American Experience (1988–…): Season 25, Episode 4 - The Abolitionists: Part 3 - full transcript
The battle between pro-slavery and free-soil contingents rises to fever pitch.
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On the evening of July 4, 1854,
an immense crowd gathered
on the Boston Common
to celebrate
the 78th anniversary
of American independence.
There was almost no one left
to remember the Revolution.
As those years
of turmoil and hardship
passed from living memory
into myth,
the Union itself came to seem
ever more precious.
Meanwhile, a few miles
outside the city,
anti-slavery activists
marked the occasion
in a very different spirit.
The government is in the hands
of the party demagogues,
who are the tools
of the Slave Power.
Corruption is general,
constitutional restraints
are as cobwebs;
the representatives are
the betrayers of the people.
William Lloyd Garrison
had been waging war against
slavery for 25 years,
but tonight,
victory seemed inconceivable.
Just a few weeks earlier, the
president of the United States
had sent a massive detachment
of federal troops to Boston,
all to return a lone
runaway slave to captivity.
For Garrison, it was yet more
proof that the Republic itself
had been corrupted at birth,
its original sin implanted
in a founding document
written largely by slaveholders.
And this,
the Constitution
of the United States of America,
is the source and parent
of all the other atrocities,
a covenant with death
and an agreement with hell.
So perish all compromises
with tyranny!
And let all the people say,
"Amen."
Amen!
And let all the people say,
"Amen."
Amen!
And let all the people say,
"Amen."
Amen!
Garrison had launched
his crusade in 1829.
Since then, the slave population
of the United States
had doubled to four million.
The Compromise of 1850
had strengthened
the grip of slaveholders
over the federal government
and introduced the notorious
Fugitive Slave Law.
And now a new battleground
was opening up
on America's western frontier.
Northerners and Southerners
had come to believe
that the nation's destiny
would be determined there,
as new territories
were admitted to the Union
as either slave or free states.
In 1855, the flashpoint
was Kansas.
Partisans on each side
of the struggle
perceived a mortal threat:
whichever way Kansas went,
the territories further west
would likely go the same way.
Congress had decided
to let the settlers in Kansas
decide the question
for themselves.
The result was mayhem.
In the summer of 1855,
Kansas has really become
the front line
in the conflict over slavery.
Pro-slavery forces
really have the upper hand.
They're bullying
and intimidating
and sometimes killing
Northern settlers.
Many abolitionists wondered
if their pacifist ideals
were misguided...
Whether the conflict had entered
a new and violent phase.
One of them had no doubt.
John Brown had never put
much stock
in Garrison's talk
of peace and persuasion;
"milk and water abolitionism,"
he called it.
And now, at last, John Brown was
on his way to war in Kansas.
Over the years,
Brown had attracted a network
of abolitionist supporters.
As he headed west from his home
in upstate New York,
he collected money and weapons
for the fight.
Among those who contributed
was the most famous black man
in America,
the ex-slave Frederick Douglass.
"While I will continue to write
and speak against slavery,"
Douglass wrote,
"I have become less hopeful
of its peaceful abolition.
I welcome any new mode of attack
upon the slave system."
Brown is almost a battering ram
of a human being.
He has a moral strength
and clarity
that cuts through the cant
about slavery.
And I think
this is very appealing
to anti-slavery Northerners
who are really giving up almost
on the political system
and on nonviolent resistance.
By the time Brown left Ohio
for the last leg of the journey
to eastern Kansas,
he had gathered
a formidable arsenal
of rifles, pistols
and broadswords.
"We believe the great victory
will follow before long,"
he wrote home to his wife.
But John Brown's long and bloody
struggle was just beginning.
On the 21st of May 1856,
a posse of 800 Southerners
surrounded the free soil capital
of Lawrence, Kansas.
They flew a blood-red flag
on which was inscribed
"Southern Rights."
Over the course of the day,
they sacked the town
while the inhabitants fled.
News of the guerrilla war
flaring in Kansas
became the talk of the nation.
Northerners began sending
clothing and food
to the embattled
free-soil settlers.
In Washington, anti-slavery
senator Charles Sumner
decried the spread of slavery
to Kansas
and accused Southerners
of "raping and plundering
the virgin territory."
South Carolina Congressman
Preston Brooks took offense.
On the floor
of the United States Senate,
Brooks beat Sumner with the gold
head of his heavy cane
as Sumner struggled
to free himself from his desk.
Finally,
blinded by his own blood,
Sumner collapsed into the aisle
and lost consciousness.
Brooks continued beating him
until his cane broke.
Sumner would never
fully recover.
Newspapers across the South
celebrated the assault,
but when news of the incident
reached John Brown's
encampment in Kansas,
he and his followers
were enraged.
When someone urged caution,
Brown replied,
"Caution, caution...
It is nothing but the word
of cowardice."
On the night of May 24, 1856,
Brown and four of his sons
dragged five pro-slavery men
from their cabins
and hacked them to pieces
with broadswords.
Brown is not simply
evening the score in Kansas.
He's really also trying
to strike terror into the hearts
of pro-slavery settlers.
This is God's punishment.
This is not the punishment
of man.
They're not going to be hung.
They're going to be murdered,
they're going to be butchered,
because that's
Old Testament retribution.
Pottawatomie scares but also
enrages pro-slavery forces,
who don't need much incitement
to violence.
They've already been
committing it.
And now it's let loose
the dogs of war.
It's at this point that Kansas
becomes known as
Bleeding Kansas.
After the massacre,
Brown and his followers
hid out in the wilderness,
resurfacing occasionally
to battle pro-slavery forces.
At the beginning
of October 1856,
he left Kansas for the East to
gather more money and weapons.
It was on a covert swing
through Boston
that John Brown finally met
William Lloyd Garrison
for the first time.
The pacifist printer
chastised Brown
for his role
in the Pottawatomie killings
and insisted that nonviolence
was still the only path
to victory.
Garrison would have been
even more wary
had he known the full extent
of Brown's plans.
"I will carry the war into
Africa," Brown had told his son.
"Africa" was their code word
for the slave-holding South.
On the morning of March 7, 1857,
the papers brought
stunning news.
Out of the blue, the Supreme
Court had radically altered
not just the battle
over slavery,
but the status of every
black person in America.
The case had seemed
inconsequential.
A Missouri slave
named Dred Scott
wanted the court to set him free
because his master had taken him
to live in Illinois
and then Wisconsin Territory,
where slavery was illegal.
Chief Justice Roger Taney
saw the case as an opportunity
to settle the question
of slavery once and for all.
In a sweeping decision,
Taney ruled that Congress
had no authority
to prevent the spread
of slavery to the territories.
Most ominously for free blacks
like Frederick Douglass,
Taney wrote that
blacks were "so far inferior
they had no rights which the
white man was bound to respect,"
and that any free black "might
lawfully be reduced to slavery
for his benefit."
The Dred Scott decision had the
potential to legalize slavery
everywhere in the United States.
In effect, it turns the entire
country into a slave nation.
So many abolitionists
after Dred Scott said,
"You see, we've been telling you
for decades
"that there's a Slave Power
conspiracy out there
"of presidents, Supreme Court
members, of Congresspeople,
"of bankers, of ship owners
"to not only preserve but expand
this system of slavery
"until it dominates every aspect
of American society
and economy,"
and now here's
the Supreme Court saying
slavery has an eternal future
in the United States.
