The Assassination and Its Lessons: An Address Delivered in Washington, D.C., on February 13, 1866
THE ASSASSINATION AND ITS LESSONS: AN ADDRESS
DELIVERED IN WASHINGTON, D.C., ON 13 FEBRUARY 1866
Washington Daily Morning Chronicle, 14 February 1866. Another text in Washington
Evening Star, 15 February 1866.
An “immense and highly intelligent audience” of both blacks and whites and
including members of both houses of Congress gathered at First Presbyterian
Church in Washington, D.C., on the evening of 13 February 1866 to hear
Douglass deliver a lecture for the benefit of the National Home Association
for Colored Orphans. Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase presided. After a scrip-
ture reading by the Reverend Byron Sunderland, pastor of the church, and a
prayer by the Reverend Bernard Nadal, Chase introduced Douglass as “one of
the first orators, and foremost of American citizens.” Congressman William
D. Kelly spoke briefly at the end of the main address. Douglass’s speech was a
variation of a text on the meaning of Lincoln’s assassination that he delivered
numerous times in late 1865 and early 1866. The circumstances surrounding
this delivery were particularly controversial and received extensive press
coverage. Originally approving Douglass’s use of their building, the church’s
trustees voted to rescind permission after Douglass’s much publicized par-
ticipation as a member of the black delegation that on 7 February met with and
then openly criticized President Johnson. On 13 February, the trustees, dea-
cons, and temporal committee of the church publicly protested Douglass’s
scheduled appearance that evening, making it an issue in a long-standing
factional dispute within the congregation. The dissenters blamed Sunderland,
a “new-light sensationalist,” for allowing the church to be occupied “by a
promiscuous gathering of white and colored persons to listen to a lecture . . .
on a subject not religious in its character, but calculated to destroy the harmo-
ny of the church and to bring it into great disrepute; the lecture . . . being in
reality to enable certain political parties to promulgate their peculiar doctrine
in opposition to the President of the United States and a large majority of the
American people." Although the meeting proceeded as planned, the New
York Tribune reported that “some miscreant among the opposition had sprin-
kled the aisles with capsicum which caused much suffering and constant
coughing.” In the public debate that followed Douglass's appearance, the
“airing of dirty linen” at First Presbyterian Church received more attention
than the speaker’s politics. The Evening Star supported the dissidents, while
the Daily Morning Chronicle chastised the trustees for their “un-Christian
spirit” and called for a “revival” to relieve the church’s “heartlessness.”
Sunderland, several times chaplain of the U.S. Senate, survived the incident
and retired as pastor emeritus in 1898. In other versions of this speech Doug-
lass criticized Johnson more extensively and severely. See Appendix A, text
2, for précis of alternate texts. Washington Evening Star, 13, 14, 16, 17, 19
February 1866; Washington Daily Morning Chronicle, 15, 16 February 1866;
Washington National Intelligencer, 14 February 1866; New York Tribune, 14
February 1866; Boston Commonwealth, 17 February 1866; ChR, 17 February
1866; NASS, 17 February 1866; NCAB, 10: 71.
Mr. Douglass stepped forward, and was received with enthusiastic demon-
strations of applause. He spoke substantially as follows:
He expressed his sincere thanks, first to Chief Justice Chase,1Salmon P. Chase. for the
kind and complimentary introduction he had been pleased to give him to
this refined and intellectual audience. He was here to speak about the
assassination and its lessons, and desired to declare at the outset that he did
not wish to be understood to assume the office of teacher, as might be
inferred from the title of his lecture. To those who knew him he need not
disclaim this; they knew well the distance to be travelled from the corn-
field to Dr. Sunderland’s2Douglass alludes to Byron Sunderland (1819-1901), the pastor of the First Presbyterian Church of Washington, D.C., from 1853 until his death. Born in Shoreham, Vermont, Sunderland graduated from Middlebury College in 1838. After attending Union Theological Seminary in New York City, he filled the pulpit of Presbyterian churches in Batavia and Syracuse, New York, before his call to the prestigious Washington congregation. Sunderland twice served as chaplain of the U.S. Senate (1861-64, 1873-79) and as president of Howard University from August 1867 to April 1869. Rayford W. Logan, Howard University: The First Hundred Years, 1867-1967 (New York, 1969), 58-59; NCAB, 10: 71. pulpit.
