A Glorious Liberty by Damon Root

Author:Damon Root [Root, Damon]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: BIO002000 Biography & Autobiography / Cultural Heritage, HIS036050 History / United States / Civil War Period (1850-1877)
Publisher: Potomac Books

4

“Men of Color, to Arms!”

On April 12, 1861, Confederate general Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard, acting on orders from the man he called president, Jefferson Davis, gave the command to open fire on Fort Sumter, a U.S. military facility strategically located on a man-made island in the harbor of Charleston, South Carolina. With those shots, the Civil War was officially underway.

“God be praised!” Frederick Douglass cheered upon learning the news.1 As far as Douglass was concerned, he, just like every other black American, had been at war with slavery for his entire life. During his twenty years in bondage, he had been flogged, beaten, and tortured. As a teenager, he had squared off against the feared “negro breaker” Edward Covey and drawn blood from his enemy. As a fugitive from slavery, he had risked life and limb escaping to freedom. As a conductor on the Underground Railroad, he had kept his eyes peeled for armed slave catchers. As an abolitionist orator, he had faced down racist mobs that were intent on doing him harm. The time was long overdue, Douglass believed, for the federal government to join the fight against the slave power.

Thankfully, the secessionists had just done the cause of antislavery a tremendous favor. By attacking Fort Sumter, Douglass wrote, they have “exposed the throat of slavery to the keen knife of liberty, and have given a chance to all the righteous forces of this nation to deal a death-blow to the monster evil of the nineteenth century.”2 Douglass had long implored the federal government to unleash its entire constitutional arsenal against the peculiar institution. Now he would urge one federal official in particular, President Abraham Lincoln, to exercise his considerable powers as commander in chief for that very same purpose. “The Government is active, and the people aroused,” Douglass celebrated.3 The great war for freedom was finally at hand.

Yet as the Civil War got going in earnest, the Union’s tactics increasingly left Douglass feeling cold. Lincoln was fighting a war against slaveholders, Douglass complained in July 1861, yet he was doing so “without fighting slavery.” The Confederates were “tearing up railways” and “building forts, guarding forts, fighting behind batteries,” and all the while, their slaves were “busily at work with spade, shovel, plow and hoe.” Slave labor was simultaneously aiding the insurrection and sustaining the rebel home front. “Why, in the name of all that is national,” wondered Douglass, “does our Government allow its enemies this powerful advantage?”4

Lincoln had a different view. To Douglass’s dismay, Lincoln was prepared to leave slavery alone if the rebels would only return to the fold. His one and only goal as commander in chief, Lincoln stressed, was to preserve the Union, not to fight a war to free the slaves. Just as bad, Lincoln seemed indifferent (or worse) to the idea of training, equipping, and making use of black troops, even in the Union’s most desperate hour of need. “The government consents only that Negroes shall smell powder in the character of cooks and body servants in the army,” Douglass complained.

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