Frederick Douglass in Brooklyn. Frederick Douglass
good; we now see where you stand and where we stand.
(The speaker said he had predicted at the outset of the war this result.)
The North had made the mistake of supposing that the rebellion could be crushed without interfering with slavery. Nearly all our generals thought so; the only man who saw this error was Fremont.[46] [Great applause.] Gen. Butler has been converted to the right doctrine, and now says that the only way to destroy the rebellion is to destroy slavery.[47] They have begun to recruit at the North when they should have been recruiting at the South. There are four million of his people at the South, capable of furnishing eight hundred thousand able-bodied men; and if they were not enough, the women would fight also. The king of Dahomey was kept on his throne by an army of black women. And if our black women cannot shoulder musket, they can do what white soldiers have had to do, and have lost their lives in doing, dig trenches. We must urge the government to be bold; to be as true to the Union and as bold in maintaining it, as the rebels were to their cause. In opening recruiting offices to enlist colored men, the states of Maryland, Kentucky, Missouri, Delaware, Western Virginia, and Tennessee had been excluded. These states contained a free colored population of ninety thousand, capable of furnishing fifteen thousand soldiers. Just where we have the power to recruit, we will not open recruiting offices.
[I believe] the Negroes will fight. Those who said they would not were inconsistent in their charges. One day an article would appear in their papers alleging that the Negroes would not fight; the next day they would write an article asserting that the first fruits of the Proclamation would be setting the Negroes to cut their masters’ throats. One day they will say that the Negroes will not work; the next they will state that the Negroes are coming north to take the work out the hands of the Germans and Irish. [Laughter.] The Negroes will fight when they have something to fight for. They are sensible men, and not anxious to fight unless they have a chance of whipping somebody. The rebel armies have been against them, and the Northern armies have been pledged against them. The Southerners know that the Negroes will fight, hence the watch they keep upon them, and they are always going armed with bowie knife and revolver.
([Douglass] instanced St. Domingo, where France sent an army of twenty thousand men to reduce to slavery men who had for six years enjoyed their liberty.)
The black men drove back the invaders, and have maintained their freedom for sixty years.[48]
(He cited the Amistad slave mutiny and others, where black men have done deeds of bravery, showing they will fight when they have the opportunity of fighting for liberty.[49] )
The American Negroes are now willing to fight in this war, provided they have the shield of this government extended over them, and the same rights and protection guaranteed to them as to other men who fight its battles. Their lives are as precious as those of other men, and they have as much regard for their lives as other men. If this protection is guaranteed to the colored men, they will at the North and at the South rally around the flag.
(“Give them a chance,” was all he asked. If they do not embrace it, then let the colored people forever hold their peace. If it was needed that he, the speaker, should go forth, and he should refuse, then let condemnation settle on his brow, in common with the rest. The speaker continued to discuss the prospects of the war, and expressed his belief that the rebellion would eventually be put down, since the right means [the Emancipation Proclamation] had been adopted.)
*
THE BLACK MAN AND THE WAR—Fred. Douglass, the colored orator, delivered a lecture on this subject last night, at the African Methodist Episcopal Church in Bridge Street, Western District.[50] It was an able and genuinely rhetorical lecture, and was listened to by a mixed audience of four hundred persons. After laying down the usual fundamental planks of the Abolition creed, [Douglass] proceeded to apply the black man to the war, and maintained that the colored race would fight whenever they were assured that they should be allowed the privileges of citizenship on the same ground with the Germans or Irish. He promised that the blacks would stand by the president with their sympathy, their strong arms, and their earnest hearts. The lecture was heartily applauded.
Chapter 3
What Shall Be Done with the Negro?
Brooklyn Academy of Music
May 1863
In May of 1863, Douglass came back to Brooklyn in order to amplify his call for full black equality. He made his case by rebutting popular arguments against black “inferiority”; and he critiqued a number of proposals about what to do with freed slaves, from colonization to segregation. Douglass also questioned why the Irish, who had endured religious oppression in their homeland, had now become “persecutors” of black people in America. Two months later, the Draft Riots would starkly illustrate local Irish racist sentiment.
Earlier that week, Douglass had given the same talk at the American Anti-Slavery Society’s annual meeting, held at the Church of the Puritans (near Union Square in Manhattan). But the follow-up event—held on May 15 at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, then located at 176–194 Montague Street in Brooklyn Heights—promised to be a good show. An ad in the Eagle announced it as a “Grand Rally,” highlighting that “Fred. Douglass, Esq., will lecture” and the very popular Hutchinson Family Singers “will sing their favorite songs.”
BAM was indeed filled to capacity that Friday night. Postmaster George Lincoln—a white abolitionist, and then the highest-ranking federal official in Brooklyn—served as master of ceremonies. The Eagle reported that Senator Samuel Pomeroy, a Kansas Republican, joined Theodore Tilton on the stage, as did a number of “colored people.” Writing in the New York Tribune, editor Sydney Howard Gay—a leading figure in the Underground Railroad, and a longtime ally of Douglass—observed that “the beauty and fashion of the City of Churches were largely represented in the audience, with here and there a colored lady or a colored gentleman sitting in the audience, as if to demonstrate the fact set forth by the orator of the evening, ‘that friend could sit near friend, as easily as master or mistress could sit near servant.’”[51]
Thomas Kinsella of the Eagle assumed a far less respectful tone in his editorial about the event, which appeared alongside the paper’s recap. What appears first here is the text of the speech, as reprinted in Frederick Douglass’ Monthly, interspersed with portions of the Eagle’s versions of it. (Note that I have added italics to indicate the Eagle portions.) That is followed by Kinsella’s splenetic reply. Whether it was Douglass’s statements about the Irish or his concluding comments about publicly socializing with white women (or both) that set Kinsella off is not clear.
*
What Shall Be Done with the Negro?
Ladies and Gentlemen
I think that most of you will agree with me in respect to the surpassing importance of the subject we are here to consider this evening though you may differ from me in other respects. It seems to me that the relation subsisting between the white and colored people of this country, is of all other questions, the great, paramount, imperative and all commanding question for this age and nation to solve. [Cheers.]
All the circumstances of the hour plead with an eloquence, equaled by no human tongue, for the immediate solution of this vital problem. 200,000 graves—a distracted and bleeding country pleads for this solution. It cannot be denied, nobody now even attempts to deny, that the question, what shall be done with the Negro, is the one grand cause of the tremendous war now upon us, and likely to continue upon us, until the country is united upon some wise policy concerning it. When the country was at peace and all appeared prosperous, there was something like a plausible argument in favor of leaving things to their own course. No such policy avails now. [Cheers.]
We are encompassed by it on every side and burned with [the question] as by fire, and turn which way we will, it meets us at every