Mankind were indebted for the progress they have made in civilization
to two kinds of teachers—great men and great events. There were some
minds able to discover in the most occult beginnings a grand result, but
most men were taught by events. From them are learned those principles
without which no nation can be permanently prosperous or great. The
masses are always engaged chiefly in the struggle for existence, and have
little time to give to theories. A few can comprehend a rule and the reasons
therefor, but the many require illustrations before they can be instructed.
Long before our land was rent with civil war, and in the face of sixty years
of unbroken prosperity, a few good and clear-minded men, ranging them-
selves beside the down-trodden and oppressed, and looking up from that
lowly position to the source of eternal justice, foresaw and warned us of all
the evils that came upon us; but they were unheeded. The tears of the slave
mother who saw her child placed upon the auction-block anointed the eyes
of the few, and they saw and warned us that there must come a day of
retribution; but nothing short of the thunders of Sumter could open the eyes
of the masses to the dangers of fostering a privileged class in a republic.
The past year has witnessed two great events. The first was the down-
fall of the rebellion. Unlike most rebellions, this was undertaken not to
assert any great right, or to redress any great wrong, but to maintain the
ascendency of a privileged class, and to hold a race in perpetual bondage.
When this rebellion fell, it was fondly hoped that the South would be
instructed by the war, and, that with the death of slavery, would be settled
all the questions pertaining thereto—that they would be settled forever,
because settled in accordance with the principles of eternal justice.
The other event was something unprecedented in our history; it was the
inauguration of a new crime—a stranger to our latitude. We had heard of it
among the monarchs of Europe, where men were goaded to desperation by
tyranny, but had never dreamed that in this land of free ballots, a crime so
monstrous as the assassination of our Chief Magistrate could be possible.
But we were mistaken. We had a friend among us whose presence had not
been taken into account.
A new year had lately dawned upon us. We had hoped much upon it,
but there was reason for grave apprehension. There was reason to fear that
it might witness something worse than even assassination, and this crime
which we had cause to dread was nothing less than the abandonment of all
the advantages won by the war—the freeing of the American bondman.
Oh! when will the American people learn rightly the lessons of their own
history? Many shocks have fallen upon them, chief among which was the
assassination. Had the question of settling the status of the negro been
submitted to them on the morning after that event, there is no doubt as to
what they would have done. They would have put away from among them
every vestige of slavery.
It was not necessary that he should call attention to the effect of that
atrocious crime; the recollection of it was fresh in every mind. It was as if
some strong convulsion of nature had occurred. Had a city been swallowed
up by an earthquake, had the grave opened and the sheeted dead walked
forth in our streets, it could not have produced a more profound sensation
than did this startling event. The calamity was so sudden, and so out of joint
with the sense of security prevailing among us, that few of us could believe
the dreadful news to be true. As at no time before, the loyal people were
rejoicing in victory: Richmond had fallen; Lee, the patrician, commanding
an army composed of the elite of the South, had surrendered to Grant, the
plebeian;3Robert E. Lee and Ulysses S. Grant. Wilmington and Mobile were in our hands;4A combined effort of Federal land and sea forces commenced a two-pronged campaign for Wilmington, North Carolina, on 18 February 1865. As the Union troops approached, the Confederates, under the command of General Braxton Bragg, began destroying the supplies and equipment they would be forced to leave behind. On 22 February, Wilmington, the Confederacy’s last major port, fell without opposition. On 9 April 1865, the same day Lee surrendered to Grant at Appomattox Court House, General E. R. S. Canby’s army launched an attack on Mobile, Alabama, which fell on 12 April 1865 following its evacuation by the Confederates on the previous night. Long, Civil War Day by Day, 636-42, 670-73; Rowena Reed, Combined Operations in the Civil War (Annapolis, 1978), 312-84. South Carolina had
received from Sherman the chastisement she merited,5On 1 February 1865 the Union army commanded by William Tecumseh Sherman began its campaign in South Carolina, which proved even more destructive than its earlier march through Georgia. Columbia fell on 17 February, and culpability for a massive conflagration in the city that evening was immediately attributed either to Sherman's troops or to jubilant and intoxicated blacks and released Union prisoners. Although Sherman denied responsibility for the blaze-accusing Confederate cavalry units of setting fire to cotton bales before retreating-he added to the toll by destroying all buildings that could be of use to the enemy's war efforts. On 18 February Charleston surrendered to the Union army. During the next three weeks Sherman’s troops marched north across South Carolina, destroying railroad depots and military stores and supply houses. John G. Barrett, Sherman's March through the Carolinas (Chapel Hill, 1956), 44-116; ACAB, 5: 502-08; DAB, 17: 93-97. and in Charleston,
the cradle of secession, loyal black troops had marched through the streets
to the tune of “Old John Brown.”
