FREDERICK DOUGLASS TO ROBERT HAMILTON¹At the time Douglass wrote this letter to the editor of the , the editor was probably Robert Hamilton (1819–70), but it is possible that the intended recipient might have been his brother Thomas Hamilton (1823–65), who had at various times been owner, publisher, and coeditor of the newspaper. Natives of New York City, the Hamilton brothers were the sons of William T. Hamilton (1773–1836), a mixed-race carpenter by trade who became a noted orator and abolitionist, and was rumored to be the illegitimate son of Alexander Hamilton. The , commonly referred to as the or the , was a New York City newspaper owned and managed from 1859 to 1865, with a short interruption in 1861, by Thomas and Robert Hamilton. The Hamilton brothers sought to produce a paper that would be the voice of the New York black community, but they hoped its influence would extend beyond the state as well. The four-page newspaper was produced and printed at 48 Beekman Street in downtown Manhattan and was distributed every Saturday. The newspaper’s motto, which appeared on the masthead, read, “Man must be free; if not within the law, why then, above the law.” Douglass’s close friend James McCune Smith was a financial backer as well as a regular contributor of articles to the . The paper was closed shortly after Thomas’s death from typhoid fever in early 1865. 1860 U.S. Census, New York, King’s County, 397–98; Emma J. Lapsansky-Werner and Margaret Hope Bacon, eds., (University Park, Pa., 2005), 150; Sterling,, 377; Debra Jackson, “ ‘A Cultural Stronghold’: The ‘Anglo African’ Newspaper and the Black Community of New York,” , 85:331–57 (Fall 2004); , 1:71, 2:44–45.

Rochester, N.Y. 27 July 1863.

