Justice Long Delayed

[David Lockmiller]

(06-20-2023 09:46 PM)Steve Wrote:  

(06-18-2023 07:55 AM)David Lockmiller Wrote:  The slaves of the South could have been informed of their freedom long before but Frederick Douglass refused a military commission as a Major to inform slaves in the South that they had been granted their freedom. Douglass was perfectly willing to let his own sons risk life and limb as members of the Massachusetts 54th (as I recall) but he was not willing to risk his own life to inform the slaves of the South of their freedom. Should not those black warriors who served and fought for the Union and the freedom of all slaves be especially honored today?

That's not accurate. In 1863, Douglass went to Washington and met with both Lincoln and Stanton to advocate for equal treatment for Black soldiers. During his meeting with Stanton, Stanton surprised Douglass by offering him a commission to become an officer in the Army and using him to recruit escaped/freed slaves in the Mississippi Valley into enlisting in the Union Army. Douglass agreed to the proposal and told Stanton to send his commission to his home in Rochester in a couple of weeks. The commission never arrived and Douglass wrote to the War Department that he had not received his commission yet. The War Department responded by sending this letter:



But they didn't send a commission to Douglass along with the letter, so obviously he didn't go.

Abraham Lincoln: A Life, Volume Two, pp. 676-677.

On August 19, 1864, Lincoln and Douglass met for the second time.

Turning to the danger presented by a Democratic victory, Lincoln told Douglass that the “slaves are not coming so rapidly and so numerously to us as I had hoped.” (The situation had changed since 1862, when he had informed Orville Browning that the flood of escaped slaves posed a significant problem.)

Douglass “replied that the slaveholders knew how to keep such things from their slaves, and probably very few knew of his Proclamation.”

With “great earnestness and much solicitude,” the president said: “I want you to set about devising some means of making them acquainted with it, and for bringing them into our lines.” (In a letter written days after their conversation, Douglass referred to the president’s “suggestion that something should be speedily done to inform the slaves in the Rebel states of the true state of affairs in relation to them” and “to warn them as to what will be their probable condition should peace be concluded while they remain within the Rebel lines: and more especially to urge upon them the necessity of making their escape.”) Months later, Douglass recalled that Lincoln’s words that day “showed a deeper moral conviction against slavery than I had ever seen before in anything spoken or written by him.” Lincoln said: "Douglass, I hate slavery as much as you do, and I want to see it abolished altogether.” The black orator agreed to help organize an effort to recruit a band of black scouts “whose business should be somewhat after the original plan of John Brown, to go into the rebel states, beyond the lines of our armies, and carry the news of emancipation, and urge the slaves to come within our boundaries.” (footnote 177 in the published book – Douglass, Life and Times, 435.)

[Apparently, on this occasion, the offer of the commission as a Major came from my fallible memory. At least, I could not find where Douglass was offered a commission to head this important task.)