The people were already beginning to manifest a desire to conciliate,
and that maudlin magnanimity that is now our greatest danger. It was
becoming fashionable to speak of rebel generals in terms of the highest
respect, and men were almost as thankful to Lee for surrender as to Grant
for making him surrender. But what did this leniency avail? Was the iron
heart of slavery softened by it? No; nor ever will be. Nothing will ever
soften it save the military power of the United States. For it seized that
moment when there was nothing to be gained, and when we of the North
were meditating mercy, to deal upon the nation’s head its heaviest blow, by
murdering a man the most beloved the nation has ever known.
He was not here to deliver a lecture on the character of Mr. Lincoln. On
this there is little left to be said, especially after the brilliant oration of
yesterday;6An allusion to an address delivered by Massachusetts politician, statesman, and intellectual George Bancroft (1800-91) in the chamber of the House of Representatives on the anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s birthday, the day before Douglass’s speech. Washington Evening Star, 12 February 1866; Lilian Handlin, George Bancroft: The Intellectual as Democrat (New York, 1984). and yet there is a charm in it which makes it always an interest-
ing subject to an American audience. When our great military Chieftains
are forgotten, and the war itself shall seem a mere speck in the distance,
Abraham Lincoln, like dear old John Brown, will still find eloquent
tongues to speak of his name. The difficulties that he met on the threshold
of his power, the conscientious earnestness and energy with which he
grappled them, the singular purity of his life, and the tragic manner of his
death will ever be fertile themes for the historian. One peculiarity endeared
him, and ever must endear him to all who have struggled up from a low to a
high position. He was a self-made man, a rail-splitter, the captain of a
flatboat;7In 1830, while living in New Salem, lllinois, Lincoln and John Hanks split three thousand rails for the county sheriff’s fence and then hired out to split a thousand more rails for other neighbors. Thirty years later Hanks recalled these events to Republican party officials, who, in attempting to emphasize Lincoln's humble origins, successfully designated him the “Rail-Splitter" candidate for the 1860 presidential election. The nomenclature was so favorably received that it remained a vital part of Lincolniana. In 1831 Lincoln was hired by Denton Offutt to help navigate a flatboat containing produce from Beardstown, Illinois, to New Orleans. Offutt, impressed with Lincoln's capabilities, hired Lincoln to operate his small mill and store in New Salem. Neely, Abraham Lincoln Encyclopedia, 226-27, 254; Thomas, Abraham Lincoln, 19-21 , 23-24. he took hold of life in the rough of it. He travelled far, but he
made the road in which he advanced; he climbed high, but he made the
ladder on which he ascended. This will ever make the name of Abraham
Lincoln dear to all the toilers of our land. All know him well—know of his
independence, his amiable temper, his devotion to his country, his tem-
perance, his vigilance, his ability to bring together extremes and opposites
in the cause of the nation.
But why take this theme now, it may be asked. Because he would
underscore the assassination, and warn the American people to have a care
that, in the process of reconstruction, they do not leave in the soil some root
or fibre out of which may spring other rebellions and other assassinations.
The speaker said he was indebted to our enemies for his text, as the
friends of freedom had been indebted to them for many steps in our pro-
gress. The annexation of Texas and the fugitive slave law had added to the
ranks of the abolitionists. The repeal of the Missouri Compromise and the
invasion of Kansas by border ruffians only roused in the loyal masses the
determination to make Kansas a free State. And had Abraham Lincoln
lived to the old age which his strong constitution and his temperate habits
promised him, we should have followed him to his grave with nothing like
the emotion we felt at his death. Dying as he did, his name becomes a text
from which to show that the tree on which grew such fruit must not merely
be cut down, but taken up by the roots,8Douglass perhaps makes reference to Matt. 3: 10: “And now also the axe is laid unto the root oftrees: therefore every tree which bringeth not forth good fruit is hewn down, and cast into the fire." and that no vestige of the slave
code must be left.
