FREDERICK DOUGLASS TO WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON

Rochester, N.Y. 17 Sept[ember] 1864.

WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON, ESQ.:

DEAR SIR,—

You were pleased to remark in the last number of the , (heading it with “Frederick Douglass on President Lincoln,”) that the secessionist newspapers in Great Britain are publishing with exultation a letter recently addressed by Mr. Douglass to an English correspondent;¹In its 16 September 1864 issue, the Liberator reprinted a portion of a letter that Douglass sent to an unknown English correspondent, suspected to be Mary Browne Carpenter. In that letter, Douglass criticizes the Lincoln administration’s treatment of blacks, attacking the government for the unequal treatment of black soldiers as well as the refusal to retaliate against Rebel prisoners when Confederate armies massacred black soldiers unlawfully. Furthermore, he criticized Lincoln for not fully supporting black suffrage, saying, “The negro is deemed good enough to fight for the Government, but not good enough to vote or enjoy the right to vote in the Government.” The claimed that pro-Confederate newspapers in Great Britain were publishing Douglass’s letter “with exultation.” The letter in question is published in this volume, and although Douglass claims that he wrote the letter three months earlier, the exact date is unknown. ., 16 September 1864. and you further favor your readers with an extract from the same letter, whichcriticises in plain terms the policy of the present Administration towards the colored people of the country.

I am sure you will allow me space in the columns of the , (not to qualify, not to take back any charge, statement, or argument contained in that letter, not even to find fault with its publication here or elsewhere,—though it was flung off in haste, and was not written for publication, but for the eyes of the esteemed friend to whom it was addressed,) to remove an inference respecting my present political course, which may possibly and will probably be drawn from the extract in question.

