Frederick Douglass, “The Mission of the War. Delivered in Concert Hall: Philadelphia, 1863” Source: The Frederick Douglass Papers at the Library of Congress. Delivered repeatedly as a lecture during the winter of 1863–1864. Ladies and Gentlemen: By the mission of the war, I mean nothing occult, nothing difficult to understand; but simply the accomplishment of those great changes in the condition of the American people, which are demanded by the situation of the country, and involved in the nature of the war, and which, if the war is conducted in accordance with sound principles, it is naturally and logically fitted to accomplish. Speaking in the name of Providence, some men tell us that slavery is already dead; that the first gun fired at Sumter, put an end to slavery. This may be so, but I do not share the confidence with which it is asserted. In a grand crisis like this, I prefer to look facts squarely in the face, and accept their verdict. I shall do this whether it shall bless or blast me. I look for no miracle to abolish slavery. The war looms before me simply as a grand National opportunity, which may be improved to National salvation, or neglected to National destruction. I hope much from the skill and bravery of our armies, but vain is the might of armies, if they fail to profit by experience, and refuse to listen to the suggestions of wisdom and justice. The hopeful fact of the hour is, that we are now in a salutary school, the school of affliction. If sharp and signal and wide-sweeping and overwhelming retribution, long delayed and long protracted, can teach a great nation respect for the cruelly despised and neglected claims of justice, surely we shall be taught now and for all time to come. But if on the other hand, this school of affliction, this potent teacher, whose lessons are written in characters of blood, and thundered in our ears from the blazing cannons [sic] mouth, shall fail, we shall go down, as we deserve to go down, a warning to all other nations which shall come after us. It is less pleasant to contemplate the present hour as one of danger, than to contemplate it as one of security and safety, but it may be wiser to consider the danger and warn men against it. The acorn involves the oak, but the commonest accident may destroy its potential character, and defeat its natural destiny. One wave brings a treasure from the briny deep, but another often sweeps it back to its primal depths. The saying that revolutions never go backward must be taken with limitations. The revolution of 1848 was one of the grandest that ever dazzled a gazing world. It sent Louis Philippe into exile; upset the French throne; inaugurated a glorious republic; and shook every throne in Europe, — but was followed by reaction. Looking on from a distance, the friends of democratic Liberty saw in the convulsion, the death of king craft in Europe. Great was their

disappointment. Almost in the twinkling of an eye the latent forces of despotism rallied. The Republic disappeared. Her noblest defenders were sent into exile, and the hopes of Constitutional liberty were blasted in the very moment of their bloom! Politics and perfidy proved, in that contest, too strong for the principles of justice and liberty. I wish I could say that no such liabilities darken the horizon around us. But this example is too recent and the case too plain for such a conclusion. The same elements are involved here as there, and although the portents indicate that we shall flourish, it is too much to assume that we are out of danger. The price of liberty is eternal vigilence. [sic] Our destiny is not taken out of our own hands, and it will not do to shuffle off our responsibilities upon the shoulders of Providence. We are now wading deep into the third year of conflict with a fierce and sanguinary rebellion: one which one of our most sagacious political prophets[1] assured us at its beginning, would end in less than ninety days. We are struggling with a rebellion which, in its worst features, stands alone among rebellions; which in its solitary and ghastly horror is without parallel in the history of any nation, ancient or modern; a rebellion inspired by no love of liberty and no hatred of oppression, and therefore indefensible upon any moral or social grounds; a rebellion which openly and shamelessly sets at defiance the worlds [sic] judgment of right and wrongs, appeals from light to darkness, from intelligence to ignorance, from the ever increasing prospects and blessings of a high civilization to the cold and withering blast of a naked barbarism; a rebellion which draws all its assistance and power from a system of bondage, too inhuman, too monstrous, and too indecent to be described, and of which sensitive and just minds can only think with horror; a rebellion which, even at this unfinished stage, counts its slain, not by thousands nor by tens of thousands, but by hundreds of thousands; a rebellion which, in the destruction of human life and property, rivals the earth-quake, the whirlwind, and the pestilence that walketh in darkness; a rebellion which, in two short years, has planted the bitterest agony at a million hearth-stones, thronged our streets with weeds of mourning, filled our land with mere stumps of men, ridged our soil with two hundred thousand rudely formed graves, and mantled it all over as with the shadow of death; a rebellion which has arrested the wheels of industry, checked the peaceful commerce of the world, and piled up a frightful debt, heavier than a mountain of gold, to weigh down the necks of our childrens [sic] children; a rebellion which has blasted the hopes of European democracy, given joy to tyrants, brought ruin at home, and contempt abroad: which has cooled our friends, heated our enemies, and endangered the very existence of this great Nation! Now for what is all this desolation, ruin, shame, and sorrow? Here is the answer: It has been given a hundred times, and it has never been denied, by the only men who could have denied it, were it deniable. Less than half a million of Southern slaveholders, holding in bondage four millions of slaves, [changed from dash to comma] finding themselves out-voted in the effort to get possession of the United States Government, have now resorted to the sword. They have undertaken for the preservation of slavery, to accomplish by bullets what they failed to do by ballots. It should be remarked here, that this rebellion was not originally intended to be a war for secession, but a war for subversion; a war to supplant a Republican Government by a

