the
military art, and in the next they tell you that there is danger that white men
may be outranked by colored men. (Continued laughter.) I may be pardoned
if I leave these objections to their own contradictions and absur-
dities. They are like the Kilkenny cats, and there is a fair probability of
their reaching the same result. (Great laughter.)
But we are asked why have the negroes remained silent spectators of
the dreadful struggle now going on? I am not annoyed by this question. The
course pursued by them is creditable to their wisdom. The negro has
proved that he is much like the white man. He will fight, but he must have a
reasonable prospect of whipping somebody. Up to the first day of last
month there was no earthly chance of success in a rising among the slaves.
Both the Union and the Confederate armies were in the field against the
negro. Madness itself could not counsel the slaves to rise in such circum-
stances. Their not doing so should be charged not to their cowardice, but to
their good sense.
But who are those who are now opposing the measure of putting arms
in the hands of colored men? Who. are those who are opposed to raising
colored troops? They are the men who would gladly disarm every white
soldier now fighting for their country, and hand the country over, bound
hand and foot, into the hands of Jefferson Davis. You know the men, and
ought to know how much weight should be given to the counsels of such
men. Would these men rather drown than be saved by a black man? Would
they prefer to see their dwellings burnt to ashes than to have the flames
extinguished by colored men? If they would not, then are they traitors in
disguise and very thin disguise at that, when they refuse to the country,
now in its peril, what they would gladly claim for themselves. The exhibit
their unmitigated hollowness by opposing the enrollment of colored
troops. (Cheers.)
Do you ask me whether black men will freely enlist in the service of the
Country? I tell you that that depends upon the white men of the country. The
Government must assure them of protection as soldiers, and give them a
fair chance of winning distinction and glory in common with other sol-
diers. (Cheers.) They must not be made the mere hewers of wood and
drawers of water for the army. When a man leaves home, family, and
security, to risk his limbs and life in the field of battle, for God’s sake let
him have all the honor which he may achieve, let his color be what it may.
If. by the fortunes of war he is flung into the hands of the Rebels, let him be
assured that the loyal Government will not desert him, but will hold the
Confederate Government strictly responsible, as much for a black as for a
white soldier. (Applause.) Give us fair play, and open here your recruiting
offices, and their doors shall be crowded with black recruits to fight the
battles of the country (Loud cheers.) Do your part, my white fellow-
countrymen, and we will do ours.
Oh! where’s the slave so lowly,
Condemned to chains unholy,
Who, could he burst his chains at fight,
Would pine beneath them
slowly?
The colored man only waits for honorable admission into the service of
the country. They know that who would be free, themselves must strike the
blow,26Lord Byron, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, Canto 11, Stanza 76. and they long for the opportunity to strike that blow. Thus far,
however, the colored men of the Free States, and for the most part, of the
Slave States, have had their military ardor chilled by the contempt with
which their offer to serve their country has been refused. We asked the
Governor of New York27Edwin Dennison Morgan (1811—83) was born in Massachusetts and educated in the common schools of Hartford, Connecticut. After an apprenticeship in a Hartford general store, he moved to New York City and became a prosperous import merchant. In 1850 Morgan was elected to the state senate, where he served until elected governor on the Republican ticket in 1858. Reelected in 1860, he oversaw the enlistment of 223,000 New York State men into the Union army during the Civil War's first two years. From 1863 to 1869 Morgan served in the U.S. Senate, where he sided with the conservative Republican factions on most Reconstruction questions. James A. Rawley, Edwin D. Morgan, 1811-1883: Merchant in Politics (New York, 1955); Benedict, Compromise of Principle, 164, 265, 298; ACAB, 4: 398; NCAB, 3: 51. if he would accept colored troops, and he said it