MR. EDITOR :—

Let me say a word to Mr. Parker T. Smith,²Parker T. Smith, an abolitionist, journalist, and president of Philadelphia’s Banneker Institute, a black literary society and library, headed the Weekly Anglo-African’s Philadelphia Department and wrote many of its editorials. In the 25 July 1863 edition of the , Smith criticized prominent black leaders for failing to enlist in the Union army. He argued that their enlistment would encourage other black men to join. Parker’s main target, Frederick Douglass, was criticized for not enlisting when his own sons were members of the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts Infantry Regiment. Parker wrote, “No man’s sons can work out his political salvation . . . [I]f men will not enlist and fight themselves, they have no just cause to make heavy burdens and bind them on other men’s shoulders, when they will not do so much as touch them with one of their fingers.” New York Weekly Anglo-African, 25 July 1863; Yacovone, , 8. who has in the last number of your paper made me the subject of sundry querulous and—I fear, malicious remarks.—Let me tell the said Mr. Smith, if you please, that when he or his influential friend, of whom he speaks, shall have furnished any considerable evidence of his ability to fill my place at the North, he will have done something to convince me that I ought to assume the position he assigns me in the army at the South. I certainly have a pretty high sense of my importance, but Mr. Smith carries it a peg higher when he represents my not enlisting as being the cause of hesitation in his influential friend and others. According to him, there are numerous fighting men in Philadelphia, burning to go to battle, who are only kept back from deeds of valor, because I do not lead them. This is very strange. Whence came this general confidence in me, as a warrior? When have I been heard of as a military man? How happens it that among all the fighting material of Philadelphia, of which Mr. Smith speaks, not one man can be found, who could raise a company of these eager warriors? I suspect there is a cat in the meal.³This phrase is drawn from Aesop’s fable in which a cat hides in a bag of meal in order to catch mice. William Dwight Whitney, ed., , 10 vols. (New York, 1889–1895) 1:852. It is not because I don’t form a company, that these influential gentlemen don’t enlist. If the truth were known, there are other reasons, far more satisfactory, for their tardiness. If they really wish to go and don’t wish to hang round the corner of Lombard and 6th Streets,⁴This intersection was located in the Philadelphia neighborhood of Society Hill, which wascharacterized by socioeconomic and racial diversity in the first half of the nineteenth century. The neighborhood was home to a large population of free blacks, immigrants, and whites. By the mid-nineteenth century, the city had begun to expand westward, and Society Hill lost much of its diversity as neighborhoods became more segregated. According to one Philadelphia newspaper in 1858, the area south of Lombard Street had “long been noted as a neighborhood of villainy and crime,” a comment on the large foreign population there. This negative view of the local population was likely a by-product of xenophobia and racism. Douglass’s mention of Lombard and 6th Street may be in reference to a Parker T. Smith editorial in the (11 July 1863) in which he wrote, “Large posters were stuck in various parts of the city, calling the colored people together at Bethel A.M.E. church, South 6th st., above Lombard, and at the Union A.M.E. church, Coates st., below 5th.” Philadelphia , 7 August 1858; New York , 11 July 1863; Philadelphia Register of Historic Places, “Society Hill (and Pennsylvania Hospital of Washington Square West) Historic District: Nomination” (Philadelphia, 1999), 2–3. they would soon find their way into Camp William Penn.⁵Camp William Penn, the first training facility for Northern black soldiers in the Civil War, was located approximately eight miles north of Philadelphia in Cheltenham Township, Montgomery County. Established in the summer of 1863 by the self-funded Philadelphia Supervisory Committee for Colored Enlistments, the camp began receiving its first recruits—hailing from Delaware, New Jersey, and the commonwealth—on 23 June of that year. Under the command of Colonel Louis Wagner, a native of Germany, the initial volunteers formed the camp’s first two units: the Third and Sixth Regiments of U.S. Colored Troops. The facility ultimately trained nearly 11,000 soldiers and was honored with visits from such prominent abolitionists as Douglass, Harriet Tubman, and Lucretia Mott, whose residence in Roadside sat directly beside the camp. (Harrisburg, Pa., 1914), 32; James M. Paradis, (Shippensburg, Pa., 1998), 13; Donald Scott, Sr., (Charleston, S.C., 2008), 7–8; William Blair and William Pencak, (University Park, Pa., 2001), 145–46; Cornish, , 220, 248; Quarles, , 187. It is very safe in Mr. Smith to thrust my example between himself and the battlefield, for he knows very well that for the present, at least, the Government is not ready to grant me a captaincy.⁶After being promised the commission of adjutant assistant to General Lorenzo Thomas by the secretary of war, Edwin M. Stanton, Douglass immediately disbanded . In its final issue, 16 August 1863, Douglass proclaimed, “I am going South to assist Adjutant General Thomas, in the organization of colored troops, who shall win for the millions in bondage the inestimable blessings of liberty and country.” Although Douglass technically never received his officer’s commission, Charles W. Foster, a recruiter for the War Department, repeatedly urged Douglass to join Thomas in Vicksburg, Mississippi. Because of strict policies and general racial prejudice, only about one hundred African Americans were commissioned by the War Department over the course of the Civil War. Douglass was never one of those men. C. W. Foster to Douglass, 13, 21 August 1863, reel 1, frames 834–35, 842–43L, FD Papers, DLC; , 5: n.p. (August 1863); Cornish, , 214; Quarles, , 208. There is something cowardly therefore in the boast of the influential gentleman, that he is ready to go to war when he can get a Captain, which he knows it is impossible to get. For the present I must think that this whole thing is a miserable and contemptible excuse for cowardice. Mr. Smith in alluding to the fact that two of my sons are already in the army, flippantly remarks: “no man’s sons can work out his political salvation.”⁷New York , 25 July 1863. I shall not stop here to combat this very profound remark. I depend upon no man, father or son, to work out my political salvation, and I hope to aid in working out the political salvation of others as faithfully as my assailant. But while I depend on my own energies for the place I shall hold among my fellow-men, I recognize the fact, which every intelligent colored man must recognize, that the black troops now in the field, and others, now on their way, can evince no patriotism, exhibit no courage, display no gallantry, win no laurels, achieve no victories over the insolent slaveholding rebels of the South, which will not directly and powerfully
tend to the social, civil and political advancement of every colored man and woman in the country. If therefore I am proud to refer to my two sons, as giving all that men can give to a common cause, I do not think that any sneers at this weakness—if it be a weakness, should be flung from the pen of the black man, for whose civil and political liberty those young men willingly endure hardships, dangers and death. If Mr. Parker T. Smith can thus sneer, I can only say as John Randolph said of another recreant: “I envy neither the head nor the heart of that gentleman.”⁸In a speech in the House of Representatives on March 9, 1826, Edward Everett, a congressman from Massachusetts, proclaimed, “I cannot admit, that, while it [slavery] subsists, and where it subsists, its duties are not pre-supposed and sanctioned by religion.” The religious justification of slavery was not yet a mainstream idea, and fellow congressmen rebuked Everett’s remarks. One such person, John Randolph, a congressman from Virginia and a wealthy slave owner, responded, “Sir, I envy neither the head nor the heart of that man, from the North, who rises here to defend slavery on principle.” Horace Greeley, , 1860–’64, 2 vols. (Hartford, Conn., 1864), 1:109.