Frederick Douglass eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 78 pages of information about Frederick Douglass.

Frederick Douglass eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 78 pages of information about Frederick Douglass.

Douglass was instrumental in persuading the government to put colored soldiers on an equal footing with white soldiers, both as to pay and protection.  In the course of these efforts he was invited to visit President Lincoln.  He describes this memorable interview in detail in his Life and Times.  The President welcomed him with outstretched hands, put him at once at his ease, and listened patiently and attentively to all that he had to say.  Douglass maintained that colored soldiers should receive the same pay as white soldiers, should be protected and exchanged as prisoners, and should be rewarded, by promotion, for deeds of valor.  The President suggested some of the difficulties to be overcome; but both he and Secretary of War Stanton, whom Douglass also visited, assured him that in the end his race should be justly treated.  Stanton, before the close of the interview with him, promised Douglass a commission as assistant adjutant to General Lorenzo Thomas, then recruiting colored troops in the Mississippi Valley.  But Stanton evidently changed his mind, since the commission, somewhat to Douglass’s chagrin, never came to hand.

When McClellan had been relieved by Grant, and the new leader of the Union forces was fighting the stubbornly contested campaign of the Wilderness, President Lincoln again sent for Douglass, to confer with him with reference to bringing slaves in the rebel States within the Union lines, so that in the event of premature peace as many slaves as possible might be free.  Douglass undertook, at the President’s suggestion, to organize a band of colored scouts to go among the negroes and induce them to enter the Union lines.  The plan was never carried out, owing to the rapid success of the Union arms; but the interview greatly impressed Douglass with the sincerity of the President’s conviction against slavery and his desire to see the war result in its overthrow.  What the colored race may have owed to the services, in such a quarter, of such an advocate as Douglass, brave, eloquent, high-principled, and an example to Lincoln of what the enslaved race was capable of, can only be imagined.  That Lincoln was deeply impressed by these interviews is a matter of history.

Douglass supported vigorously the nomination of Lincoln for a second term, and was present at his [March 4] inauguration.  And a few days later, while the inspired words of the inaugural address, long bracketed with the noblest of human utterances, were still ringing in his ears, he spoke at the meeting held in Rochester to mourn the death of the martyred President, and made one of his most eloquent and moving addresses.  It was a time that wrung men’s hearts, and none more than the strong-hearted man’s whose race had found its liberty through him who lay dead at Washington, slain by the hand of an assassin whom slavery had spawned.

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Frederick Douglass from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.