The decision hung like a pall
over the abolitionist movement,
casting Douglass, most of all,
into a deep depression.
With an earnest aching heart,
I have long looked
for the realization
of the hope of my people.
I have sought in my humble way
to see in the distance
the white flags of freedom,
the time at which the cruel
bondage of my people should end.
But of that time,
I can know nothing
and you can know nothing.
All is uncertain.
It was with a sense
of foreboding and hopelessness
that Frederick Douglass
responded to an urgent summons
in August of 1859
from his old friend John Brown.
Together with Shields Green,
a fugitive he had befriended
in Rochester,
Douglass quietly made his way
to a stone quarry
at Chambersburg, Pennsylvania.
Mr. Douglass!
Captain Brown.
I would never
have known you, sir!
Our time has come.
Brown was secretly encamped
at a nearby farmhouse
with 22 recruits.
I had hoped for more men,
of course.
But I believe we have enough
to achieve our ends,
with your help.
What end is that?
Well, sir...
In one stroke,
we shall rouse this nation.
We will deal the Slave Power
such a blow
it shall never recover.
All with 22 men?
It takes one spark
to light a fire.
We are the spark that will
set this country ablaze.
But how?
The armory at Harper's Ferry.
Good Lord, man.
You can't be serious.
A hundred thousand rifles...
What will 22 men do with
a hundred thousand rifles?
As I said, the spark.
We are but the spark.
There are four million men
in bondage
who will fly to our banner.
Not immediately, of course,
but even a few thousand slaves
in this vicinity
will fly to our aid...
Douglass expected Brown to
unveil a mission to free slaves
and funnel them north
along the mountains to freedom.
But when he gets
to the stone quarry,
Brown presents
a very different plan.
I know.
My friend, I have been over this
a thousand times.
I can assure you...
And I can assure you
that you will be walking
into a perfect steel trap...
He's talking about invading the
South and occupying the South
and taking over the South,
you know,
sort of building this republic
out one mile at a time,
and that republic
is going to be a new country.
It will kill you.
And it will serve no purpose.
There will be a bloodbath.
Without the shedding of blood,
there is no remission of sin,
Douglass.
Douglass spends two days
trying to convince John Brown
not to raid Harper's Ferry.
Brown spends the same amount of
time trying to convince Douglass
to go to Harper's Ferry with him
to be his right-hand man.
My friend, the world
will remember what we do here.
How do you want the world
to remember you?
How do you want your children
to remember you?
I don't want them to remember me
as throwing my life away
for nothing.
Captain...
It pains me more than you
will know to leave you.
Mr. Green.
You have heard Mr. Brown.
What will you do?
I believe I'll go
with the old man.
Come with me, Douglass.
I will defend you with my life.
I want you
for a special purpose.
When I strike,
the bees will begin to swarm,
and I shall want you
to help hive them.
Frederick Douglass
returned home alone.
The decision to leave Brown
would haunt him
for the rest of his life.
On the night of October 16,
1859, John Brown and his men
seized the federal armory
at Harper's Ferry,
taking several hostages.
But over the course
of the following day,
they were overwhelmed as every
able-bodied man in the area
grabbed a gun
and raced into town.
Within 24 hours, half of Brown's
men were dead or dying.
He and four of the survivors,
including Shields Green,
were trapped in an engine-house
at the armory.
By this time, a company
of U.S. Marines had arrived
under the command
of Colonel Robert E. Lee.
Fragmentary reports
of the uprising spread
across the country.
In Boston,
William Lloyd Garrison
wondered whether Brown
was involved.
In Philadelphia, Frederick
Douglass knew all too well.
It so happened that I was
speaking to a large audience
in National Hall.
The announcement came upon us
with the startling effect
of an earthquake.
It was something to make
the boldest hold his breath.
The sensation Douglass felt
at that moment was,
"Oh God, what comes now?
"Oh God,
they'll be after all of us.
What sort of bloodbath
may flow from this?"
His own life was at risk now.
At dawn, the Marines
stormed the engine house,
capturing Brown
and his surviving men.
Investigators seeking a link
to the abolitionists
found what they needed
in Brown's papers:
an innocuous note
signed by Frederick Douglass
two years earlier,
inviting Brown to dinner.
It was all they needed.
Douglass suddenly becomes
the most wanted man
in the United States.
He hides out at a friend's place
in Philadelphia,
and in fact he finds out
from the telegraph operator
in Philadelphia
that the president
of the United States on down
has put out the equivalent
of an all-points bulletin.
All the feds are now
scouring the country
for Frederick Douglass.
Douglass hurriedly
made his way north,
his panic mounting
as he realized
that his fellow passengers
were reading newspaper reports
calling for his arrest.
He telegraphed ahead
with instructions
to destroy the contents
of his desk.
Miraculously,
Douglass made it to Rochester,
where he boarded
a boat to Canada.
The next day, Douglass heard
that federal marshals
had arrived at his home,
hot on his trail.
But he was out of their reach.
Douglass was wanted more than
any of the other conspirators
in John Brown's raid
because Douglass
was a black man.
John Brown was almost killed
when the Marines
stormed the engine house.
He had to be carried
from his jail cell
to a cot that was set up
in the courtroom.
Nevertheless, Brown dominated
the proceedings.
He stands up without notes
and gives one of the greatest
speeches in American history.
Brown in simple, direct,
powerful language
basically put his accusers
on trial.
Had I interfered in behalf
of the rich, the powerful,
the intelligent,
the so-called great,
every man in this court
would have deemed it an act
worthy of reward
rather than punishment.
Now, if it is deemed necessary
that I should forfeit my life
for the furtherance
of the ends of justice
and mingle my blood further
with the blood of my children,
I submit.
Shields Green
and the other captives
had already been sentenced
to hang.
There could be little doubt
that Brown would follow them.
From his jail cell,
Brown kept up a stream
of correspondence and interviews
which were breathlessly reported
throughout the North.
This guy's just led a raid
to destroy slavery.
They have killed people, and not
the first people he's killed.
And he's suddenly become
famously depicted in art,
wearing these sort of
evening slippers
with this long, peaceful,
old patriarch beard,
and he's the abolitionist
grandfather
you wish you had.
Brown was absolutely a genius
at working the press,
at giving interviews,
at talking to people
and turning himself
into as fully committed
a Christian sacrificial lamb
on the altar of slavery
as he could possibly be.
You have the Northern
establishment,
every newspaper, saying,
"This guy's a hero.
He's a saint."
How can Southerners
look at that and say,
"Oh, these guys are good
negotiating partners.
We're going to be able to sort
the slavery problem out."
What Brown has done ultimately
is just to expose
the depth of the divide
between North and South.
And after that point, that
divide can never be bridged.
On the morning
of December 2, 1859,
John Brown was driven
from the jail,
seated on his own coffin,
to the gallows nearby.
The evening
of Brown's execution,
4,000 people crowded
into Boston's Tremont Temple.
Most of them had come to hear
William Lloyd Garrison.
Garrison has to resolve
this tension between clearly
unapologetic armed resistance
and strategy and maneuver
with pacifism and moral suasion.
And you can see, or we can hear,
in that speech that he gives,
he just...
he is truly like a boat
in rough sea,
he's just rocking
back and forth.
I have labored unremittingly
to effect the peaceful abolition
of slavery
by an appeal to the reason and
conscience of the slaveholder;
yet as a peace man,
an "ultra" peace man,
I am prepared to say,
"Success to every slave
insurrection at the South."