slaveholding Oligarchy. Its aim was not Richmond but Washington, — not the South merely, but the whole United States. Whence came the guilty ambition equal to this atrocious crime? From Slavery! Slavery, that robs the slave of his manhood, and the master of his just consideration for the rights and happiness of his fellow-men; which pays for labor by covering the laborers [sic] back with bloody stripes, has prepared the guilty slave-holder for all the infernal concomitants of this terrible war. But for this curse of curses, the internal peace of this great country had flowed on for the next half century as it flowed on through the last half century. From no source less foul and wicked than slavery, could such a rebellion come. No argument is needed at this point. The country knows the story by heart. I am one of those who think that this rebellion, inaugurated and carried on for a cause so unspeakably guilty, is quite enough for the whole lifetime of any Nation, even though that lifetime cover the space of a thousand years. We cannot want a repetition of it. Looking at the matter from no higher ground than patriotism, and setting aside the high conditions of justice and liberty, the American people,—let the war cost little or much; let its duration be short or long,— should resolve as one man, that this rebellion shall be the last slave-holding rebellion that shall ever curse the shores of America. The work now begun should suffer no pause till it is done, Now And Forever. I know that many are appalled and disappointed by the apparently interminable character of this war. I am neither appalled nor disappointed by this feature of the contest. Without pretending to any higher wisdom than other men, I knew well enough, and often said it, that if once the north and the south confronted each other on the battle field, the contest would be fierce, long and bloody; and the longer the better, if it must be so, in order to put an end to the hell black cause out of which the rebellion has risen. Say not that I am indifferent to the horrors of war. In common with the American people generally, I feel this prolongation of the war to be a heavy calamity, private as well as public. There are vacant places at my hearthstone, which I shall rejoice to see filled again by the boys who once occupied them, but which must remain sadly vacant while war shall last; and, possibly, forever; for my sons enlisted for the entire war![ii] But even from the length of this war, we, who mourn over it, may draw some consolation, when we reflect on the vastness and grandeur of its mission. The world has witnessed many struggles, and history records and perpetuates their memory, but never was one nobler and grander than that which the loyal people of this country are now maintaining against the slaveholders rebellion. In the long chain of human events; in the allotments and destinies of nations, we seem to have been especially chosen to strike this last blow to releive [sic] the world of slavery. We stand in our place today and wage war, not merely for our selves, but for the whole world; not for this generation, but for unborn generations, and for all time. We are writing the statutes of eternal justice and liberty, in the blood of tyrants, as a warning to all future cruel ambition. Ours is a high mission. Let us not mourn over it, but rather rejoice that we have in any measure been able to answer the high demands of this mighty crisis.

It is true that the war seems long. But this very slow progress is essential to its effectiveness. As in tardy convalescence of some patients, the fault is less due to the treatment than to the nature of the disease. We were in a very low condition before the remedy could be applied. We had been dragged nearly to death by pro-slavery compromises. A radical change was needed in the morals and manners of the people. Nothing is better calculated to make this change than the slow and steady progress of the war. I know that this idea is not consoling to the peace Democracy.[iii] I was not sent, and have not come, to console that branch of the political church. To them, this grand moral revolution in the mind and heart of the nation, is the most distressing attribute of the war. In view of it they howl like certain characters of whom we read who thought themselves tormented before their time. In utter helplessness, they charge that this war is no longer waged on Constitutional principles. They charge that it was not intended to establish the Union as it was! They charge that this is a war for the subjugation of the south, a war for the overthrow of Southern Institutions: in a word, an abolition war. For one, I am not careful to deny this charge; but it is instructive to observe how it is brought, and how it is not. Both warn us of danger. Why is the war fiercely denounced as an abolition war? I answer, because the nation has long and bitterly hated abolition, and the enemies of the war confidently rely upon this hatred, to serve the ends of treason. Why do the loyal people deny the charge? I answer because they know that abolition, though now a vast power, is still odious. But the charge and the denial tell how the people despise the only measure that can save the country. An abolition war! Well, let us thank the Democracy for teaching us this word. The charge, in a comprehensive sense, is true, and it is not a pity that it is true, but it would be a vast pity if it were not true. Would that it were more true than it is. When our Government and people shall bravely avow this to be an abolition war, then the country will be safe; then our work will be fairly mapped out; then the uplifted arm of the nation will swing unfettered, and the spirit, pride and power of the rebellion will be broken. Had slavery been broken down in the border states at the very beginning of this war, as it ought to have been, there would now be no rebellion in the southern states. Instead of having to watch Kentucky and Maryland, our armies would have marched in overpowering numbers upon the rebels, and overwhelmed them. I now hold that a sacred regard for truth, as well as a sound policy, makes it our duty to own and avow before heaven and Earth, that this war is, and of right ought to be, an abolition war. This is its central principle and comprehensive character, and includes everything else which this struggle involves. It is a war for the Union, a war for the Constitution, and a war for Republican Institutions, I admit; but it is logically such a war, only in the sense that the greater includes the lesser. Slavery has proved itself the strong element of our national life. In every rebel state it has proved itself stronger than the Union, the Constitution, and Republican Institutions. This strong element must be bound and cast out of our national life before union, the Constitution, and Republican Institutions can become possible. An abolition war therefore includes union, Constitution, and