would be impossible for him to receive them. We asked Gov. Curtin28The son of a Bellefonte, Pennsylvania, iron manufacturer, Andrew Gregg Curtin (1817-94) became a successful lawyer in his hometown and was appointed secretary of the commonwealth and superintendent of public instruction in 1855 by the newly elected Whig govemor, James Pollock. In 1860 he outmaneuvered his archrival, Simon Cameron, to obtain the Republican gubernatorial nomination. As wartime governor Curtin devoted most of his energies to the enlistment, transportation, supply, and care of Pennsylvania troops. In September 1862 he hosted a conference of Northern governors at Altoona, Pennsylvania, that supported Lincoln's plan for an impending military draft and an emancipation proclamation. After the war Curtin lost an intraparty battle for a U.S. Senate seat to Cameron and settled for appointment as ambassador to Russia under the Grant administration. He left the Republican party to support Horace Greeley for president in 1872 and later served three terms in Congress as a Democrat. William B. Hesseltine, Lincoln and the War Governors (New York, 1948), 54—61, 184—85, 254-61; ACAB, 2: 34; NCAB, 24: 412—13. of
Pennsylvania, and he would not receive colored soldiers at any rate?29On 6 February 1863, the same date as this speech, Douglass asked Govemor Andrew Curtin allow the establishment of black regiments in Pennsylvania. Curtin refused Douglass's request. Quarles, Negro in the Civil War, 187. So
that our ardor was chilled. But I know, colored men now in the army
passing for white not much whiter than I, but by shaving their heads very
closely they manage to get in. I know one from my own town who has been
promoted recently. (Laughter and cheers.) If I could speak loud enough to
be heard by the Government at Washington I should say, have a care, lest
you let slip the last moment when your call for help can be answered. You
have wronged us long and wronged us greatly, but it is not yet too late to
retrieve the past. We still stand ready to serve you, and will do it with a
will, at the first sound of your war-trumpet. (Cheers.)
I know the colored men of the North; I know the colored men of the
South. They are ready to rally under the stars and stripes at the first tap of
the drum. Give them a chance; stop calling them “niggers,” and call them
soldiers. (Applause) Give them a chance to seek the bauble [bubble]
reputation at the cannon’s mouth.30As You Like It, act 2, sc. 7, lines 149-53. Stop telling them they can’t fight, and
tell them they can fight and shall fight, and they will fight, and fight with
vengeance. Give them a chance. The most delicate lady in the city of New
York can ride by the side of a black man, if he is there as a servant. Even the
most fastidious of our Generals can be waited on by colored men. Why
should they object to our fighting? We were with you on the banks of the
Mobile, good enough to fight with you under Gen. Jackson.31Andrew Jackson. Why not let
us fight by your side under Gen. Hooker?32Born in Hadley, Massachusetts, Joseph Hooker (1814-79) graduated from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point in 1837, saw service in the Mexican War, and, after resigning from the army in 1853, moved to California. Leaving a career as a farmer and surveyor, he rejoined the army with the outbreak of war in 1861. Hooker successfully directed a Union division in the Peninsula campaign and a corps in the battles of Antietam and Iiredericksburg before assuming command of the Army of the Potomac in January 1863. In June 1863, after a sound defeat at the Battle of Chancellorsville, Hooker was transferred south, where he performed capably as a corps commander in fighting around Chattanooga and Atlanta. After the war he remained in the army until he was forced to retire in 1868 owing to his paralysis. Boatner, Civil War Dictionary, 409-10; ACAB, 3 : 249—51; DAB, 9: 196—98. (Loud cheering.) We shall
have a chance yet. and I tell you to whom I am looking for this; I have great
faith, as I told you more than a year ago, in the virtue of the people of the
North; I have more in the persistent villainy of the South. (Laughter and
applause.) I tell you that under their tent we shall yet be able to accept the
aid of the colored man. Away with prejudice. away with folly, and in this
death struggle for liberty, country, and permanent security, let the black,
iron hand of the colored man fall heavily on the head of the slaveholding
traitors and rebels and lay them low. Give them a chance! Give them a
chance. I don’t say they are great fighters. I don't say they will fight better
than other men. All I say is, give them a chance. I feel that we are living in a
glorious time. I felt so on the first of January, and have been feeling so ever
since. I felt whiter, and I have combed my hair with less difficulty. (Cheers
and laughter.) You had a grand time here. and we had a grand time at
Boston, on the first of January.
