Frederick Douglass Essay, Research Paper

Abolition stopped Frederick Douglass dead in his tracks and forced him

to reinvent himself. He learned the hard central truth about abolition.

Once he learned what that truth was, he was compelled to tell it in

his speeches and writings even if it meant giving away the most secret

truth about himself. From then on, he accepted abolition for what it

was and rode the fates.

The truth he learned about abolition was that it was a white

enterprise. It was a fight between whites. Blacks joined abolition

only on sufferance. They also joined at their own risks. For a long

time, Douglass, a man of pride and artfulness, denied this fact.

For years there had been disagreements among many abolitionists.

Everyone had their own beliefs towards abolition. There was especially

great bitterness between Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison, dating

from the early 1850’s when Douglass had repudiated Garrisonian

Disunionism. Garrisonians supported the idea of disunion. Disunion

would have relieved the North of responsibility for the sin of slavery.

It would have also ended the North’s obligation to enforce the

fugitive slave law, and encourage a greater exodus of fugitive slaves

from the South. (161,162 Perry) Douglass did not support this idea

because it would not result in the complete abolition of slavery.

Blacks deserved just as much freedom as whites. He believed that the

South had committed treason, and the Union must rebel by force if

necessary. Astonished by Garrison’s thoughts, Douglass realized that

abolition was truly a war between whites. Garrison, and many others,

had failed to see the slaves as human beings.

Were blacks then supposed to be irretrievably black in a white world

? Where is the freedom and hope if all great things are privilege only

to the whites? Douglass resolved never again to risk himself to

betrayal. Troubled, Douglass did not lose faith in his beliefs of

abolishing slavery. However, he did reinvent his thinking.

Douglass eventually made his way with what amounted to the applied

ideas of Alexis de Tocqueville and Fancis Grund, both of which were

writing at the time when Douglass realized the truth about abolition.

Grund and Tocqueville celebrated the “new man,” the “self-made” men who

were breaking through old restraints. These restraints included

monopolized privileges, restricted franchises, and the basic refusal of

the main chance of equal opportunity. The blacks were confronted by

the most vicious and deadly restraints any “new man” had been compelled

to face in the United States. This was horrendous, but it was not

insurmountable.

Douglass decided that the separation between whites was an advantage

to his cause. He could then make allies with one of the disputants in

the fight and exploit the alliance to yield guarantees of access to the

devices of power and mobility the “new man” had historically sought.

In conclusion, he and his allies would not share any common causes

except that “your enemy is my enemy.” Influenced by Grund’s and

Tocqueville’s beliefs, this was Douglass’ new political strategy and

social goal.

William Garrison continued to hounded Douglass. He once said, “I

regard him as thoroughly base and selfish….He reveals himself more

and more to me as destitute of every principle of honor, ungrateful to

the last degree….He is not worthy of respect, confidence, or

countenance.” (Garrison Papers)

But in 1862, during wartime, Douglass was ready to bury their

differences and implement his new political strategy.

“Every man who is ready to work for the overthrow of slavery, whether a

voter or non-voter, a Garrisonian or a Gerrit Smith man, black or white,

is both clansman and kinsman of ours. Whatever political or personal

differences, which have in other days divided and distracted us, a

common object and a common emergency makes us for the time at least,

forget those differences. No class of men are doing more according to

their numbers, to conduct this great war to the Emancipation of the

slaves than Mr. Garrison and the American Anti-Slavery Society.”

(Frederick Douglass, Monthly of March 1862).

Raising the free black regiments for service in the Union Army was a

policy intended to give blacks a sturdy claim on the state and prove

that they were citizens of the United States. Frederick Douglass was

extremely active, and his own sons were the first recruits from New

York. In March 1863, he published the stirring Men of Color, To Arms!

“Liberty won by white men would lack half its luster. “Who would be

free themselves must strike the blow,” proclaimed Douglass. “The

chance is now given you to end in a day the bondage of centuries, and

to rise in one bound from social degradation to the plane of common

equality with all other varieties of men….Action! action! not

criticism, is the plain duty of this hour.” Soon, two black regiments

were formed.

After learning the truth about abolition, Douglass never deceived

himself by thinking that the blacks were anything but the nation’s

foster children, taken into the “family” as a result of accident and

necessity. Although they were not of the nation, they were in the

nation. They, the black race, were citizens of the United States, and

they were on equal terms. The laws of the national state guaranteed

that. By 1870, Douglass and his allies had made considerable progress.

Most of the measures they had originally advocated had been adopted:

the immediate and universal abolition of slavery, the enlistment of

black soldiers, the creation of a Freedmen’s Bureau, and most

importantly, the incorporation of the black man’s civil and political

equality into the law of the land (Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and

Fifteenth amendments).

But the next decade proved to be a very frustrating one for Douglass

and many of his supporters. Many of the achievements of the Civil War

and Reconstruction were not concrete. It became expedient for northern

political and business interests to conciliate southern whites, and an

end to federal enforcement of black equality in the South was the price

of conciliation. Frederick Douglass declared that “as the war for the

Union recedes into the misty shadows of the past, and the Negro is not

longer needed to assault forts and stop rebel bullets, he is . . . of

less importance. Peace with the old master class has been war to the

Negro. As the one has risen, the other has fallen.” The

Reconstruction guarantees of the national state were broken.

The ugly truth was now exposed. Abolition was a war between whites,

and blacks joined only on sufferance. Douglass knew this early on,

but now everyone knew. It may sound depressing, but Douglass, and many

others like him, did build the foundation for later equality movements

by Martin Luther King. Today, we are still working up to the ideals of

Douglass’ crusade.

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