When he started his
abolitionist campaign
as a printer,
one could still hope
in the early 1830s
that maybe arranging types
in a case,
stringing words together
into sentences,
publishing articles
against slavery
might persuade the nation
to rid itself of slavery.
But as time goes by, Garrison
begins to be swept along
by the changing events
around him.
I think he recognized that
this was a turning point.
Garrison was confronting
some things that suggested
that the future
was going to take
a very different path
than the past.
Frederick Douglass returned
to the United States
in the spring of 1860,
after Congress decided not
to pursue Brown's accomplices
for fear of creating
more martyrs.
When he arrived,
he found the country
embroiled in a presidential
campaign unlike any other.
The old political alignments
had been destroyed
by the argument over slavery,
and the election was tilting
to the candidate of a new party,
Republican Abraham Lincoln.
Douglass recognizes the
Republican Party for what it is.
It's not an abolitionist party.
It's a free soil party committed
to the nonextension of slavery.
He still sees that
as an enormous triumph
for the abolitionist movement.
Douglass took hope
in Lincoln's candidacy
and publicly endorsed him.
Garrison was too wary
of politics to get involved,
but he did meet quietly with
one of Lincoln's emissaries.
William Herndon assured him
that he and Lincoln
were working to the same end.
The Republican didn't want
Garrison's endorsement.
In fact, any connection
to the controversial printer
would be political poison.
But all the same,
Garrison's continued radicalism
would be a great help
in paving the way
for a moderate
anti-slavery Republican.
Garrison maintained
his distance,
but like every abolitionist,
he wondered where all
this upheaval would lead.
During the last few years,
free colored people
have despaired of their future
in the United States.
They fear that persecution
and hardships
are to grow more and more
grievous with every year.
For this reason they are now,
as never before,
looking out into the world for
a place of retreat and asylum.
In November of 1860, Abraham
Lincoln was elected president
without carrying a single
slaveholding state.
Washington immediately
descended into chaos,
as one Southern state after
another seceded from the Union.
Hoping to pacify the South,
Congress hurriedly passed
a Constitutional amendment
protecting the status
of slavery forever.
Lincoln in his inaugural address
approves and supports
that amendment.
Lincoln also vows to add
even more teeth
to the Fugitive Slave Law.
And Douglass reads this
and says, "I'm outta here."
Frederick Douglass's
faith in America
had endured
through 20 years of slavery
and 20 years
of fruitless struggle.
But for Douglass,
Lincoln's effort to placate
the slave states
was one blow too many.
On the morning
of April 12, 1861,
Frederick Douglass was preparing
to leave the United States.
He and his daughter Rosetta
had booked passage to Haiti,
with an eye to emigrating there
with his family.
Their ship was due to sail
in 13 days.
Father, it's starting!
The war!
I came as fast as I could!
What are you talking about?
Fort Sumter!
They started bombarding it
this morning!
Are you sure?
That's what everyone's saying.
What else did you hear?
The fort's burning.
As soon as I heard it,
I came here.
All right, now...
Tell us everything
you heard, slowly.
They said the Major and his men,
they can't hold out much longer.
The president's going
to call out all the troops now.
It's war for sure,
that's what everyone's saying.
The role that
abolitionists played
in the buildup to the Civil War
was absolutely crucial.
Without the abolitionists,
the Civil War
would not have occurred;
without the abolitionists,
I think that one could say
that slave owners
would have turned
the entire United States
into slave country.
That was what they wanted.
Once the firing happens
on Fort Sumter,
Garrison wraps himself
in the flag,
and like practically
every other abolitionist
endorses the war for the Union
as a war to eliminate slavery.
Garrison, like everybody,
like Douglass,
like all the people that have
been in tremendous conflict
with each other before the war
are in a sense reunited
in the war for the Union.
"Civil war has at last begun.
"A terrible fight
is at this moment going on
between Fort Sumter..."
Frederick Douglass canceled
his trip to Haiti.
We shall stay here and watch
the current of events
and serve the cause of freedom
and humanity
in any way
that shall be open to us.
With the outbreak of war,
abolitionists faced
a daunting new challenge:
convincing the president
and skeptical Northerners
that the conflict was not about
preserving the old Union,
but ending slavery.
At last, the squabbling
abolitionist factions
came together again,
including, above all,
Frederick Douglass
and William Lloyd Garrison.
"Whatever political or personal
differences have divided us,"
Douglass wrote,
"a common goal makes us
forget those differences
and strike at the common foe."
For the first time in years,
Douglass and Garrison
appeared together in public,
and Angelina Grimké reemerged
after 20 years' absence
to form a woman's league.
But victory,
and even an anti-slavery war,
turned out to be
far more elusive
than anyone had expected.
Harriet Beecher Stowe,
who had warned of the evils
of slavery in Uncle Tom's Cabin,
saw the war as
divine retribution.
It was God's will
that the slave mothers,
whose tears nobody regarded,
should have with them
a great company of weepers.
That the Free States,
who refused to listen when they
were told of starvation, cold
and barbarous cruelty
perpetrated on the slave,
should have starvation, cold,
privation and barbarous cruelty
doing its work
among their own sons.
Stowe spoke from experience;
her son Frederick had rushed
to join the colors
in the first days of the war.
Like untold thousands
of young men,
he would never fully recover.
Time and again,
unimaginable slaughter
was eclipsed within months
by something even worse.
The abolitionists' argument
is that all of this blood
and treasure
is going to be wasted
unless slavery dies.
And more and more and more
as the war goes on,
it's a realization
that many, many Northerners
come to share.
Through it all,
Lincoln seemed immovable.
"My paramount object in this
struggle is to save the Union,"
he announced in August of 1862,
"and is not either to save
or destroy slavery."
Many abolitionists lost hope
in the president
when they read reports
of a meeting
at the White House
later that summer.
Lincoln calls in
these five ministers
and he has this back-and-forth
with them;
mostly, he gives them a speech.
He says, "Without the presence
of your people in this country,
we wouldn't even have this war."
He tries to recruit
these black men to lead efforts
to colonize black folk
out of the United States.
Lincoln basically says to them,
"This is a single-race country.
"The best hope for your people
is going to be outside
of this country."
For William Lloyd Garrison
and Frederick Douglass,
it was the last straw.
Just God!
What but the meanest selfishness
stimulates this scheme?
President Lincoln's education
with and among
"the white trash" of Kentucky
was most unfortunate
for his moral development;
so that there seems
to be nothing
elevated and noble
in his character.
Mr. Lincoln is
a genuine representative
of American prejudice
and Negro hatred
and far more concerned
with the preservation of slavery
than for any principle
of justice and humanity.
Then, on the 22nd
of September 1862,
the newspapers brought
astonishing news:
Lincoln was promising to sign
an Emancipation Proclamation
on New Year's Day.
"All persons," Lincoln wrote,
"held as slaves within any State
in rebellion
shall be then, thenceforward
and forever free."
The Proclamation
was the first sign
that the president was moving
by agonizing steps
to a new understanding
of the war.
For Lincoln, the carnage
had become unendurable,
unless it could be given over
to a higher purpose.
Still, Garrison was wary;
Lincoln seemed to be hedging.
In December of 1862, only weeks
before the promised date,
Lincoln presented Congress
with a dramatic peace plan:
if the Southern states
would lay down their arms,
they could keep their slaves
for another 40 years.
Abolitionists were baffled.