Republican Institutions and all else that goes to make up the greatness and glory of our common country. The position of the Democratic party in relation to the war ought to surprise no one. It is consistent with the history of the party for thirty years past. Slavery, and only slavery, has been its recognized master during all that time. It early won for itself the title of being the natural ally of the South, and of slavery. It has always been for peace or against peace, for war or against war, precisely as dictated by slavery. Ask why it was for the Florida war, and its answer is “Slavery;” ask why it was for the Mexican war, and it answers “Slavery;” ask why it was for the annexation of Texas, and it answers “Slavery;” ask why it was opposed to the habeas corpus when a negro was the applicant, and it answers “Slavery;” Ask why it is now in favor of the habeas corpus when traitors and repels are the applicants for its benefit, and it answers “Slavery!” Ask why it was for mobbing down freedom of speech a few years ago, when that freedom was claimed by abolitionists and “Slavery!” is the answer. Ask why it now furiously asserts freedom of speech when sympathizers with traitors claim that freedom, and again “Slavery!” is the answer. Ask why it denied the right of a state to protect itself and its citizens from possible abuses of the fugitive slave bill, and you have the same old answer. Ask why it now asserts the sovereignty of the states separately, as against the states united, and again “Slavery!” is the answer. Ask why it was opposed to giving persons claimed as fugitive slaves/jury trial before returning them to slavery? Ask why it is now in favor of giving jury trial to traitors before sending them to the forts for safe keeping? Ask why it was for war with England at the beginning of our civil war? Ask why it has attempted to hinder and embarrass the loyal Government at every step of its progress, and you have but one answer, and that answer is again and again, “Slavery!” The fact is that the party in question, I say nothing of individual men who were once members of it, has had but one vital and animating principle for thirty years, and that has been the same old horrible and hell black principle of negro slavery. It has now assumed a saintly character, and desires to recieve [sic] the benediction due to peacemakers. It would stop bloodshed at the South, by inaugurating a bloody revolution at the North. The livery of peace is a beautiful livery, but, in this case, it is a stolen livery, and stolen to serve the ends of treason and slavery. These new apostles of peace call themselves peace Democrats, and boast that they belong to the only party which can restore the country to peace. I neither dispute their title, nor the pretention founded upon it. All that can be said of the peace making ability of this class of men, is, that it consists in known treachery to the loyal government. That upon which they are most proud is their most killing condemnation, with all soundly loyal men. They have but to cross the rebel lines to he hailed by the rebels as fellow countrymen, clansmen, kinsmen, and brothers beloved in a common conspiracy.

