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2 The Brief Life of Douglass’s “New Nation” From Emancipation–Reconstruction to Returning Declension, 1861–1895 THE CIVIL WAR held deep mystical meaning for Frederick Douglass.1 The war brought abolition and, he believed, the possibility of a racially just, truly democratic America. It was the high point of his life and of his near-term hopes for America; he considered it a unique moment that transcended ordinary history. The war between the States was seen by many as God’s terrible punishment , oft predicted by jeremiahs, on America for slavery. At the same time, the war was a redemptive act through which God had wrought black emancipation and national regeneration. It was an epiphanic event in which a generation of sons believed that they had rescued the fathers’ heritage while creating a new more glorious Union for themselves and their posterity. The war raised in Douglass high hopes for America and for blacks’ acceptance by whites as equal citizens. His sense of an era of new creation lasted until he saw the unmistakable return of national declension after a short season of uncompleted Reconstruction. The Civil War era represented to Douglass a shining interlude of American progress between two sorry times of declension. During that period, unlike the Antebellum Era and Gilded Age, Douglass’s faith in America’s future was supported by concrete national events. The last half of the nineteenth century saw extreme changes in national climate and conditions; it brought, for Frederick Douglass, corresponding swings between millennial expectations and deep disappointment. 34 Chapter Two Debate over Slavery and the National Promise The Antebellum Era that, for Douglass, was fundamentally one of pronounced declension nevertheless contained some hopeful portents. Dismayed by slavery’s expansion and national popularity of racist ideas, he nevertheless saw the advance of universal principles at home and abroad as a countervailing and ultimately more powerful social trend. Abolitionism was on the upswing worldwide, with England taking the lead; the movement was making encouraging inroads into the American North, too. Douglass was never so blind to Northern white prejudice as he evidently was to European racial bias. Yet, just as he imagined the United States holding out against a swelling abolitionist tide, so he imagined the South as the lone obstacle to abolitionism’s domestic progress. Focusing on the South as slavery’s last bastion led himtoseetheNorth’sgreaterreceptivenesstoabolitionismassignaling that it was moving, albeit slowly, in the right direction. Consequently, in Douglass’s conception, it was mainly the white South that kept America from fulfilling its democratic destiny, and it was blacks’ and white Northerners’ duty to defeat the slave power, release the nation from its death grip, and free America to fulfill its millennial destiny. Well into the Civil War, however, abolitionists remained a tiny beleaguered minority even in the North, and Douglass and his associates deliveredantislaveryjeremiadsmostlybeforeemptyhallsorhostileaudiences . What began to end the abolitionists’ isolation and create the potential for dramatic social improvements for blacks was the growing sense among Americans that the identities and self-interests of the Northern and Southern states were fundamentally divergent, and that these differences revolved around slavery. Slavery had long been central to the economic and social system of the white South and was rapidlybecomingmoresowiththeopeningofvastnewlandstocotton cultivation near mid-century. Slavery, on the other hand, had never proven as economically feasible in the northern regions and so had not taken root and flourished there as it had in the South. Most Northern states had legally abolished this dying institution within their borders in the early national period. When large Western territories began to The Brief Life of Douglass’s “New Nation” 35 be settled in the late 1840s and 1850s after the war with Mexico, political conflict erupted between North and South over whether slavery might enter these new territories. Both sides became convinced that the black slave and white free labor systems were incompatible and that one or the other must dominate in the West and in the national future. Douglass’s opportunity to challenge the Northern conscience was not presented by intra-white disagreement on white superiority and black inferiority (little of which existed) but by an intensifying debate in American political culture about the relation of slavery to the national promise. From the beginning, the existence of slavery seemed to many an embarrassing anomaly for a nation officially dedicated to liberty and equality. The universal egalitarianism of the American Revolution cast slavery in a generally unfavorable light in the early Republic, even though the institution was...

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