In the space of five months,
the president had declared that
the war was not about slavery,
suggested that all black people
should leave the United States,
promised to emancipate
the slaves on January 1,
and finally offered
to let Southerners
keep their slaves until 1900.
Garrison, Douglass
and every other abolitionist
had good reason to wonder
whether Lincoln would ever sign
the Emancipation Proclamation.
New Year's Day 1863
was an anxious vigil.
Tense with anticipation,
Boston's abolitionists made
their way to two gatherings.
At the Music Hall,
William Lloyd Garrison
and Harriet Beecher Stowe
attended a concert
with some of the city's
most distinguished figures.
Boston's black citizens
poured into Tremont Temple
to listen to speakers
and sing hymns.
But Frederick Douglass, the man
everyone had come to hear,
didn't say much of anything
at all.
9:00 became 10:00
and then 11:00,
and still there was no word.
Douglass remembered being unable
to listen to the speakers,
as he kept his eye on the door.
Finally, near midnight, a
messenger rushed onto the stage.
Lincoln had kept his word.
Every enslaved person
in the South
was then, thenceforward
and forever free.
That was in some ways
the turning point
of Frederick Douglass's life,
and certainly the turning point
in the historical life
of African Americans.
A new country,
a new constitution,
a new history is going
to come out of this.
I never saw enthusiasm before.
I never saw joy before.
Henceforth, this day shall take
rank with the Fourth of July.
Henceforth, it becomes the date
of a new and glorious era
in the history
of American liberty.
With the signing of the
Emancipation Proclamation,
the war merged
with the abolitionist cause.
But the Union had to win, or the
proclamation would mean nothing.
The Proclamation had included
an unexpected clause.
At last, black men could enlist
in the armed services
of the United States.
As Douglass said,
Lincoln's "paper Proclamation
must now be made iron,
lead and fire."
Douglass enlisted
two of his sons,
and even William Lloyd Garrison,
the ultra-peace man,
allowed his firstborn
to join the colors.
The Civil War moved Garrison
farther and farther away
from that abstract devotion
to peace principles and pacifism
that he had held
through the years.
When Garrison is forced
to choose,
he chooses abolition
over his peace principles.
For Douglass,
what better symbol of democracy
and of racial equality
is there in the United States
is if the federal
government arms
and gives uniforms
to black soldiers
and tells them
to kill white men.
The one-time radicals
were no longer outsiders.
Garrison, Douglass and Stowe
would each meet the president
at the White House.
Each gave him
their heartfelt support.
Suddenly, abolitionists
are looking prophetic.
They seem now to be having
had anticipated
all of these things
that are happening.
And abolitionists are accorded
a newfound respect
that they had never
experienced before.
But victory was nowhere
in sight.
The slaughter of the first two
years of war was but a prelude.
Hundreds of thousands of men,
white and black,
would be swallowed up
in the abyss.
Yet for Douglass, Garrison
and Stowe,
for millions of slaves
and millions of their
white brethren,
all of the suffering
finally had a new meaning:
victory meant abolition.
If we fail, we shall go down
as we deserve to go down,
as a warning
to all other nations
which shall come after us.
But if we succeed, our glory
as a nation will be complete,
our peace will flow
like a river,
and our foundations will be
the everlasting rocks.
President Lincoln himself
had suggested that Garrison
come to Charleston.
The editor was overwhelmed
as he walked among the ruins
of the once-gracious city.
The news of Robert E. Lee's
surrender at Appomattox
came the day
of Garrison's arrival.
The war was over.
It had been four years
to the day
since federal troops
evacuated Sumter.
Lincoln thought Garrison
should have the honor
of helping raise the flag
over the reconquered fortress.
At Fort Sumter,
Garrison reminisced about the
30-year anti-slavery struggle,
marveling at the transformation
that had taken place.
His reservations about Lincoln
had vanished entirely;
"either he's become
a Garrisonian abolitionist,"
Garrison said, "or I have become
a Lincoln emancipationist,
for we blend together,
like kindred drops, into one."
For his part, a few days earlier
Lincoln had told an admirer
that he had been
"only an instrument"
in the anti-slavery struggle.
As he put it,
"the logic and moral power
of Garrison and the anti-slavery
people" had done it all.
But for Garrison, the real
triumph came the next morning,
at a mass meeting
of freed slaves.
A crowd estimated at 10,000
had gathered outside
the Charleston Citadel.
When Garrison appeared,
the freedmen seized him joyfully
and carried him on their
shoulders around the square.
They then proceeded a few blocks
to Zion's church,
where a mass of humanity
pressed in
to every available spot.
Once Garrison
and the other dignitaries
had been seated at the pulpit,
a black man and his two
daughters approached.
"Sir," he addressed Garrison,
as the church fell silent.
"Here you see your handiwork.
"These children were robbed
from me, and I stood desolate.
"You have restored them to me,
"as you have restored
other mothers,
"fathers, sisters, brothers.
"The greeting that they
would give you
"is almost impossible
for me to express.
Simply, sir, we welcome and look
upon you as our savior."
I have been actively engaged in
this work for almost 40 years,
but I never expected
to look you in the face,
never supposed you would hear
of anything I might do
in your behalf.
I have no language to express
the feelings of my heart.
Lincoln's Emancipation
Proclamation
had freed the slaves,
but it hadn't outlawed
slavery itself anywhere.
That could be accomplished only
by amending the Constitution.
In December of 1865,
the United States was finally
cleansed of its original sin
when the 13th Amendment
was added to the Constitution,
banning slavery in all
the states forever.
For almost four decades,
Garrison had dedicated his life
to this moment.
He had created a movement,
had led it through every
adversity without wavering.
The Liberator had become
not only the most influential
voice of abolition,
but the symbol of its tenacity.
1,803 issues,
every one set by hand,
most by Garrison's own.
And this, Garrison felt,
was a fitting occasion
to print the last.
The post-war years
would be hard;
Garrison, Douglass
and their kindred spirits
protested in vain
as Northern and Southern whites
conspired to keep
the emancipated slaves
in a condition almost
indistinguishable from slavery.
But nothing could entirely
erase the change
that had taken place
in American life.
When Garrison died in 1879
at the age of 73,
Frederick Douglass
was transported
to the days of his youth,
to the days when,
as a newly escaped slave,
he had first heard
William Lloyd Garrison
and thought him the new Moses.
His eulogy was more than
a memorial to one man.
Angelina Grimké
was on her deathbed,
John Brown was in his heaven,
Harriet Beecher Stowe had
withdrawn from public life.
Douglass would write a lament
for the movement they had led,
for their youth,
for the generation that
was passing from the scene.
It was a tribute to fervent
ideals, generosity and love,
to the bitterness
and the passions
that had moved men and women
to bend the arc of history.
The abolitionists
of this country
were never a numerous class.
But lately, death has been busy
in reducing their
already thinned ranks.
Only a few can now tell
from actual experience
something of the darkness and
peril that brooded over the land
when the anti-slavery movement
was born.
Now the brightest and steadiest
of all the shining hosts
of our moral sky
has silently
and peacefully descended
below the distant horizon.
He moved not with the tide,
but against it.
He rose not by the power
of the Church or the State,
but in bold, inflexible
and defiant opposition
to the mighty power of both.
It was the glory of this man
that he could stand alone
with the truth
and calmly await the result.
Now that this man has filled up
the measure of his years,
now that the leaf
has fallen to the ground
as all leaves must fall,
let us guard his memory, let us
try to imitate his virtues
and endeavor as he did
to leave the world freer, nobler
and better than we found it.