But, fellow citizens, I have far less solicitude about the position and influence of this party, than I have about that of the great loyal party of the country. We have much less to fear from the bold and shameless wickedness of the Democratic party, than from the timid and short sighted policy of the great loyal party. I know we have recently gained a great political victory,[iv] but it remains to be seen whether we shall wisely avail ourselves of its manifest advantages. There is danger that, like some of our generals in the field, who, after soundly whipping the foe, generously allow him to retreat, reorganize, and entrench himself in a new and stronger position where it will require more power and skill to dislodge him than was required to vanquish him in the first instance, we, although the game is now in our own hands, shall be [likewise led to give it over to the enemy?]. I hold, that, while the Democratic party has an existence as an organization, we are in danger of a slaveholding peace and, therefore, a rebel victory and a rebel rule. There is but one way to destroy this danger and avert this calamity, and that is, to destroy slavery and enfranchise the black man. While there is a vistage [sic] of slavery remaining, it will command the political support of the whole South and of the Democratic party of the North. The South united, and the North divided, we shall be hereafter, as heretofore, under the heels of the South. Now how shall we meet this danger? How shall we avert this calamity? I answer, Let these be our principles, and let our practice conform to them. First:— That this war which we are compelled to wage against slaveholding rebels and traitors, shall be, and of right ought to be, an abolition war. Second:— That the loyal people of the North and of the whole country, shall offer no peace, and accept no peace, which shall not be to all intents and purposes, an abolition peace. Third:— That the colored people of the whole country, in the loyal as well as in the disloyal states, shall be at once declared, unconditionally, and forever, free. Fourth:— That the emancipated slaves of the south shall enjoy the most perfect civil and political equality, including the right of voting and being voted for, in common with all other citizens. Fifth:— That this Government shall oppose all schemes for colonizing colored Americans or any part of them, in Africa or elsewhere: that ,in peace, the black man is needed as a laborer: that, in war he is needed as a warrior, and that it is the duty of the Government and people to render him valuable in both relations, by paying him equal wages and giving him an equal chance to rise. Sixth:—

That the freedom and elevation of white men are neither subserved nor shall be purchased by the degradation of black men, but the contrary. There was a time when I hoped that events, unaided by discussion, would couple the rebellion and slavery in a common grave. But the facts of the present do not come up to our hopes. The question, What shall be done with slavery?, and, especially, What shall be done with the negro?, is an open one. It is true that we have the proclamation of Jan. 1863. It was a vast and glorious step. But, unhappily, excellent as that paper is, it settles nothing permanently. It is still open to decision by court, by Congress, and by cannon. I applauded it and do now applaud it; but I detest the principle upon which it proceeds, namely: that only loyal men shall enjoy the luxury of holding and flogging negroes.[v] Our danger lies in the absence of all moral feeling in the utterances of our rulers. In his letter to Mr. Greely, [sic] the President has told the country that, if he could save the Union with slavery he would do that; if he could save it without the abolition of slavery, he would do that. In his last message he shows the same indifference as to slavery, by saying that he hoped that the rebellion could be put down without the abolition of slavery. When the late Stephen A. Douglass [sic] uttered the sentiment that he did not care whether slavery were voted up or voted down in the territories, we thought him lost to all genuine feeling on the subject of slavery, and no man more than Mr. Lincoln denounced that sentiment. But to day, after nearly three years of slaveholding rebellion, we find Mr. Lincoln uttering something like the same sentiment. Douglas wanted his popular sovereignty, and cared nothing for the fortunes of the slave. Mr. Lincoln wanted the Union, and would accept that, with or without slavery. Had a warm heart and high moral feeling controlled his utterance, he would have welcomed with joy unspeakable and full of glory, the opportunity afforded by the rebellion to free his country from the matchless crime and infamy of slavery. But policy, policy, everlasting policy has robbed our statesmanship of broad soul moving utterance. The great misfortune is, and has been, through all the progress of this grand struggle, that the government and the loyal people of the country have not fully understood and accepted the true mission of the war. Hence we have been floundering in the depths of dead issues endeavoring to impose old and worn out conditions upon new relations; putting new wine into old bottles and new cloth into old garments and thus making the rent worse than before. We have failed to recognize the war as at once the signal and the necessity for a new order of social and political relations. Hence, we have been talking of carrying on the war within the limits of a Constitution, already broken down by the very people in whose behalf the Constitution is pleaded. Hence, we have, from the first, been deluding ourselves with the miserable dream that the old Union can be revived in the States where it has been abolished. Now we of the North have seen many strange things and may see more; but that old Union whose cannonized [sic] bones we saw hearsed in death and inurned under the walls of Sumter,