In the first place, it is proper to state that that letter was not written recently as you mistakenly allege, but three months ago, and was in no wise intended to be used against the present Administration in the canvass and issues as now made up between the great parties, and especially by the disloyal and slavery perpetuating nominations placed before the country by the Chicago convention.²The Democratic National Convention commenced on 29 August 1864 in Chicago and lasted three days. As in 1860, the Democratic party was highly factionalized. During the convention, the party was split between Peace Democrats, more commonly known as Copperheads, and War Democrats. Although the peace wing of the party, under the leadership of the Copperhead Clement Vallandigham of Ohio, was in the minority, its influence was greatly felt at the convention. Vallandigham, who had been exiled to the Confederacy in 1863 as a result of his Southern sympathies and public anti-Lincoln statements, was selected to serve on the seven-person platform committee. During the afternoon session on 30 August, the committee submitted the proposed party platform, and its six planks were decidedly a product of Vallandigham and the Copperhead faction. It declared that the Democratic party would adhere to the Union with “unswerving fidelity”; that the war was a failure and that immediate efforts should be made for a cessation of hostilities; that federal interference in state elections must be resisted; that the rights of the Union, state, and individual must be preserved; that the administration’s disregard of Union soldiers in Southern prisons should be denounced; and that the nation’s soldiers and sailors had the party’s full sympathy. The party assured these men that if it were successful in the election, they would receive the care, protection, and regard they deserved. Although opposed to Vallandigham’s “war-failure” resolution, War Democrats deemed nominating General George B. McClellan for president more important, so the platform was adopted without debate. McClellan was chosen to head the ticket, with the Copperhead George H. Pendleton from Ohio as his running mate. Republicans were outraged at the Democratic platform, and many labeled it disloyal for its condemnation of Lincoln’s administration and for the claim that the war was a failure. One Philadelphia paper commented on the convention by saying it was made up of Confederate sympathizers and that “no word of condemnation of the rebels was there uttered.” Philadelphia , 6 September1864; (Chicago, 1864), 27, 43; Jennifer L. Weber, (Oxford, Eng., 2006), 168-71; Stephen W. Sears, (New York, 1988), 372-74; Waugh, , 283, 285-86. Since the date of those nominations, we are met by a new state of facts, and new considerations have arisen to guide and control the political action of all those who are animated by a sincere desire to see justice, liberty, and peace permanently established in this rebellion and slavery cursed land. While there was, or seemed to be, the slightest possibility of securing the nomination and election of a man to the presidency of more decided anti slavery convictions and a firmer faith in the immediate necessity and practicability of justice and equality for all men, than have been exhibited in the policy of the present Administration, I, like many other radical men, freely criticised, in private and in public, the actions and the utterances of Mr. Lincoln, and withheld from him my support.³Throughout early 1864, Douglass criticized Lincoln and his administration. His disapproval stemmed mainly from the president’s early outline for a Reconstruction plan in December 1863. While Lincoln vowed to make emancipation permanent, he did not address the issue of racial equality. Douglass and other abolitionists wanted Reconstruction efforts to include the abolition of slavery as well as black enfranchisement. He criticized the administration’s failure to grant blacks suffrage in occupied Southern states and continued to press the issue of equal pay for black soldiers. Douglass disapproved of Lincoln’s refusal to sign the Wade-Davis bill, a radical proposal for Reconstruction, and denounced the president’s alternative Ten Percent Plan. Douglass also offered a new perspective on the Emancipation Proclamation, claiming that while it was a step in the right direction, “‘it settles nothing.” He charged Lincoln with showing “moral indifference” to abolition and claimed that through the progress of the war, the government, too preoccupied with saving the Union, had not accepted its true mission: freeing the slaves. ser. 1, 4:12-13, 25-30; Oakes, 222-24; Blight, 172-85. That possibility is now no longer conceivable; it is now plain that this country is to be governed or misgoverned during the next four years, either by the Republican party represented in the person of Abraham Lincoln, or by the (miscalled) Democratic party, represented by George B. McClellan.⁴George Brinton McClellan (1826-85) was born in Philadelphia and graduated from the U.S. Military Academy in 1846. He fought in the Mexican War, studied European military systems while serving on a commission that toured Europe and the Crimea, and was an officer of the Illinois Central Railroad before being placed in command of the Department of the Ohio in May 1861. He commanded the Army of the Potomac from July 1861 until November 1862, when an unsuccessful attempt to march on Richmond and his reluctance to pursue Lee’s army across the Potomac after the Battle of Antietam led to his replacement by Ambrose E. Burnside. Nominated as the Democratic candidate for the presidency in 1864, McClellan later was appointed chief engineer of the New York City Department of Docks (1870-72). He served as governor of New Jersey from 1878 to 1881. H[amilton] J. Eckenrode and Bryan Conrad, (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1941); Warren W. Hassler, Jr., (Baton Rouge, La., 1957); , 4:79-84; , 11:581-85. With this alternative clearly before us, all hesitation ought to cease, and every man who wishes well to the slave and to the country should at once rally with all the warmth and earnestness of his nature to the support of Abraham Lincoln and Andrew Johnson,⁵Andrew Johnson (1808-75) assumed the presidency on 15 April 1865, following the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. Born in Raleigh, North Carolina, the self-educated Johnson served in the Tennessee legislature (1834-37, 1839-43) before being elected a Democratic congressman (1843-53), governor (1853-57), and U.S. senator (1857-62). In 1862, Lincoln appointed Johnson, a Unionist, to be the military governor of Tennessee, and two years later Johnson was elected as Lincoln’s vice president. Radical Republicans opposed Johnson’s Reconstruction policies, and in 1867, after the president had attempted to oust Edwin M. Stanton as secretary of war in defiance of the Tenure of Office Act, they succeeded in impeaching him. At the Senate trial in 1868, Johnson was saved from conviction by one vote. After his presidential term, Johnson returned to Tennessee, which elected him to the U.S. Senate in 1874. Robert W. Winston, (New York, 1928); James E. Sefton, (Boston, 1980). and to the utter defeat and political annihilation of McClellan and Pendleton;⁶Born in Cincinnati, Ohio, George Hunt Pendleton (1825-89) was a congressman, senator, and minister to Germany. He was the eldest child of Nathaniel Greene Pendleton, a lawyer and Whig congressman, and Jane Frances Hunt Pendleton. He attended local schools until he went abroad in 1844, traveling around Europe and briefly attending the University of Heidelberg. Upon returning to the United States in 1846, he married Alicia Lloyd Nevins Key, the daughter of Francis Scott Key and niece of Roger B. Taney. Pendleton studied law in Cincinnati and was admitted to the bar in 1847. He practiced with George E. Pugh until he was elected to the state senate as a Democrat in 1853. He won a seat in Congress in 1856 and served until March 1865. He supported Stephen A. Douglas in the fight over Kansas’s status as a free or slave state, and in Douglas’s unsuccessful 1860 campaign for the presidency. During the Civil War, Pendleton was a vocal Peace Democrat. Because he was a leading opponent of Lincoln and an advocate for an immediate end to the war, “Gentleman George” was nominated for vice president on the Democratic ticket with General George B. McClellan in 1864. Although he retired from Congress in 1865, Pendleton continued his political career and ran for governor of Ohio in 1869. After his defeat by the Republican Rutherford B. Hayes, he was elected president of the Kentucky Central Railroad. In 1878, Pendleton was elected to the Senate and served until 1885, when President Cleveland appointed him minister to Germany, where he served until his death. , 14: 419-20, , 17: 279-81. for the election of the latter, with their known antecedents, declared sentiments, and the policy avowed in the Chicago platform, would be the heaviest calamity of all these years of war and blood, since it would upon the instant sacrifice and wantonly cast away everything valuable, purchased so dearly by the precious blood of our brave sons and brothers on the battle-field for the perfect liberty and permanent peace of a common country.

Let me say one other word. I would never give intentionally the slightest joy to the enemies of human liberty. My rule is to do that least that they like most, and that most that they like least. But nothing strange has happened to me in the said exultation over my words by the secessionist newspapers in Great Britain or elsewhere. The common example of those who do not go at all, playing off those who go farthest against those who go, but do not go fast and far enough, is but repeated in this exultation; and if I mistake not, in other days, there were often utterances of the itself, both on the eve and in the middle of Presidential campaigns, which caused even greater exultation among the known enemies of liberty against timid, short-sighted and trimming anti-slavery men in the high places of the country, than anything I ever wrote concerning Mr. Lincoln and his Administration could produce.

Yours for freedom and the equal rights of all men,

FREDERICK DOUGLASS.

PLSr: ., 23 September 1864. Other text in HLSr, General Correspondence File, reel 2, frames 59-60, 61, FD Papers, DLC.