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On the evening of July 4, 1854,
an immense crowd gathered
on the Boston Common
to celebrate
the 78th anniversary
of American independence.
There was almost no one left
to remember the Revolution.
As those years
of turmoil and hardship
passed from living memory
into myth,
the Union itself came to seem
ever more precious.
Meanwhile, a few miles
outside the city,
anti-slavery activists
marked the occasion
in a very different spirit.
The government is in the hands
of the party demagogues,
who are the tools
of the Slave Power.
Corruption is general,
constitutional restraints
are as cobwebs;
the representatives are
the betrayers of the people.
William Lloyd Garrison
had been waging war against
slavery for 25 years,
but tonight,
victory seemed inconceivable.
Just a few weeks earlier, the
president of the United States
had sent a massive detachment
of federal troops to Boston,
all to return a lone
runaway slave to captivity.
For Garrison, it was yet more
proof that the Republic itself
had been corrupted at birth,
its original sin implanted
in a founding document
written largely by slaveholders.
And this,
the Constitution
of the United States of America,
is the source and parent
of all the other atrocities,
a covenant with death
and an agreement with hell.
So perish all compromises
with tyranny!
And let all the people say,
"Amen."
Amen!
And let all the people say,
"Amen."
Amen!
And let all the people say,
"Amen."
Amen!
Garrison had launched
his crusade in 1829.
Since then, the slave population
of the United States
had doubled to four million.
The Compromise of 1850
had strengthened
the grip of slaveholders
over the federal government
and introduced the notorious
Fugitive Slave Law.
And now a new battleground
was opening up
on America's western frontier.
Northerners and Southerners
had come to believe
that the nation's destiny
would be determined there,
as new territories
were admitted to the Union
as either slave or free states.
In 1855, the flashpoint
was Kansas.
Partisans on each side
of the struggle
perceived a mortal threat:
whichever way Kansas went,
the territories further west
would likely go the same way.
Congress had decided
to let the settlers in Kansas
decide the question
for themselves.
The result was mayhem.
In the summer of 1855,
Kansas has really become
the front line
in the conflict over slavery.
Pro-slavery forces
really have the upper hand.
They're bullying
and intimidating
and sometimes killing
Northern settlers.
Many abolitionists wondered
if their pacifist ideals
were misguided...
Whether the conflict had entered
a new and violent phase.
One of them had no doubt.
John Brown had never put
much stock
in Garrison's talk
of peace and persuasion;
"milk and water abolitionism,"
he called it.
And now, at last, John Brown was
on his way to war in Kansas.
Over the years,
Brown had attracted a network
of abolitionist supporters.
As he headed west from his home
in upstate New York,
he collected money and weapons
for the fight.
Among those who contributed
was the most famous black man
in America,
the ex-slave Frederick Douglass.
"While I will continue to write
and speak against slavery,"
Douglass wrote,
"I have become less hopeful
of its peaceful abolition.
I welcome any new mode of attack
upon the slave system."
Brown is almost a battering ram
of a human being.
He has a moral strength
and clarity
that cuts through the cant
about slavery.
And I think
this is very appealing
to anti-slavery Northerners
who are really giving up almost
on the political system
and on nonviolent resistance.
By the time Brown left Ohio
for the last leg of the journey
to eastern Kansas,
he had gathered
a formidable arsenal
of rifles, pistols
and broadswords.
"We believe the great victory
will follow before long,"
he wrote home to his wife.
But John Brown's long and bloody
struggle was just beginning.
On the 21st of May 1856,
a posse of 800 Southerners
surrounded the free soil capital
of Lawrence, Kansas.
They flew a blood-red flag
on which was inscribed
"Southern Rights."
Over the course of the day,
they sacked the town
while the inhabitants fled.
News of the guerrilla war
flaring in Kansas
became the talk of the nation.
Northerners began sending
clothing and food
to the embattled
free-soil settlers.
In Washington, anti-slavery
senator Charles Sumner
decried the spread of slavery
to Kansas
and accused Southerners
of "raping and plundering
the virgin territory."
South Carolina Congressman
Preston Brooks took offense.
On the floor
of the United States Senate,
Brooks beat Sumner with the gold
head of his heavy cane
as Sumner struggled
to free himself from his desk.
Finally,
blinded by his own blood,
Sumner collapsed into the aisle
and lost consciousness.
Brooks continued beating him
until his cane broke.
Sumner would never
fully recover.
Newspapers across the South
celebrated the assault,
but when news of the incident
reached John Brown's
encampment in Kansas,
he and his followers
were enraged.
When someone urged caution,
Brown replied,
"Caution, caution...
It is nothing but the word
of cowardice."
On the night of May 24, 1856,
Brown and four of his sons
dragged five pro-slavery men
from their cabins
and hacked them to pieces
with broadswords.
Brown is not simply
evening the score in Kansas.
He's really also trying
to strike terror into the hearts
of pro-slavery settlers.
This is God's punishment.
This is not the punishment
of man.
They're not going to be hung.
They're going to be murdered,
they're going to be butchered,
because that's
Old Testament retribution.
Pottawatomie scares but also
enrages pro-slavery forces,
who don't need much incitement
to violence.
They've already been
committing it.
And now it's let loose
the dogs of war.
It's at this point that Kansas
becomes known as
Bleeding Kansas.
After the massacre,
Brown and his followers
hid out in the wilderness,
resurfacing occasionally
to battle pro-slavery forces.
At the beginning
of October 1856,
he left Kansas for the East to
gather more money and weapons.
It was on a covert swing
through Boston
that John Brown finally met
William Lloyd Garrison
for the first time.
The pacifist printer
chastised Brown
for his role
in the Pottawatomie killings
and insisted that nonviolence
was still the only path
to victory.
Garrison would have been
even more wary
had he known the full extent
of Brown's plans.
"I will carry the war into
Africa," Brown had told his son.
"Africa" was their code word
for the slave-holding South.
On the morning of March 7, 1857,
the papers brought
stunning news.
Out of the blue, the Supreme
Court had radically altered
not just the battle
over slavery,
but the status of every
black person in America.
The case had seemed
inconsequential.
A Missouri slave
named Dred Scott
wanted the court to set him free
because his master had taken him
to live in Illinois
and then Wisconsin Territory,
where slavery was illegal.
Chief Justice Roger Taney
saw the case as an opportunity
to settle the question
of slavery once and for all.
In a sweeping decision,
Taney ruled that Congress
had no authority
to prevent the spread
of slavery to the territories.
Most ominously for free blacks
like Frederick Douglass,
Taney wrote that
blacks were "so far inferior
they had no rights which the
white man was bound to respect,"
and that any free black "might
lawfully be reduced to slavery
for his benefit."
The Dred Scott decision had the
potential to legalize slavery
everywhere in the United States.
In effect, it turns the entire
country into a slave nation.
So many abolitionists
after Dred Scott said,
"You see, we've been telling you
for decades
"that there's a Slave Power
conspiracy out there
"of presidents, Supreme Court
members, of Congresspeople,
"of bankers, of ship owners
"to not only preserve but expand
this system of slavery
"until it dominates every aspect
of American society
and economy,"
and now here's
the Supreme Court saying
slavery has an eternal future
in the United States.
The decision hung like a pall
over the abolitionist movement,
casting Douglass, most of all,
into a deep depression.