We had two machines running—at Music Hall and Tremont Temple‘
more than three thousand at each.33Douglass describes the public meetings held in Boston on 1 January 1863 to celebrate Lincoln's formal issuance of the Emancipation Proclamation. At the Boston Music Hall, a host of New England luminaries, including Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, John Greenleaf Whittier, and Harriet Beecher Stowe, attended a special jubilee. The Philharmonic Orchestra played selections from Beethoven and Mendelssohn, and Ralph Waldo Emerson read “Boston Hymn," a poem he had written for the occasion. DM, 4: 796—97 (February 1863); Quarles, Negro in the Civil War, 170—71; Franklin, Emancipation Proclamation, 104-05. You want to know what the colored
people think. I will tell you how joyfully they received the Proclamation of
Abraham Lincoln. We were not all colored either; but we all seemed to be
about of one color that day. We met in good spirits at 10 o’clock expecting
before the adjournment to have the Proclamation. We had waited on each
speaker keeping our eye on the door. No Proclamation. The President said
we would meet again at two when he had no doubt we should have the
Proclamation. We met again but no Proclamation. We did not know
whether to shout or hold our peace but we adjourned again with the under-
standing that it was on the wires and we should certainly see it in the
evening. But no Proclamation came. We went on until I 1 o’clock and I
said, we won’t go home till morning. By and by Judge Russell34Thomas Russell. went to
one of the newspaper offices and obtained a slip containing the Proclama-
tion. I never saw enthusiasm before. I never saw joy before. Men, women,
young and old, were up; hats and bonnets were in the air, and we gave three
cheers for Abraham Lincoln and three cheers for almost everybody else.
Some prayed and some sang, and finally we adjourned from that place to
meet in the Rev. Mr. Grimes’ Church;35The Reverend Leonard A. Grimes was the minister of Twelfth Baptist Church, Boston. that good old soul (laughter) and
we continued greeting them till three o’clock. There was shouting and
singing. “Glory, Hallelujah,” “Old John Brown,” “Marching On,” and
“Blow Ye, the Trumpet Blow!”36When first published in 1861 by Oliver Ditson, the well-known Civil War ballad “John Brown’s Body" was given the title “Glory, Hallelujah." Although possibly the same tune, “Old John Brown" was named by Colonel Thomas Wentworth Higginson as a popular song in his black regiment in South Carolina. “March On" was a slave folk song that also became popular among black Union army troops. “Blow Ye, the Trumpet Blow," also known as “The Year of Jubilee," was another widely sung hymn at the time of emancipation. William Francis Allen, Charles Pickard Ware, and Lucy McKim Garrison, Slave Songs of the United States (1867; New York, 1951), 3; Miles Mark Fisher, Negro Slave Songs in the United States (New York, 1953), 118-19, 134, 158; Ewan, American Popular Songs, 204; Joshua Leavitt, Companion to the Christian Lyre (New York, 1833), 139—40.—till we got up such a state of enthusiasm
that almost anything seemed to be witty—and entirely appropriate to
the glorious occasion.
There was one black man who stood in a corner, and I thought I never
saw a blacker man and I think I never saw whiter teeth. Occasionally he
would bound up like a fish out of water, and as he was standing in a dark
place, you could see nothing going up but a little white streak. (Loud
laughter.) About the last he said he must speak, and I will make you his
speech. It was all in place. We were up to the point when everything was in
order. “Brethren.” said he, “I was born in North Carolina, where my
brother Douglass was born, thank God!” I didn’t happen to be born there,
but I could not for the life of me interrupt him. Said he, “I was born there,
and was born and held a slave there, thank God! (Laughter.) I grew up from
childhood to manhood there, thank God!” And the audience shouted. And
said he: “When I got to be grown up to man’s estate I wanted to marry a
wife. thank God!” (Laughter.) And said he: “I courted no less than sixteen
women, thank God!” (Great laughter.) And said he: “The woman I mar-
ried is here to—night, thank God!” We all rose up to see this little woman,
and she was told to get up. and we looked at her, and she was nothing
extraordinary (laughter); but still it was all in place. The feeling of the
whole of this black Congregation—for it was mainly black—was that they
were ready to offer their services at any moment this Government should
call for them. And I want to assure you, and the Government, and every-
body, that we are ready, and we only ask to be called into this service.
What a glorious day when Slavery shall be no more in this country, when
we have blotted out this system of wrong, and made this United States in
fact and in truth what it is in theory—The land of the Free and the Home of
the Brave.37Douglass quotes from the last line of the first stanza of Francis Scott Key’s “The Star-Spanglcd Banner." (Loud applause.)