It was the speaker’s exceeding great privilege to know Abraham Lin-
coln; to get near to him and from his conversations with him, he believed
that had Mr. Lincoln been living to-day, he would have stood with those
who stand foremost, and gone with those who go farthest, in the cause of
equal and universal suffrage.
Perhaps, said the speaker. you would like to know how I came to visit
Mr. Lincoln. He invited me.9Douglass may be recalling his second White House meeting with Lincoln on 19 August 1864, When the president summoned him to discuss the possible fate of blacks still enslaved in the Confederacy. Lincoln feared that his Emancipation Proclamation would be rendered ineffective by a premature end to the war and wondered aloud to Douglass if the national govemment might not sanction an unofficial Underground Railroad by encouraging slaves to escape and then assisting them to freedom behind Union lines. Douglass, who would have been the most likely candidate to serve as general agent for such an endeavor, listened with “deepest interest and profoundest satisfaction." He later wrote that “what [Lincoln] said on this day showed a deeper moral conviction against slavery than I had ever seen before in anything spoken or written by him.” Douglass, Life and Times, 393-96; Quarles, Lincoln and the Negro, 215-16. It was a significant fact both for the men and
the times. First, it showed that he had moral courage; that he remembered
he was a man as well as President; and if there is one thing to-night that
impresses me more than another, it is that we have presiding over this
meeting one who remembers that he is a man and a Christian, notwith-
standing the ermine. It required moral courage to open this church to-night
for a meeting of this character. But let me say that I remember a time when
abolitionism could ride in an omnibus. He said he had known it in its
infancy and in its childhood, and to-day he saw it a giant, and woe betide
those who stand in its pathway, for they must fall. Some men had physical
courage, and would look down the throat of a cannon, but could not
encounter a prejudice that required moral courage. This courage Mr. Lincoln
had; and not only did he invite a black man to his house, but also
invited him to the Soldiers’ Home to take tea with him.10Created in 1851 as a shelter for invalid and disabled soldiers, the Soldier's Home in Washington, D.C., expanded its size and functions during the Civil War, becoming the headquarters for the Special Relief Services in the capital. In addition to providing food, lodging, shelter, and medical care for soldiers, it assumed administrative responsibilities on behalf of its residents. Whenever possible, President Lincoln went there to visit with the soldiers. Although Douglass does not specify the date, he recalls in his autobiography that Lincoln once invited him for tea at the Soldier's Home. Because he had a speaking engagement that evening Douglass declined the invitation, a decision he later regretted. Douglass, Life and Times, 396; Charles J. Stillé, History of the United States Sanitary Commission, Being the General Report of Its Work During the War of the Rebellion (Philadelphia, 1866), 291-95; Leech, Reveille in Washington, 14, 214; Wilhelmus Bogart Bryan, A History of the National Capital from Its Foundation through the Period of the Adoption of the Organic Act, 2 vols. (New York, 191416), 2: 337.
The speaker had observed, in his intercourse with men, that the higher
the sphere in which he moved, the less prejudice did he find. Prejudice
flourished most vigorously among those who had the least to boast of in the
form of intellectual acquirements. He here related an incident that occurred
to him in a train between Baltimore and Washington. He was requested to
leave the car in which he had taken a seat, and at the same moment he saw a
lady enter with a dog in her arms. He looked forward to a time when a black
man might go where a dog could be permitted.
But this invitation implied more than moral courage and freedom from
prejudice. It showed that Mr. Lincoln comprehended the situation, and saw
what was coming. He was a tall man, morally as well as physically, and
great moral truths shed their lustre on his brow long before they reached the
dwellers in valleys or delvers in copper mines. He had before said that had
Mr. Lincoln been living to-day, he would have stood with those who stood
foremost, and gone with those who went farthest. He said this because he
knew him to be a progressive man—one who did not begin as a Moses and
end as a Pharaoh. He learned wisdom from war, and he would have learned
it from peace. He had during his life expressed the opinion that two classes
of colored men should be enfranchised—those who had fought in our
armies, and those who were educated;11Though Lincoln had great sympathy for the disenfranchised, he generally accepted the premise that the states should determine their own voting requirements. On 13 March 1864, however, shortly before Louisiana was to hold a convention to draft a new constitution, Lincoln suggested to Michael Hahn, the newly elected governor, “for your private consideration, whether some of the colored people may not be let in-as, for instance, the very intelligent, and especially those who have fought gallantly in our ranks. They would probably help . . . to keep the jewel of liberty within the family of freedom." Basler, Collected Works of Lincoln, 7: 243; Quarles, Lincoln and the Negro, 229. and at the same time he desired to
see the means provided whereby all could receive the education necessary
to fit them for this privilege.