With an earnest aching heart,
I have long looked
for the realization
of the hope of my people.
I have sought in my humble way
to see in the distance
the white flags of freedom,
the time at which the cruel
bondage of my people should end.
But of that time,
I can know nothing
and you can know nothing.
All is uncertain.
It was with a sense
of foreboding and hopelessness
that Frederick Douglass
responded to an urgent summons
in August of 1859
from his old friend John Brown.
Together with Shields Green,
a fugitive he had befriended
in Rochester,
Douglass quietly made his way
to a stone quarry
at Chambersburg, Pennsylvania.
Mr. Douglass!
Captain Brown.
I would never
have known you, sir!
Our time has come.
Brown was secretly encamped
at a nearby farmhouse
with 22 recruits.
I had hoped for more men,
of course.
But I believe we have enough
to achieve our ends,
with your help.
What end is that?
Well, sir...
In one stroke,
we shall rouse this nation.
We will deal the Slave Power
such a blow
it shall never recover.
All with 22 men?
It takes one spark
to light a fire.
We are the spark that will
set this country ablaze.
But how?
The armory at Harper's Ferry.
Good Lord, man.
You can't be serious.
A hundred thousand rifles...
What will 22 men do with
a hundred thousand rifles?
As I said, the spark.
We are but the spark.
There are four million men
in bondage
who will fly to our banner.
Not immediately, of course,
but even a few thousand slaves
in this vicinity
will fly to our aid...
Douglass expected Brown to
unveil a mission to free slaves
and funnel them north
along the mountains to freedom.
But when he gets
to the stone quarry,
Brown presents
a very different plan.
I know.
My friend, I have been over this
a thousand times.
I can assure you...
And I can assure you
that you will be walking
into a perfect steel trap...
He's talking about invading the
South and occupying the South
and taking over the South,
you know,
sort of building this republic
out one mile at a time,
and that republic
is going to be a new country.
It will kill you.
And it will serve no purpose.
There will be a bloodbath.
Without the shedding of blood,
there is no remission of sin,
Douglass.
Douglass spends two days
trying to convince John Brown
not to raid Harper's Ferry.
Brown spends the same amount of
time trying to convince Douglass
to go to Harper's Ferry with him
to be his right-hand man.
My friend, the world
will remember what we do here.
How do you want the world
to remember you?
How do you want your children
to remember you?
I don't want them to remember me
as throwing my life away
for nothing.
Captain...
It pains me more than you
will know to leave you.
Mr. Green.
You have heard Mr. Brown.
What will you do?
I believe I'll go
with the old man.
Come with me, Douglass.
I will defend you with my life.
I want you
for a special purpose.
When I strike,
the bees will begin to swarm,
and I shall want you
to help hive them.
Frederick Douglass
returned home alone.
The decision to leave Brown
would haunt him
for the rest of his life.
On the night of October 16,
1859, John Brown and his men
seized the federal armory
at Harper's Ferry,
taking several hostages.
But over the course
of the following day,
they were overwhelmed as every
able-bodied man in the area
grabbed a gun
and raced into town.
Within 24 hours, half of Brown's
men were dead or dying.
He and four of the survivors,
including Shields Green,
were trapped in an engine-house
at the armory.
By this time, a company
of U.S. Marines had arrived
under the command
of Colonel Robert E. Lee.
Fragmentary reports
of the uprising spread
across the country.
In Boston,
William Lloyd Garrison
wondered whether Brown
was involved.
In Philadelphia, Frederick
Douglass knew all too well.
It so happened that I was
speaking to a large audience
in National Hall.
The announcement came upon us
with the startling effect
of an earthquake.
It was something to make
the boldest hold his breath.
The sensation Douglass felt
at that moment was,
"Oh God, what comes now?
"Oh God,
they'll be after all of us.
What sort of bloodbath
may flow from this?"
His own life was at risk now.
At dawn, the Marines
stormed the engine house,
capturing Brown
and his surviving men.
Investigators seeking a link
to the abolitionists
found what they needed
in Brown's papers:
an innocuous note
signed by Frederick Douglass
two years earlier,
inviting Brown to dinner.
It was all they needed.
Douglass suddenly becomes
the most wanted man
in the United States.
He hides out at a friend's place
in Philadelphia,
and in fact he finds out
from the telegraph operator
in Philadelphia
that the president
of the United States on down
has put out the equivalent
of an all-points bulletin.
All the feds are now
scouring the country
for Frederick Douglass.
Douglass hurriedly
made his way north,
his panic mounting
as he realized
that his fellow passengers
were reading newspaper reports
calling for his arrest.
He telegraphed ahead
with instructions
to destroy the contents
of his desk.
Miraculously,
Douglass made it to Rochester,
where he boarded
a boat to Canada.
The next day, Douglass heard
that federal marshals
had arrived at his home,
hot on his trail.
But he was out of their reach.
Douglass was wanted more than
any of the other conspirators
in John Brown's raid
because Douglass
was a black man.
John Brown was almost killed
when the Marines
stormed the engine house.
He had to be carried
from his jail cell
to a cot that was set up
in the courtroom.
Nevertheless, Brown dominated
the proceedings.
He stands up without notes
and gives one of the greatest
speeches in American history.
Brown in simple, direct,
powerful language
basically put his accusers
on trial.
Had I interfered in behalf
of the rich, the powerful,
the intelligent,
the so-called great,
every man in this court
would have deemed it an act
worthy of reward
rather than punishment.
Now, if it is deemed necessary
that I should forfeit my life
for the furtherance
of the ends of justice
and mingle my blood further
with the blood of my children,
I submit.
Shields Green
and the other captives
had already been sentenced
to hang.
There could be little doubt
that Brown would follow them.
From his jail cell,
Brown kept up a stream
of correspondence and interviews
which were breathlessly reported
throughout the North.
This guy's just led a raid
to destroy slavery.
They have killed people, and not
the first people he's killed.
And he's suddenly become
famously depicted in art,
wearing these sort of
evening slippers
with this long, peaceful,
old patriarch beard,
and he's the abolitionist
grandfather
you wish you had.
Brown was absolutely a genius
at working the press,
at giving interviews,
at talking to people
and turning himself
into as fully committed
a Christian sacrificial lamb
on the altar of slavery
as he could possibly be.
You have the Northern
establishment,
every newspaper, saying,
"This guy's a hero.
He's a saint."
How can Southerners
look at that and say,
"Oh, these guys are good
negotiating partners.
We're going to be able to sort
the slavery problem out."
What Brown has done ultimately
is just to expose
the depth of the divide
between North and South.
And after that point, that
divide can never be bridged.
On the morning
of December 2, 1859,
John Brown was driven
from the jail,
seated on his own coffin,
to the gallows nearby.
The evening
of Brown's execution,
4,000 people crowded
into Boston's Tremont Temple.
Most of them had come to hear
William Lloyd Garrison.
Garrison has to resolve
this tension between clearly
unapologetic armed resistance
and strategy and maneuver
with pacifism and moral suasion.
And you can see, or we can hear,
in that speech that he gives,
he just...
he is truly like a boat
in rough sea,
he's just rocking
back and forth.
I have labored unremittingly
to effect the peaceful abolition
of slavery
by an appeal to the reason and
conscience of the slaveholder;
yet as a peace man,
an "ultra" peace man,
I am prepared to say,
"Success to every slave
insurrection at the South."
