1861_ The Civil War Awakening - Adam Goodheart [189]
Even some of the Northerners who were considered radicals had deferred to what seemed the necessity of disavowing any abolitionist intentions. “Some people ask if this is to be a crusade of emancipation,” Henry Ward Beecher told his congregation. “No, it is not. I hate slavery intensely.… Liberty is the birthright of every man, yet ours is not an army of liberation. Why? Because the fifteen States of the South are guaranteed security in their property, and we have no right by force to dispossess them of that property.”50
For America’s small community of black intellectuals, the spring of 1861 was a disorienting time. “I have never spent days so restless and anxious,” Frederick Douglass confessed two weeks after Sumter. “Our mornings and evenings have continually oscillated between the dim light of hope, and the gloomy shadow of despair.”51
The past few years had been dispiriting and exhausting ones for Douglass, who had never ceased fighting for emancipation since his own escape from slavery in Maryland more than two decades earlier. In 1855, he closed the second edition of his autobiography with a ringing proclamation:
Old as the everlasting hills; immovable as the throne of God; and certain as the purposes of eternal power, against all hindrances, and against all delays, and despite all the mutations of human instrumentalities, it is the faith of my soul, that this anti-slavery cause will triumph.52
Of all the Negro abolitionists, Douglass had always been the one to insist, often to the derision of other black leaders, that Africans might one day also be Americans, that the promise of freedom embedded in the Declaration might one day apply to them, too. He remembered when, as a boy clandestinely teaching himself to read, he had pored over a book of political oratory from the Revolution, deciphering the stirring words one letter at a time. He spurned those who sought an independent black republic in Africa or the Caribbean.
By 1861, however—after Bleeding Kansas, Dred Scott, and John Brown—even Douglass’s rock-solid faith had been badly shaken. The final blow for him was the inauguration of the new Republican president. Douglass had campaigned for Lincoln. But the “double-tongued document” of the inaugural address, as he had called it, came as a shocking betrayal. If even such a leader as Lincoln would sacrifice four million Negroes to appease the South, then clearly all hope was lost. Blacks had no future in America. At the end of March, he booked passage to Haiti, planning to set sail from New Haven on April 25 and arrive in Port-au-Prince by May 1. If the island nation lived up to its promise—as a sun-kissed “city set on a hill” for former slaves—Douglass would move down there for good, and he would urge other black Americans to do the same.53
But at the last minute, ten days after the attack on Sumter and in the midst of his oscillations between hope and despair, Douglass changed his travel plans, staying behind in the chilly dampness of western New York State. On April 27, as the ship steamed toward Port-au-Prince without him, he gave a lecture at a church in Syracuse. It was one of only a few speeches that Douglass, usually a tireless orator, would deliver in the year ahead. At the most tumultuous moment of the national crisis, he seemed briefly to find the voice, by turns soaringly prophetic and frankly personal, that had moved audiences ever since his first public address in a Nantucket meetinghouse, many years before. Instead of trying