we shall never see again while the world stands. The issue before us is a living issue. We are not fighting for the dead past, but for the living present and the glorious future. We are not fighting for the old Union as it was, but for something ten thousand times more important, and that thing, crisply rendered, is National Unity. Both sections have tried union and it has failed. The lesson for the statesmen at, this hour is, to find out and apply some principle which shall produce unity of sentiment, unity of idea, unity of purpose, and unity of object. Such unity alone can give and support national unity. Union without unity, is body without soul; marriage without love, a barrel without hoops, and will fall at the first touch. The statesmen of the South understood this matter better and earlier than did the statesmen of the North. The dissolution of the Union as a [xxx] on the old basis of compromise, was plainly seen thirty years ago. Mr. Calhoun, and not Mr. Seward, was the author of the irrepressible conflict. The South is logical and consistent. Under the teachings of their great leader, they admit into their form of Government, no disturbing force. They have based their confederacy squarely upon slavery as their corner stone. Their two great and all commanding ideas are, that slavery is right, and that slave holders are superior to all other classes of men. Around these, their religion, their morals, their manners, and their politics, revolve. Slavery being right, every thing inconsistent with it is wrong, and ought to be put down. I say they are strictly logical in their theory and definite in their ideas of fundamental principles. They first endeavored to have the Federal Government stand on their accursed corner stone, and we barely escaped the calamity. Fugitive slave laws, slavery extension laws, and Dred Scott decisions [sic] were but vain endeavors to get the nation squarely upon the corner stone now chosen by the Confederate States. The loyal North is less logical, less consistent, and less definite, in regard to the necessity of fundamental principles of National unity; yet, unconsciously to ourselves and against our own protestations, we are in reality, like the south, fighting for National unity; a unity of which the great principles of liberty and equality, and not slavery and class superiority, are the corner stone. Long before this rude and terrible war came to tell us of a broken Constitution and a dead Union, the better portion of the loyal people had outlived and outgrown what they had been taught to believe were the requirements of the old Union. We had come to detest the principle by which slavery had a strong representation in Congress. We had come to abhor the idea of being called upon to suppress slave insurrections. We had come to be ashamed of slave hunting and of being the watch dogs of the slave holders who were too proud to scent out and hunt down their slaves for themselves. We had, four years ago, so far outlived the old Union that we thought the little finger of the hero of Harper’s Ferry of more value to the world struggling for liberty, than all the first families of old Va. put together.[vi] What business have we to he pouring out our treasure and shedding our blood like water for that old worn out dead and buried Union, which had already become a calamity and a curse. The fact is, we are not fighting for any such thing, and we ought to come out under our own true colors and let the South and the whole world know that we do not want, and will not have, the old Union, nor anything analogous to the old Union. What we now want is a country, a free country: a country nowhere saddened and defaced by the footprints of a single slave, and nowhere cursed by the presence of a slaveholder.

We want a country, and we are fighting for a country, which shall not brand the Declaration of Independence as a lie. We want a country whose fundamental institutions we can proudly defend before the highest intelligence and civilization of the age. Hitherto we have opposed European scorn of our slavery, with the blush of shame as our best defence. We now want a country in which the obligation of patriotism shall not conflict with fidelity to justice and liberty. We want a country and are fighting for a country which shall be free from sectional political parties; free from sectional religious denominations; free from sectional religious associations; free from every kind and description of combination of a sectional character. We want a country where men may assemble from any part of it, and in any part of it, without prejudice to their interests or peril to their persons. We are, in fact and from absolute necessity, transplanting the whole south with the higher civilization of the North. The New England school house is to take the place of the Southern whipping post; not because we love the negro, but because we love the nation; not because we prefer to do it, but because we must do it, or give up the contest and the country. We want a country, and are fighting for a country, where social intercourse and commercial relations shall neither be embarrassed nor imbittered by the imperious exactions of an insolent slaveholding oligarchy, requiring Northern merchants to sell their souls as a condition of selling their goods. We want a country, and are fighting for a country, through the length and breadth of which, the literature of any section of it may unimpaired float to its extremities unimpaired, and thus become the common property of all the people; a country in which no man shall be fined for reading a book, or imprisoned for selling a book; a country where no man can he imprisoned, or flogged, or sold, for learning to read, or for teaching a fellow mortal to read! We want a country, and are fighting for a country, in any part of which, to be called an American citizen, shall mean as much, as it meant to be called a Roman citizen, in the palmest days of the Roman Empire. We have in other days heard much of manifest destiny – I do not go all the length to which such theory are [sic] pressed, but I do believe, that it is the manifest destiny of this war, to unify and reorganize the morals, manners, and institutions of this country; and that herein is the secret of the strength, the patient fortitude, the persistent energy, and the sacred significance of this contest of [xxx]. Strike out the high ends and aims thus indicated, and the war would appear, to the impartial eye of an onlooking world, little better than a gigantic enterprise for shedding human blood. A most interesting and gratifying confirmation of this theory of the mission of the war, is furnished in the history of the great struggle itself. In just proportion of progress made in taking upon itself the character I have ascribed to it, just in that proportion has our cause prospered, and that of the rebels, correspondingly lost ground. Justice and liberty, though often overpowered and crushed, are of themselves mighty forces; and the cause supported by them, must triumph at last. A war waged merely for power, as our seemed at first to be, repels sympathy and invites