When he started his
abolitionist campaign
as a printer,
one could still hope
in the early 1830s
that maybe arranging types
in a case,
stringing words together
into sentences,
publishing articles
against slavery
might persuade the nation
to rid itself of slavery.
But as time goes by, Garrison
begins to be swept along
by the changing events
around him.
I think he recognized that
this was a turning point.
Garrison was confronting
some things that suggested
that the future
was going to take
a very different path
than the past.
Frederick Douglass returned
to the United States
in the spring of 1860,
after Congress decided not
to pursue Brown's accomplices
for fear of creating
more martyrs.
When he arrived,
he found the country
embroiled in a presidential
campaign unlike any other.
The old political alignments
had been destroyed
by the argument over slavery,
and the election was tilting
to the candidate of a new party,
Republican Abraham Lincoln.
Douglass recognizes the
Republican Party for what it is.
It's not an abolitionist party.
It's a free soil party committed
to the nonextension of slavery.
He still sees that
as an enormous triumph
for the abolitionist movement.
Douglass took hope
in Lincoln's candidacy
and publicly endorsed him.
Garrison was too wary
of politics to get involved,
but he did meet quietly with
one of Lincoln's emissaries.
William Herndon assured him
that he and Lincoln
were working to the same end.
The Republican didn't want
Garrison's endorsement.
In fact, any connection
to the controversial printer
would be political poison.
But all the same,
Garrison's continued radicalism
would be a great help
in paving the way
for a moderate
anti-slavery Republican.
Garrison maintained
his distance,
but like every abolitionist,
he wondered where all
this upheaval would lead.
During the last few years,
free colored people
have despaired of their future
in the United States.
They fear that persecution
and hardships
are to grow more and more
grievous with every year.
For this reason they are now,
as never before,
looking out into the world for
a place of retreat and asylum.
In November of 1860, Abraham
Lincoln was elected president
without carrying a single
slaveholding state.
Washington immediately
descended into chaos,
as one Southern state after
another seceded from the Union.
Hoping to pacify the South,
Congress hurriedly passed
a Constitutional amendment
protecting the status
of slavery forever.
Lincoln in his inaugural address
approves and supports
that amendment.
Lincoln also vows to add
even more teeth
to the Fugitive Slave Law.
And Douglass reads this
and says, "I'm outta here."
Frederick Douglass's
faith in America
had endured
through 20 years of slavery
and 20 years
of fruitless struggle.
But for Douglass,
Lincoln's effort to placate
the slave states
was one blow too many.
On the morning
of April 12, 1861,
Frederick Douglass was preparing
to leave the United States.
He and his daughter Rosetta
had booked passage to Haiti,
with an eye to emigrating there
with his family.
Their ship was due to sail
in 13 days.
Father, it's starting!
The war!
I came as fast as I could!
What are you talking about?
Fort Sumter!
They started bombarding it
this morning!
Are you sure?
That's what everyone's saying.
What else did you hear?
The fort's burning.
As soon as I heard it,
I came here.
All right, now...
Tell us everything
you heard, slowly.
They said the Major and his men,
they can't hold out much longer.
The president's going
to call out all the troops now.
It's war for sure,
that's what everyone's saying.
The role that
abolitionists played
in the buildup to the Civil War
was absolutely crucial.
Without the abolitionists,
the Civil War
would not have occurred;
without the abolitionists,
I think that one could say
that slave owners
would have turned
the entire United States
into slave country.
That was what they wanted.
Once the firing happens
on Fort Sumter,
Garrison wraps himself
in the flag,
and like practically
every other abolitionist
endorses the war for the Union
as a war to eliminate slavery.
Garrison, like everybody,
like Douglass,
like all the people that have
been in tremendous conflict
with each other before the war
are in a sense reunited
in the war for the Union.
"Civil war has at last begun.
"A terrible fight
is at this moment going on
between Fort Sumter..."
Frederick Douglass canceled
his trip to Haiti.
We shall stay here and watch
the current of events
and serve the cause of freedom
and humanity
in any way
that shall be open to us.
With the outbreak of war,
abolitionists faced
a daunting new challenge:
convincing the president
and skeptical Northerners
that the conflict was not about
preserving the old Union,
but ending slavery.
At last, the squabbling
abolitionist factions
came together again,
including, above all,
Frederick Douglass
and William Lloyd Garrison.
"Whatever political or personal
differences have divided us,"
Douglass wrote,
"a common goal makes us
forget those differences
and strike at the common foe."
For the first time in years,
Douglass and Garrison
appeared together in public,
and Angelina Grimké reemerged
after 20 years' absence
to form a woman's league.
But victory,
and even an anti-slavery war,
turned out to be
far more elusive
than anyone had expected.
Harriet Beecher Stowe,
who had warned of the evils
of slavery in Uncle Tom's Cabin,
saw the war as
divine retribution.
It was God's will
that the slave mothers,
whose tears nobody regarded,
should have with them
a great company of weepers.
That the Free States,
who refused to listen when they
were told of starvation, cold
and barbarous cruelty
perpetrated on the slave,
should have starvation, cold,
privation and barbarous cruelty
doing its work
among their own sons.
Stowe spoke from experience;
her son Frederick had rushed
to join the colors
in the first days of the war.
Like untold thousands
of young men,
he would never fully recover.
Time and again,
unimaginable slaughter
was eclipsed within months
by something even worse.
The abolitionists' argument
is that all of this blood
and treasure
is going to be wasted
unless slavery dies.
And more and more and more
as the war goes on,
it's a realization
that many, many Northerners
come to share.
Through it all,
Lincoln seemed immovable.
"My paramount object in this
struggle is to save the Union,"
he announced in August of 1862,
"and is not either to save
or destroy slavery."
Many abolitionists lost hope
in the president
when they read reports
of a meeting
at the White House
later that summer.
Lincoln calls in
these five ministers
and he has this back-and-forth
with them;
mostly, he gives them a speech.
He says, "Without the presence
of your people in this country,
we wouldn't even have this war."
He tries to recruit
these black men to lead efforts
to colonize black folk
out of the United States.
Lincoln basically says to them,
"This is a single-race country.
"The best hope for your people
is going to be outside
of this country."
For William Lloyd Garrison
and Frederick Douglass,
it was the last straw.
Just God!
What but the meanest selfishness
stimulates this scheme?
President Lincoln's education
with and among
"the white trash" of Kentucky
was most unfortunate
for his moral development;
so that there seems
to be nothing
elevated and noble
in his character.
Mr. Lincoln is
a genuine representative
of American prejudice
and Negro hatred
and far more concerned
with the preservation of slavery
than for any principle
of justice and humanity.
Then, on the 22nd
of September 1862,
the newspapers brought
astonishing news:
Lincoln was promising to sign
an Emancipation Proclamation
on New Year's Day.
"All persons," Lincoln wrote,
"held as slaves within any State
in rebellion
shall be then, thenceforward
and forever free."
The Proclamation
was the first sign
that the president was moving
by agonizing steps
to a new understanding
of the war.
For Lincoln, the carnage
had become unendurable,
unless it could be given over
to a higher purpose.
Still, Garrison was wary;
Lincoln seemed to be hedging.
In December of 1862, only weeks
before the promised date,
Lincoln presented Congress
with a dramatic peace plan:
if the Southern states
would lay down their arms,
they could keep their slaves
for another 40 years.
Abolitionists were baffled.
In the space of five months,
the president had declared that
the war was not about slavery,
suggested that all black people
should leave the United States,
promised to emancipate
the slaves on January 1,
and finally offered
to let Southerners
keep their slaves until 1900.