He had said this event was necessary, and he charged it home on
slavery. It was true that it had been disclaimed on the part of the South.
Mason,12James Murray Mason. the rebel emissary in England, had hastened to tell us that she
was not responsible; yet the shadow does not cling closer to the object by
which it is cast than does this crime to slavery. For thirty years the language
of slavery has been death to any one who ventured to oppose it; besides,
this crime accords with the whole catalogue of the barbarities of the war,
which extended even to the going down into their bloody graves ofsons and
brothers, to steal their skulls for drinking cups and their bones for trinkets.
Where will you find anything like it? It accords well with the throwing off
the railroad track of trains bearing women and children and other non—
combatants, the firing of hotels in the hearts of populous cities,13In late November 1864, Confederate agents who had been thwaned in their plans to disrupt the election in New York decided to set fire to key buildings in the city. Encouragement for such actions appeared in the Southem press, the Richmond Whig exhorting sympathizers to “substitute the torch for the sword" and to “burn one of the chief cities of the enemy and let its fate hang over the others as a warning of what may be done, and what will be done to them, if the present system of war on the part of the enemy is continued. . . . New York is worth twenty Richmonds." Spurred by such rhetoric, Confederate agents John W. Headley and Robert Cobb Kennedy received permission from their superior, Jacob Thompson, to use “Greek Fire," an incendiary chemical that would burst into flames upon impact, on the leading hotels of New York City. Although accounts vary, on 25 November 1864, Kennedy, Headley, and their accomplices rented rooms and set fires in anywhere from thirteen to nineteen hotels around the city as well as on river barges and in Phineas T. Barnum's American Museum. Despite panic, there were no injuries and material damage was limited. Headley and Kennedy escaped to Canada, but when the latter attempted to return to the Confederacy, Federal authorities captured and tried him for espionage, guerrilla warfare, and arson. He was executed on 25 March 1865, the only conspirator so punished. Richmond (Va) Whig, 15 October 1864; New York Times, 26, 27, 28, 29 November 1864, 5, 28 February, 14, 21, 26 March 1865; John W. Headley, Confederate Operations in Canada and New York(New York, 1906), 271-331; Kinchen, Confederate Operations in Canada and the North, 164-74; Benn Pitman, comp, The Assassination of President Lincoln and the Trial of the Conspirators (New York, 1865), 53-54. the
poisoning of springs, the attempt to spread infection,14Douglass refers to the alleged Confederate plot to introduce yellow fever into Northern cities by Luke Pryor Blackburn (1816-87), a physician and future governor of Kentucky whom Southern authorities had sent to Canada to procure medical supplies. In the spring of 1864 Canada’s governorgeneral requested that Blackburn, who had helped contain epidemics in Mississippi in the 1840s and 1850s, go to Bermuda to assist local doctors faced with an outbreak of yellow fever. When Blackburn returned in mid-July—and again after a similar trip in late summer-reports surfaced that he had brought with him trunks of contaminated linen and bedclothing to be sold to used-clothing merchants in populous Northern cities and near major Union army encampments. Not until the American consul in Bermuda provided further evidence against him in the spring of 1865 did the U.S. government issue an order for Blackburn's arrest on charges of conspiracy to commit murder. He was arrested in Canada on 19 May 1865 and bound over for trial after a preliminary hearing introduced considerable circumstantial evidence against him, including a report of a yellow fever outbreak in New Bern, North Carolina, shortly after one of his trunks arrived there. Blackburn was ultimately acquitted of conspiracy charges and returned to the United States in 1867. Over the next twenty years he continued his work as a sanitarian and in 1879 was elected governor of his native state. New York Times, 26 April, 7, 16, 19, 21, 24, 26 May, 6 June, 17 October 1865; “American Consular Records-Civil War Period," Bermuda Historical Quarterly, 19: 13-27 (Spring 1962); Nancy Disher Baird, Luke Pryor Blackburn: Physician, Governor, Reformer (Lexington, Ky., 1979), 20- 25; Kinchen, Confederate Operations in Canada and the North, 150; Headley, Confederate Operations in Canada and New York, 264; AAC, 1887, 572; Pitman, Assassination of President Lincoln, 54-57; Howard A. Kelly and Walter L. Burrage, Dictionary of American Medical Biography . . . (New York, 1928), 104; DAB, 2: 317. the starving of our