abhorrence, although backed by legitimacy. If Ireland should strike for Independence to-morrow, the sympathy of the world would go with her, and I doubt if American statesmen would be quite as discreet in the expressions of their opinions concerning the merits of such a contest, as English statesmen have been in respect of our war, in its early days. But now the world begins to see, in the cause of the North, something more than legitimacy. It sees something more than National pride. It sees National wisdom, aiming at National unity, and National justice breaking the chains of bondmen and giving liberty to millions. This new complexion of affairs, warms our hearts and strengthens our hands at home, while it equally disarms opposition, and increases our friends and supporters abroad. It is this which, more than all else, has carried alarm and consternation into every blood-stained hall of the South, and, like a strong angel, has gone through the world on the wings of the lighting, paralizing [sic] rebel press and tongues, sealing the fiery lips of the Robucks and Lindsays in England, and causing the eloquent Mr. Gladstone to restrain the expression of his admiration for Jefferson Davis and the Southern Confederacy![vii] It has placed the sharp eye of British suspicion upon the prow of the Rebel rams in the Mersey and performed a like service for those in France! It has given a new meaning to British neutrality, and driven Mr. Mason,[viii] the shameless negro hunter, from London, where he should never have been tolerated for an hour, except, as blood-hounds are tolerated in Regent Park, for exhibition. Depend upon it my friends, the more completely we fill out this high mission of the war, the more certain will be our success in waging it, and the more wide spread and glorious will be the results of our triumph at last. It is the fact that this war is a war for humanity, a war for a united Union based upon liberty, which has brought to our cause the powerful aid of John Bright, Richard Cobden, Wm. Edward Forster and other liberal British Statesmen. They outran us in comprehending this fact. I know we are not to be praised for this changed character of the war. It came not of our choice nor of our seeking, but rather against both. The truth is the American people and Government did at the beginning, design that this war should have but one object, and that object should be simply the restoration of the old Union; and for a time the war was kept to that object, strictly, and you know full well, with what results. I do not stop here to cast blame. Many of the blunders and disasters of the past might have been avoided, had our armies and generals not repelled the only people in the rebel states likely to he friendly to the loyal cause. But let that pass. Few men, however great their wisdom, are permitted to see the end from the beginning. The history of this war teaches that events are mightier than men, and that these Divine forces have, with over powering logic, fixed upon this war the comprehensive character I have ascribed to it. Even Mr. Lincoln can no longer, as at first, regard the war as a war for the repossession of a few forts and arsenals which the rebels had captured in their flight out of the Union. This has, in every sense of the term, been a growing war. It began weak and has risen strong. It began low and has risen high and broad. It began with few, and now behold our country filled with armed men, ready to carry out, with courage and fortitude, the all controlling idea of their country men.

Let, then, the war proceed in its high, broad and strong course, till the rebellion is put down and our country is saved, and saved beyond the necessity of being saved again. I have already hinted of our danger. Let me be a little more direct and pronounced. The Democratic party at the North, though defeated in the election of last, fall, is still a power not to be despised. It is the still the ready, organized, and living nucleus of a powerful proslavery and pro-rebel reaction. Though it has lost its numbers, it retains all the elements of its characteristic mischief and malevolence. A slight change in the balance of power, and it can turn the guns now levelled at traitors and rebels, at the breasts of the loyal enemies of slavery, where they would rather aim them. That party has five strong points in its favor, and its public men, headed by Horatio Seymour,[ix] know well enough how to take advantage of them. First: there is, on the part of the great mass of loyal people, an absence of any deep moral feeling against slavery itself. They hate it, not because it is a crime against human nature, but because it has made war upon the Government and broken up the Union. Second: the vast expense of the war and the heavy taxes in money and men required for its prosecution. We know that loyalty has a strong back, but it is a back often broken by heavy taxation, and the hardships of prolonged warfare. Third: the earnest desire for the return of peace which is shared by all classes, except Government contractors who are making fortunes out of the misfortunes of their country. This feeling, which is silent in victory, becomes vehement and powerful in reverses to our arms. Fourth: the fact that an abolitionist is an object of popular dislike. The Democratic party knows that a man in earnest against slavery is more hated by the rabble who control the elections in large cities, than is the guilty slave-holder who, with broad blade and bloody hands, is seeking to destroy the life of the Republic. Fifth: The Democratic party has on its side the National prejudice, (shared alike by union men and disunion men) against the colored people of the country; a prejudice which has done more to encourage the hopes of the rebels than all other powers at the North combined. It was this feeling which enabled the rebels to convert New York into a hell and its lower orders into fiends, last summer, while Lee was overrunning Pennsylvania and threatening Philadelphia.[x] By skillful management of the conditions indicated in these five points, the Democratic party has strong hopes of placing itself into power, and, I may say, not without reason. We have the game in our hands, but we are playing badly; playing against ourselves. While our Government has the unspeakable meanness and injustice to call upon the colored men of the North, to leave their homes, their families and good wages, to share with their white fellow citizens the perils and hardships of war, it takes pains to insult and degrade them in the presence

