The Will of a People: A Critical Anthology of Great African American Speeches

Frederick Douglass

111 Frederick Douglass Oration on the Occasion of the Dedication of the Lincoln Monument On April 14, 1876, eleven years after the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass delivered the featured address at the ceremony marking the unveiling of the Lincoln Monument in Washington, DC. The monument , built by funds raised by freedmen, was the first national memorial to the late president. The estimated crowd of twenty-five thousand included dignitaries such as President Ulysses S. Grant, his cabinet, US congressmen, and Supreme Court justices but was predominantly composed of African Americans.1 The occasion required an epideictic speech, one that praised and honored the martyred president, and as the preeminent African American orator of the day, active in Republican Party politics at the national level, Frederick Douglass was the logical choice to present it. Yet Douglass had also been a vocal critic of Lincoln during the war. A traditional ceremonial speech, filled with sweeping praise, superlatives, and generalities, would not have been credible. Douglass instead focused narrowly on Lincoln’s accomplishment of emancipation of the slaves, thus fashioning a speech that praised the president’s deeds while diplomatically neglecting a detailed account of the man himself. Douglass’s address is a case study of cultivating community without insisting upon unanimity. From the beginning of Lincoln’s first campaign for president, Douglass had been publicly critical of the politician from Illinois. The Republican Party’s 1860 campaign slogan—“No More Slave States”—was too timid for Douglass, and until the eleventh hour of the campaign, Douglass endorsed Gerrit Smith, the Abolition Party candidate. In October 1860, Douglass was still arguing that ten thousand votes for Smith were worth more than two Frederick Douglass 112 million for Lincoln, and he denounced Lincoln’s assurance to the South that a Republican president would not interfere with the institution of slavery in those states where it existed.2 As the Southern states seceded and the Civil War ensued, Douglass was critical that Lincoln moved too slowly to declare that the war was an antislavery war, that Lincoln countermanded some of his generals who declared slaves emancipated in their military districts , and that he blocked their attempts to begin raising African American regiments.3 For each step forward that Lincoln took—for example, allowing escaped slaves to be treated as contraband of war or outlawing slavery in the District of Columbia—it seemed to Douglass that Lincoln took one step back. When in the summer of 1862 Lincoln finally decided upon an Emancipation Proclamation, he did not publicly issue it until September, it did not take effect until January 1, 1863, and it only applied to those areas “still in ­ rebellion”—that is, those places the Federal Government did not control. While Douglass privately fretted that Lincoln would be politically pressured to rescind the proclamation, he publicly proclaimed his confidence that Lincoln, once decided, would be steadfast in his decision. Even as he wanted more, Douglass understood the symbolic importance of the proclamation, as it finally declared the war to be a conflict fought, at least in part, against the institution of slavery.4 Although he supported the Emancipation Proclamation, Douglass remained critical of Lincoln’s presidency. Lincoln long delayed the formation of African American regiments for the Union Army. Douglass understood the importance of having African Americans fight for—and thus “earn”— their freedom, because he foresaw the civil rights issues that would continue even after the war itself was concluded. When Lincoln finally authorized the creation of African American units, those troops were paid a lower scale than white soldiers—$7 a month as compared to $13 a month. Significantly, the $7 amount was the standard pay scale for a laborer—a strong message that African American troops were not “really” soldiers but were manual laborers for the army. African American troops received inferior training and equipment and when captured by Confederates, were turned over to state governments, prosecuted under the slave statutes, and then frequently tortured and killed. Douglass publicly petitioned Lincoln to retaliate against Confederate treatment of African American soldiers, but Lincoln steadfastly refused to do so. That refusal, wrote Douglass, made Lincoln as guilty as Jefferson Davis of the crimes committed against the African American soldiers . In the summer of 1863, although he had been one of the most vocal on the Lincoln Monument 113 supporters of African American enlistment, he ceased his recruiting efforts.5 After...