Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass by Russell Freedman

Author:Russell Freedman
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Published: 2013-06-27T16:26:24+00:00

Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederate States of America.

With the Union collapsing, the Confederate states were preparing for a war of the North against the South.

Bombarding Fort Sumter: the shots that started the Civil War. From an 1861 print.

Seven

Emancipation

The American Civil War began on the morning of April 12, 1861. At four thirty a.m., rebel cannons ringing the harbor at Charleston, South Carolina, opened fire on the American flag snapping in the sea breeze above the high brick walls of Fort Sumter. The Confederate states had declared themselves an independent nation. They demanded that the United States surrender all military fortifications within the boundaries of the South.

President Lincoln had pledged to “hold, occupy, and possess” all U.S. government forts and arsenals in the rebellious South. The garrison at Fort Sumter held out for thirty-three hours before being forced to surrender. On April 14, the American flag was hauled down and the Confederate stars and bars rose over the shattered and smoldering fort.

Lincoln, in office for little more than six weeks, issued a proclamation calling for 75,000 troops to put down the Southern rebellion. All over the North, patriotic crowds turned out to attend war rallies and cheer the flag. “I never knew what a popular excitement can be,” reported a Harvard professor who had been born during the presidency of George Washington. “The whole population, men, women, and children seem to be in the streets with Union [souvenirs] and flags.”

Senator Stephen Douglas, once Lincoln's archrival, now offered his support and called for national unity. “There are only two sides to the question,” he told a mass meeting in Chicago. “Every man must be for the United States or against it. There can be no neutrals in this war, only patriots—or traitors.”

“God be praised!” Frederick Douglass exclaimed. The war “has come at last,” and with it, the chance to destroy slavery. “Let the long crushed bondsman arise! and in this auspicious moment snatch back [his] liberty.”

Douglass had great expectations, but he would be disappointed. He soon learned that he and President Lincoln had very different ideas about why the war was being fought and how it could be won.

Douglass saw the war as a chance to destroy slavery forever. He wanted Lincoln to free the slaves and recruit black soldiers into the Union army. Enslaved blacks were eager to cast off their chains and fight for their own freedom. Thousands of blacks were already escaping from behind Southern lines, ready to join the Union forces. “Every slave who escapes from the Rebel States is a loss to the Rebellion and a gain to the Loyal Cause,” Douglass wrote. By arming only white men, he argued, the North was fighting the rebels with only one hand—“their soft white hand, while [keeping] their black iron hand chained and helpless behind them.”

In Lincoln's view, this was a war to save the Union, not to destroy slavery. “We didn't go into the war to put down slavery,” he said, “but to put the flag back.” He was willing to leave slavery alone so long as it did not spread beyond the Southern states.

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