Radical Friend by Nancy A. Hewitt

Author:Nancy A. Hewitt
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press

8 Coming Together, 1862–1872

On 25 March 1862, a year after Lincoln took office, Frederick Douglass gave a rousing oration on “The War and How to End It” at Rochester’s Corinthian Hall. Believing that black soldiers were the key to victory, he was increasingly frustrated by Lincoln’s refusal to allow African Americans to serve in the Union army. After a series of military defeats, Union forces had finally gained footholds in Confederate territory that spring. Still, Douglass’s tone was bellicose and bitter—toward southern officials and soldiers who turned traitor by joining the Confederacy and toward northern officers who seemed to admire the enemy. General George B. McClellan, he intoned, “is careful to tell us that the Southern army is composed of foemen worthy of our steel.” To Douglass, “They are traitors worthy of our hemp.” Although the Posts and other radical F/friends took a less vitriolic tone, they too worried that Lincoln either could not lead the Union to victory or would do so without abolishing slavery.1

While Douglass and the Posts insisted that blacks should be enrolled in the army and abolition must be the war’s primary goal, plenty of northerners, including activists, disagreed. Moderate abolitionists were concerned that black soldiers and emancipated slaves would only heighten tensions among northern whites at a moment when unity was critical. As thousands of the enslaved escaped behind Union lines, conflicts emerged over how the government should treat them, who should care for them, and even what to call them. At first many Union commanders sent fleeing slaves back to their owners, but eventually the federal government recognized them as “contrabands” and claimed them as prizes of war—like captured weapons. Abolitionists considered such language dehumanizing and preferred “refugees” or “freed people.”

Although these conflicts fueled divisions among government officials, army officers, and abolitionists, many female activists mended fences to aid men, women, and children who had emancipated themselves. Vastly more northern women organized on behalf of soldiers’ aid, but female abolitionists—both Post’s circle and the RLASS—focused their efforts on black refugees. Still, the bonds forged during the war between black and white, political and Garrisonian, and female and male abolitionists would not be strong enough to hold once peace was achieved. In the late 1860s, struggles over black citizenship and suffrage divided former allies and fueled new organizations and agendas.

From the outbreak of war in April 1861, northern newspapers flooded readers with optimistic claims for a quick victory followed by shocking reports of death and defeat. The Posts were committed to a Union victory only if it ensured emancipation. But at least they had time to work toward that goal. In the late 1850s, Isaac had officially passed his pharmacy business on to his son. Married and, by 1861, father to a baby girl, Jacob Post had invited another clerk, William Bruff, to become his partner. R. G. Dun and Co. assured its clients that Post and Bruff pharmacy remained a “well establ[ishe]d firm, in the oldest location in town,” and that the two partners are “careful, indus[trious] and experienced.

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