Frederick Douglass by D. H. Dilbeck

Author:D. H. Dilbeck
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
Published: 2018-03-13T04:00:00+00:00

Riot in Tremont Temple, Boston, 3 December 1860. From Harper’s Weekly, 15 December 1860.

Although the raid on Harpers Ferry failed to incite mass slave insurrection, Douglass still saw in Brown’s deeds reason for hope. Douglass expected that Brown’s bold and uncompromising rebellion against slavery would serve as a clarion call to the Christian North to embrace the cause of emancipation. Like the words of a prophet, Brown’s actions would “rouse a dead Church and dumb Ministry to the duty of putting away this dark and dangerous sin,” slavery. In the immediate wake of Brown’s capture, Douglass wrote, “The infuriated demon of Slavery never seemed to me more certain of extirpation than now.”34 Brown’s raid might appear to some as another failure and setback for the abolitionist movement. But Douglass saw it as evidence of the moral might of the antislavery cause and the certainty of its triumph.

In the run-up to the 1860 presidential election, Douglass expressed some ambivalence about the new Republican Party and its nominee, Abraham Lincoln. He rightly worried that Lincoln and most Republicans, though antislavery, were not immediate abolitionists.35 After Lincoln’s election, Douglass castigated southern slaveholders who rashly called for immediate secession from the Union. “There is no sufficient cause for the dissolution of the Union,” Douglass wrote in his newspaper in December 1860. He predicted slavery would be safer within the Union than in a newly independent southern nation.36 But by early February, seven slaveholding states had seceded and formed the Confederacy. Some sort of ominous conflict seemed on the horizon, and in early 1861 Douglass rejoiced in its imminent arrival. He believed God worked through the climactic events of the sectional crisis to set in motion slavery’s final death. After the fall of Fort Sumter in April 1861, and the formal start of the Civil War, Douglass confessed he had “no tears to shed, no lamentations to make.” Instead, he proclaimed, “God be praised!”37 Slavery’s final death throes had arrived.

During the four long years of the Civil War, Douglass relied on a spirit of prophetic hope to make sense of the conflict—to discern its ultimate meaning and God’s purposes in it. From the very start of the fighting, Douglass insisted that God was using the war to destroy slavery, and the Union must take part in God’s righteous work. Loyal citizens and their armies should fight not simply to preserve the Union but also to end slavery, Douglass argued. If they failed to do so, they imperiled their nation’s future and invited the judgment of a just God. Douglass saw in the war a momentous theological question about the relationship between divine and human effort in ending slavery. Was emancipation a triumph of God’s active work in history, or the labor of long-suffering abolitionists, or some strange mixture of both? Douglass confronted those questions head-on throughout the Civil War as he tried to ensure that the Union committed itself to abolishing slavery amid its conflict against the Confederacy.

At the onset of the Civil War, the

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