prisoners,15Although hardships prevailed in the prisoner-of-war camps of both sides. Union captives in Southern stockades generally received less adequate rations than did their counterparts in Northem prisons. As the war progressed. the noticeable decline in the quantity and quality of the food provided inmates at Belle Isle, Libby Prison, Andersonville, and other Southem camps led both prisoners and outside observers to charge the Confederacy with intentionally starving its prisoners. Mounting death tolls encouraged such accusations. At the overcrowded and unsanitary stockade in Andersonville. Georgia, for example, over thirteen thousand prisoners-ill fed. poorly clothed. and lacking proper medical attention-died between its opening in February 1864 and the war’s conclusion. Confederate officials countered the charges of planned starvation by pointing out that prisoners-of-war usually received the same rations as soldiers in the field. Ovid L. Futch, History of Andersonville Prison ([Gainesville, Fla], 1968), 37, 43; William Best Hesseltine, Civil War Prisons: A Study in War Psychology (1930; New York, 1958), 115-24, 137-38, 147-50; Pitman, Assassination of President Lincoln, 57-62. and the infamous crime of poisoning them by vaccination.16Douglass alludes to the charge that in the summer of 1863 syphilis was intentionally introduced at Libby Prison in Richmond, Virginia, through the use of impure vaccine. Against the advice of Confederate medical officers whom they were assisting, imprisoned Federal surgeons vaccinated their fellow prisoners in an attempt to prevent a threatened smallpox epidemic at the facility. Instead of using lymph for their vaccine, however, the Union doctors inadvertently used pus taken from the arm of a prisoner who was inflicted with secondary syphilis. The contaminated vaccine infected a number of prisoners, many of whom attributed their deteriorating state to conditions in the Confederate prison. Stories soon circulated that syphilis was being spread in the same way at other prisons, most notably Andersonville. Hesseltine, Civil War Prisons, 127-28; U.S. Sanitary Commission, Narrative of Privations and Sufferings of United States Officers and Soldiers While Prisoners of War in the Hands of the Rebel Authorities (Philadelphia, 1864), 30-44; OR, ser. 2, 6: 262-63; Asa B. Isham, Henry M. Davidson, and Henry B. Fumess, Prisoners of War and Military Prisons (Cincinnati, 1890), 282-444; John McElroy, Andersonville: A Story of Rebel Military Prisons, . . . (Toledo, Ohio, 1879), 109-10. It
also raises the suspicion that Abraham Lincoln was not the first victim.
Harrison, after serving one month, died, and was succeeded by a man
devoted to the interest of slavery.17Ninth president of the United States, William Henry Harrison (1773-1841) was an Indian fighter, war hero, and statesman. At his inauguration Harrison sustained a chill that eventually developed into pneumonia. He succumbed to the illness on 4 April 1841, after serving only one month in office, and was succeeded by John Tyler, a Virginia slaveholder. NCAB, 3: 33-36; DAB, 8: 348-51. Taylor had but just announced himself
in favor of the admission of California as a free State when he passed away,
and gave place to a Northern sycophant, whose name is found at the bottom
of the fugitive slave law.18On 9 July 1850, approximately twenty months after his election, Zachary Taylor died of cholera morbus and an accompanying fever contracted five days earlier at a ceremony honoring the building of the Washington Monument. He was succeeded by Millard Fillmore. NCAB, 4: 367-70; DAB, 17: 349-54. Even James Buchanan was poisoned at the
National Hotel, and had he died, would have been succeeded by Breckin-
ridge.19Douglass refers to the rumored. though unsubstantiated report of an assassination attempt on the life of President-elect James Buchanan during an outbreak of dysentery at the National Hotel in Washington, D.C., in February and March 1857. Buchanan's vice president was Kentuckian John C. Breckinridge. Philip S. Klein, President James Buchanan: A Biography (University Park, Pa., 1962), 368-69.