Garrison, Douglass
and every other abolitionist
had good reason to wonder
whether Lincoln would ever sign
the Emancipation Proclamation.
New Year's Day 1863
was an anxious vigil.
Tense with anticipation,
Boston's abolitionists made
their way to two gatherings.
At the Music Hall,
William Lloyd Garrison
and Harriet Beecher Stowe
attended a concert
with some of the city's
most distinguished figures.
Boston's black citizens
poured into Tremont Temple
to listen to speakers
and sing hymns.
But Frederick Douglass, the man
everyone had come to hear,
didn't say much of anything
at all.
9:00 became 10:00
and then 11:00,
and still there was no word.
Douglass remembered being unable
to listen to the speakers,
as he kept his eye on the door.
Finally, near midnight, a
messenger rushed onto the stage.
Lincoln had kept his word.
Every enslaved person
in the South
was then, thenceforward
and forever free.
That was in some ways
the turning point
of Frederick Douglass's life,
and certainly the turning point
in the historical life
of African Americans.
A new country,
a new constitution,
a new history is going
to come out of this.
I never saw enthusiasm before.
I never saw joy before.
Henceforth, this day shall take
rank with the Fourth of July.
Henceforth, it becomes the date
of a new and glorious era
in the history
of American liberty.
With the signing of the
Emancipation Proclamation,
the war merged
with the abolitionist cause.
But the Union had to win, or the
proclamation would mean nothing.
The Proclamation had included
an unexpected clause.
At last, black men could enlist
in the armed services
of the United States.
As Douglass said,
Lincoln's "paper Proclamation
must now be made iron,
lead and fire."
Douglass enlisted
two of his sons,
and even William Lloyd Garrison,
the ultra-peace man,
allowed his firstborn
to join the colors.
The Civil War moved Garrison
farther and farther away
from that abstract devotion
to peace principles and pacifism
that he had held
through the years.
When Garrison is forced
to choose,
he chooses abolition
over his peace principles.
For Douglass,
what better symbol of democracy
and of racial equality
is there in the United States
is if the federal
government arms
and gives uniforms
to black soldiers
and tells them
to kill white men.
The one-time radicals
were no longer outsiders.
Garrison, Douglass and Stowe
would each meet the president
at the White House.
Each gave him
their heartfelt support.
Suddenly, abolitionists
are looking prophetic.
They seem now to be having
had anticipated
all of these things
that are happening.
And abolitionists are accorded
a newfound respect
that they had never
experienced before.
But victory was nowhere
in sight.
The slaughter of the first two
years of war was but a prelude.
Hundreds of thousands of men,
white and black,
would be swallowed up
in the abyss.
Yet for Douglass, Garrison
and Stowe,
for millions of slaves
and millions of their
white brethren,
all of the suffering
finally had a new meaning:
victory meant abolition.
If we fail, we shall go down
as we deserve to go down,
as a warning
to all other nations
which shall come after us.
But if we succeed, our glory
as a nation will be complete,
our peace will flow
like a river,
and our foundations will be
the everlasting rocks.
President Lincoln himself
had suggested that Garrison
come to Charleston.
The editor was overwhelmed
as he walked among the ruins
of the once-gracious city.
The news of Robert E. Lee's
surrender at Appomattox
came the day
of Garrison's arrival.
The war was over.
It had been four years
to the day
since federal troops
evacuated Sumter.
Lincoln thought Garrison
should have the honor
of helping raise the flag
over the reconquered fortress.
At Fort Sumter,
Garrison reminisced about the
30-year anti-slavery struggle,
marveling at the transformation
that had taken place.
His reservations about Lincoln
had vanished entirely;
"either he's become
a Garrisonian abolitionist,"
Garrison said, "or I have become
a Lincoln emancipationist,
for we blend together,
like kindred drops, into one."
For his part, a few days earlier
Lincoln had told an admirer
that he had been
"only an instrument"
in the anti-slavery struggle.
As he put it,
"the logic and moral power
of Garrison and the anti-slavery
people" had done it all.
But for Garrison, the real
triumph came the next morning,
at a mass meeting
of freed slaves.
A crowd estimated at 10,000
had gathered outside
the Charleston Citadel.
When Garrison appeared,
the freedmen seized him joyfully
and carried him on their
shoulders around the square.
They then proceeded a few blocks
to Zion's church,
where a mass of humanity
pressed in
to every available spot.
Once Garrison
and the other dignitaries
had been seated at the pulpit,
a black man and his two
daughters approached.
"Sir," he addressed Garrison,
as the church fell silent.
"Here you see your handiwork.
"These children were robbed
from me, and I stood desolate.
"You have restored them to me,
"as you have restored
other mothers,
"fathers, sisters, brothers.
"The greeting that they
would give you
"is almost impossible
for me to express.
Simply, sir, we welcome and look
upon you as our savior."
I have been actively engaged in
this work for almost 40 years,
but I never expected
to look you in the face,
never supposed you would hear
of anything I might do
in your behalf.
I have no language to express
the feelings of my heart.
Lincoln's Emancipation
Proclamation
had freed the slaves,
but it hadn't outlawed
slavery itself anywhere.
That could be accomplished only
by amending the Constitution.
In December of 1865,
the United States was finally
cleansed of its original sin
when the 13th Amendment
was added to the Constitution,
banning slavery in all
the states forever.
For almost four decades,
Garrison had dedicated his life
to this moment.
He had created a movement,
had led it through every
adversity without wavering.
The Liberator had become
not only the most influential
voice of abolition,
but the symbol of its tenacity.
1,803 issues,
every one set by hand,
most by Garrison's own.
And this, Garrison felt,
was a fitting occasion
to print the last.
The post-war years
would be hard;
Garrison, Douglass
and their kindred spirits
protested in vain
as Northern and Southern whites
conspired to keep
the emancipated slaves
in a condition almost
indistinguishable from slavery.
But nothing could entirely
erase the change
that had taken place
in American life.
When Garrison died in 1879
at the age of 73,
Frederick Douglass
was transported
to the days of his youth,
to the days when,
as a newly escaped slave,
he had first heard
William Lloyd Garrison
and thought him the new Moses.
His eulogy was more than
a memorial to one man.
Angelina Grimké
was on her deathbed,
John Brown was in his heaven,
Harriet Beecher Stowe had
withdrawn from public life.
Douglass would write a lament
for the movement they had led,
for their youth,
for the generation that
was passing from the scene.
It was a tribute to fervent
ideals, generosity and love,
to the bitterness
and the passions
that had moved men and women
to bend the arc of history.
The abolitionists
of this country
were never a numerous class.
But lately, death has been busy
in reducing their
already thinned ranks.
Only a few can now tell
from actual experience
something of the darkness and
peril that brooded over the land
when the anti-slavery movement
was born.
Now the brightest and steadiest
of all the shining hosts
of our moral sky
has silently
and peacefully descended
below the distant horizon.
He moved not with the tide,
but against it.
He rose not by the power
of the Church or the State,
but in bold, inflexible
and defiant opposition
to the mighty power of both.
It was the glory of this man
that he could stand alone
with the truth
and calmly await the result.
Now that this man has filled up
the measure of his years,
now that the leaf
has fallen to the ground
as all leaves must fall,
let us guard his memory, let us
try to imitate his virtues
and endeavor as he did
to leave the world freer, nobler
and better than we found it.
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