of their fellow soldiers, by offering them only half the pay received by white soldiers. The proslavery Democracy may well enough play upon the string of popular prejudice. While the Government at Washington refuses to reward the valour of its brave black soldiers with the hope of promotion, the Democratic party may well enough presume upon the strength of popular prejudice against the negro, and scent victory in the distance. Since the war department at Washington degraded colored officers at New Orleans, simply because Yankee officers would not salute them, according to their rank, the Democratic party may well enough hope to bring about an anti-abolition peace. I warn the Union party now, as at the beginning of this war, that, if they are to win, they are to do so with the aid of their black cards. The nearer we approach the standard of justice in our treatment of the black man, the more certain we are of putting down the rebellion, retaining the reins of power and saving the country. Our Republican friends tell us that the days of compromise with slavery are past. I wish I could feel sure of that. The Northern people have always been remarkably confident of the strength and constancy of their virtue, just before they gave away to some tempting iniquity. Twenty years ago we hoped that Texas could not be annexed; but it was annexed. We then hoped that, though annexed , it would be made a free state; but it was not made a free state. Thirteen years ago we were quite sure that no such abomination as the fugitive slave bill could get itself on our National Statute book; but it did get itself on our National statute book. We then hoped it could never be enforced; but it was enforced, and with all the sanctities of Law and Religion. Four years ago we were sure that the slave States would not rebel; but they did rebel. Then we were very sure it would be a very short rebellion; nevertheless, we are nearing the edge of the fourth year of the war. I know that times have changed very rapidly, and that we have changed with them; yet I know also, that we are the same old American people, and that what we have once done we may possibly do again. The leaven of compromise is among us . It has become almost second nature with us. I repeat that, while we have a Democratic party at the North trimming its sails to catch the Southern breeze in the next presidential election, we are in danger of compromise. Tell me not of amnesties, of Oaths of Allegiance. Tell me not of the loyal people of the South. They are valueless and powerless in the presence of twenty hundred millions invested in human flesh. Let but the little finger of slavery get hack into this Union, and, in one year, you shall see its whole body upon our backs. While a respectable colored man or woman can be kicked out of the commonest street car in New York, while any white ruffian may ride unquestioned, we are in danger of a compromise with slavery. While the North is full of such papers as the New York World, Express and

Herald,[xi] firing the Nation's heart with hatred toward negroes and abolitionists, we are in danger of a slave holding peace. While the major part of all anti-slavery profession is based upon devotion to the Union rather than opposition to slavery, the country is in danger of a slave holding peace. My friends, until we shall see the election of November next, and know that it has resulted in the election of a sound antislaveryman [sic] as President, we shall be in danger of a slave-holding peace. Indeed, so long as slavery has any life in it, any where in the country, we are in danger of such a peace. Then, look again at the danger arising from the impatience of the people, on account of the prolongation of the war. I know the American People. They are an impatient people; impatient of delay; clamorous for change, and often look for results out of all proportion to the means employed in attaining them. You and I know that the mission of this war is National regeneration. We know and consider that a nation is not born in a day. We know that, large bodies move slowly, and often seem to move thus, when, could we perceive their actual velocity, we should be astonished at its greatness. A great battle lost or won is easily described, understood and appreciated, but the moral growth of a great nation, requires reflection as well as observation. There are vast numbers of voters who make no account of the moral growth of the Nation, and care nothing for the interests of humanity, or of civilization; who look at the war only as a calamity to be endured so long as they have no power to arrest it, and no longer. Now this is just the sort of people whose votes may turn the scale against us in the last event. Thoughts of this kind tell me that there was never a time, when anti-slavery work was more needed than now. The day that shall see the rebels at our feet, their weapons flung away, will be the day of trial. We have need to prepare for that trial. We have long been saved a pro-slavery peace, by the stubborn, unbending persistence of the rebels; but let them bend as they will bend, then will come the test of our sternest virtues. I have now given, very briefly and imperfectly, some of the sources of danger. A word now as to the ground of hope, The best that can be offered is, that we have made some progress; vast and striking progress within the last two years. President Lincoln introduced his Administration to the country, as one which would faithfully catch, hold, and return runaway slaves to their masters. He avowed his determination to protect and defend the slave holders right to plunder the black laborer of his hard earnings. Europe was early assured by Mr. Seward that no slave should gain his freedom by this war. Both the President and the Secretary of State have made some progress since then. Our Generals at the beginning of the war were horribly pro-slavery. They took to slave catching and slave killing, as a duck takes to water. They are now very generally and very earnestly in favor of putting an end to slavery; some of them, like Hunter and Butler, because they hate slavery on its own account; and others, because slavery is in arms against the Government. The rebellion has been a rapid educator. Congress was the first to respond to the instructive judgment