The slave power is like the robber who stops you on your way and
demands your money or your life. The slaveholder says to the slave, your
labor or your life.
He here proceeded to show that Booth20John Wilkes Booth. drew his inspiration directly
from the South; that he had been in communication with officials in the
South;21Douglass mistakenly reflects the popular belief, later discredited, that Booth acted as part of a Confederate conspiracy to assassinate the president. The only Confederates with whom Booth was in contact during the planning stages of his plot were fellow conspirators Samuel B. Arnold, Lewis Thomton Powell (alias Lewis Payne or Paine), and Michael O'Laughlin, all of whom had been Confederate soldiers. The decision to kill, instead of kidnap, Lincoln came to Booth much too late for him to have consulted with any high-ranking Confederate. Neely, Abraham Lincoln Encyclopedia, 11-13; Wilson, John Wilkes Booth, 88. that the words he repeated after committing the crime were the
motto of a Southern State;22Booth allegedly cried, “Sic Semper Tyrannis"—Thus ever to tyrants—the state motto of Virginia, as he leapt to the stage of Ford’s Theatre after shooting President Lincoln. George Earlie Shankle, State Names, Flags, Seals, Songs, Birds, Flowers and Other Symbols (1934; New York, 1938), 167; Wilson, John Wilkes Booth, 114. that his first thought of escape was turned
southward, and, had he reached the South, and had the South achieved its
independence, he would have been hailed as a hero, and the women who
presented canes to Brooks,23Preston Brooks. of South Carolina, in compliment to his
attempt to assassinate Senator Sumner,24Charles Sumner. would have showered similar
testimonies upon Booth.
“But, Douglass,” you may ask, “why do you bring these things before
us just now, when we want to come together and forget past differences?”
Because there is a lesson in them. It was a shrewd remark of General
Banks,25Nathaniel Prentiss Banks. that republics have short memories. The speaker said that if he
were a minister of the Gospel he would like to preach to the American
people for six months from one text, and that text should be, “Remember
Lot’s wife.”26Warned not to look back as she fled from Sodom before its destruction by fire and brimstone, Lot's wife nonetheless did so and was immediately turned into a pillar of salt. Gen. 19: 1-26. He would show that nations should have memories. Oh! but
we want peace. There is an old book which says, “First pure, then peaceable.”27Douglass alludes to the order of the Beatitudes in Matt. 5: 8-9.
Some of our leading men are preaching forgiveness, and some of
them preaching forgiveness even without repentance. The speaker had
always supposed that Christianity was, in this respect, the model of liber-
ality; but even this imposed one condition as an antecedent to the for-
giveness of sin, and that was repentance. Let our Southern brethren repent;
let them put away from among them the last remnant of slavery. No one
should be forgiven with the old iniquities still living in his heart, and we
have at least the right to see that our Southern brethren have laid aside their
old hatred of the American Government before bestowing this boon upon
them.
The speaker said he believed in the Methodist doctrine, as applicable to
the present case. A candidate comes forward to ask admission into the
church, but he is requested to stop a moment, and asked, “Are you justi-
fied?” Answering in the afiirmative, he is still requested to hold on, and
asked, “Are you converted?” This, also, he may answer satisfactorily; but
he is still held back and told, “We had better try you six months on
probation.”28Many nineteenth-century Methodist Church societies granted full membership only after a probationary period during which the applicant demonstrated, to the satisfaction of the clergy, acceptable behavior and spirit. The church allowed the candidate all the privileges of attending and participating in meetings but denied full fellowship until a period of six months had passed. Matthew Simpson, ed., Cyclopaedia of Methodism, 5th ed., rev. (Philadelphia, 1882), 581-82. Our Southern brethren must be placed upon probation until
they show that they have repented. It will do them good to tarry a while.
Those who were attempting to put the Southern States on an equality with
the North—to make no difference between treason and loyalty—are the
South’s worst enemies. It will be better for the Southern people to feel that
they have sinned. He had heard it said, even in Congress, that these States
were never out of the Union.29In his first annual message to Congress on 4 December 1865, President Andrew Johnson denied that the Confederate states could have legally left the Union. Johnson’s position found supporters in the Thirty-ninth Congress. Several weeks before Douglass's speech, Henry Grider of Kentucky offered a resolution which declared in part that “the General Govemment cannot by any action whatever destroy itself nor the State governments; nor can the State governments destroy either, or legally disturb the harmony of the whole. . . . [A]ll the States have been and are always in the Union." On that same day, 22 January, in House debate on a proposed constitutional amendment reducing congressional representation for states with racially discriminatory voting laws, Henry Jarvis Raymond of New York maintained that the former rebellious states “have never ceased to be States in and States of the Union." James D. Richardson, ed., A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents, 20 vols. (New York, 1897-1922), 8: 3554-55; AAC, 1866, 145, 147; Eric L. McKitrick, Andrew Johnson and Reconstruction (Chicago, 1960), 101-03. Perhaps not; but it was very certain that the
Union had been out of them. (Laughter) We should wait until there are
signs of its returning into them; until Union generals can be received in the
Legislatures of Alabama and Mississippi; until the old flag is again sainted;
until there are manifestations of a love of the Union.
The test of this patriotism and loyalty at the South is just the same as the
Scriptural text of true religion: “Inasmuch as ye have done it to one of the
least of these, my little ones, ye have done it unto me.”30Douglass paraphrases Matt. 25: 40. The treatment
they accord to the negroes should be made the test of their loyalty. The man
who has been loyal has a warm side toward the negro.
He here spoke of the services rendered by the negro troops. In the Bible
we have magnanimity presented in an exalted form, in the case where a
man lays down his life for a friend.31John 15: 13. But the negroes went beyond that
standard. They had found no friend in the United States Government. They
came at the call of a country through which they could track their course in
blood for over two hundred years. The white troops received $13 per
month; the colored troops but $11; the white man might go to seek the
bubble reputation at the cannon’s mouth,32Douglass adapts As You Like It, act 2, sc. 7, lines 152-53. but the negro could not hope to
rise higher than the rank of a non-commissioned officer. Yet we came two
hundred thousand strong.
Peace to the nation has been followed by a moral war against the negro.
When the rebel armies were in the field, and their legions swept across the
hills of Pennsylvania, leaving a desolate track to make their progress; when
the warm blood of our sons bespattered the tombstones of Gettysburg;
when every steamer was expected to bring the news of foreign recognition
of the Confederacy;33Although the Confederacy maintained diplomatic agents in London, Paris, Brussels, Madrid, and the Vatican for almost four years, it was unsuccessful in securing recognition as an independent nation from the major European countries. Jefferson Davis and his secretaries of state—Robert Toombs, R. M. T. Hunter, and Judah P. Benjamin—failed to persuade foreign powers to violate the Federal blockade and thus provide the South with desperately needed war materiel. Attempts to coerce recognition by regulating the supply of cotton to British manufacturers also failed. Despite both Anglo-French proclamations of neutrality in 1861 that granted belligerent rights to Confederate ships in their ports and offers by Napoleon III to mediate in the American conflict, neither England nor France wanted to be the first to recognize the Confederacy; U.S. Secretary of State William H. Seward had already informed them that recognition of the Confederacy would result in a break in relations with the United States. After the Union victories at Antietam in September 1862 and at Vicksburg and Gettysburg in July 1863, Britain and France never seriously considered recognizing or intervening on behalf of the Confederacy. Crook, North, South, and Powers, passim; Frank Lawrence Owsley and Harriet Chappell Owsley, King Cotton Diplomacy: Foreign Relations of the Confederate States of America (1931; Chicago, 1959), passim. when the recruiting sergeant was in our streets, and
the cry for more men was daily ringing in our ears; when a black man could
be used to stop a rebel bullet, there was room under our flag then for all,
black and white, and we were told then that the ballot should follow the
bullet. How is it now? he said. He had hoped for the future; he believed in
the omnipotence of truth; one great truth was that of equal liberty to all, and
he believed in that. He believed in the Congress of the United States; he
believed in the House; he believed in the Senate; he believed in Charles
Sumner; he believed in Judge Kelley;34William Darrah Kelley. he believed in Thaddeus Stevens,
and he believed in the people of the United States. At some future time he
proposed to tell them more of what he believed.