of the people and to fix the broad brand of its reprobation upon slave hunting in shoulder straps. Then came very temperate talk about confiscation, which soon came to be pretty radical talk. Then came a proposition for border state gradual, [sic] compensated, and colonized emancipation. Then came the shadow of a proclamation in the shape of a threat, and then came the proclamation itself. Meanwhile the negro had passed silently along from a loyal spade, pickaxe, and pike, to a Springfield rifle; the greatest sign of progress seen yet.[xii] Hayti and Liberia are recognized. Slavery is humbled in Maryland; threatened in Tennessee; stunned nearly to death in Western Virginia; doomed by the noble Germans in Missouri;[xiii] trembling in Kentucky; and is gradually melting away before our guns in the rebellious States. The hour is one of hope, as well as of danger. We should take counsel of both. But whatever may come to pass, one thing is clear; the principle involved in this contest; the necessities of both sections of the country; the obvious requirements of the age, and every suggestion of enlightened policy, demand the utter extirpation of slavery from every foot of American soil, and the complete enfranchisement of the entire colored population of the country. Finis.

Notes i i.e., Secretary of State William Seward. ii Sgt. Major Lewis H. Douglass and Pvt. Charles R. Douglass served in the 54th Massachusetts Infantry. iii i.e., Northern Peace Democrats. iv i.e., the Emancipation Proclamation. v Since Lincoln justified emancipation on the basis of military necessity rather than constitutional authority, it applied to “States and parts of States” which “are this day in rebellion against the United States,” while exempting Tennessee and areas of both Virginia and Louisiana deemed loyal or non-resisting. vi The “First Families of Virginia,” or F.F.V.s, in a strict sense comprised the clans that originally settled the Virginia colony; in the nineteenth century, it took on a looser meaning, signalling the quasi-aristocratic lineage of well-established Virginia families. This latter meaning, however, elided the social heterogeneity of the F.F.V.s. As George Willison observes: “Among those who founded the first families of Virginia were men from man lands – vignerons from France, glassmakers from Italy, woodworkers from Poland, carpenters from Germany, Negroes from the West Indies and the Gold Coast. But most were English and, with few exceptions, very poor” (Behold Virginia: The Fifth Crown. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1951). vii William Gladstone (1809–1898), British Parliamentarian and Chancellor of the Exchequer, who wanted to maintain the flow of Southern cotton to England advocated recognizing the Confederacy. He made the case in an October 1862 speech “Jefferson Davis and other leaders of the South have made an army; they are making it appears, a navy; and they have made what is more than either; they have made a nation” (quoted in James McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom, p. 552). viii Former Democratic Senator James M. Mason was a Confederate minister sent to London in 1861 to try to secure diplomatic recognition. ix Horatio Seymour (1810–1886), who served as governor of New York from (1853–1868?), was a moderate Democrat whose political ideas emphasized both unionism and federal restraint; he opposed emancipation and conscription. x Douglass is referring to the New York draft riots of 1863, triggered by the federal Enrollment Act, and encouraged by anti-administration Democrats. While rioting against the draft took place in many towns and cities, the violence in New York claimed more than 1,000 lives.

xi The New York World, the New York Express, and the New York Herald all leaned sharply southward and Democratic in their editorial sympathies, and could be blatantly racist. In one 1862 report, for example, the Herald wrote that the education of blacks on the South Carolina coast would “create Negro insurrection, and result in the indiscriminate slaughter of the white race, of every age and sex, in every section of the South” (quoted in Brayton Harris, Blue and Gray in Black and White [Washington: Brassey’s, 1999], p. 194). xii The reliable, rifled Springfield musket, manufactured at the Springfield Armory in Massachusetts, was the most common firearm used in the Civil War. xiii Of the approximately 1.3 million German Americans living in the U.S. in 1860, the vast majority lived in nonseceding states, and about 15 percent fought in the war, many of them veterans of the European revolutions of 1848– 1849. Missouri, with a large German population in St. Louis, sent six all-German regiments into combat, the most prominent of which were the 3rd Infantry, under Franz Sigel, and the 12th Infantry, under Peter J. Osterhaus. See Bruce Levine, The Spirit of 1848: German Immigrants, Labor Conflict, and the Coming of the Civil War (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992).