Transcripts For CSPAN3 The Presidency 20150526

The metro poll tan museum of art hosted this hour long event. [ applause ] in their entire eventful lives they met facetoface only three times, maybe four at most. When they timely did they spent their time locked in political combat. One was a proud and brilliant radical, aggressive advocate for Racial Justice who ran out of patience with the status quo. The other was an ingenious g gradualist master of art of compromise timing leading from behind. One would save the union and slowly cure its major birth defects, slavery, the others frees slaves immediately even if it meant destroying union and the slavery together. They expressed views with uncommon eloquence. Two orators in an age of great or story. They developed a cautious Mutual Respect and ultimately genuine mutual admiration. Two great men whose furious dissonance ended up as common goals made each of them greater. Abraham lincoln and frederick douglass. No one who met either one never forgot being in his presence or how they expressed themselves publicly and privately. Tonight, by using the very words lincoln and douglass wrote and spoke to one another about each other, and to the public and by deploying the portraits for which they sat around the time many of their meetings occurred its almost possible to see and hear them confronting each other again over their shared aspirations and differences. The result wed like to think is an authentic lincolndouglass dont. In some cases in actual recollected conversation, but for a few conjunctions each and every word you hear was written or spoken by these protagonists themselves. Tonight, we will hear them again as readers and audiences did in the 19 th century beginning with the first attempt at autobiography. I was born february 12th 1809. My parents both born in virginia of undistinguished families, second families i should say. My mother died in my tenth year. My father grew up literally without education. We reached our new home about the time the state of indiana came into the union. It was a wild region with many bears and other wild animals in the woods. There, i grew up. There was some schools, socalled, but no qualification was ever required of a teacher beyond reading writing, and ciphering to the rule of three. If one understands latin was in the neighborhood, he was looked upon as a wizard. There was nothing to excite ambition for education. Of course, when i came of age i did not know much still, somehow, i could read, write, and cipher to the rule of three, but that was all. Ive not been to school since. The little advance i now have was picked up from time to time under the pressure of necessity. I was raised to farm work, which i continued until i was 22. I was born in tuckaho in maryland. I have no accurate knowledge of my age, never having seen my authentic record containing it. My father, larger part of slaves know as limit of their age as horses know of theirs. And it is the wish of most masters to keep their slaves thus ignorant. My mother was named Harriet Harriet bailey colored and quite dark. My father was a white man. It was a common custom to part children from their mothers at a very early age. My mother and i were separated when i was an infant. I never saw her more than four or five times in my life. My first master was a cruel man. Hardened by a long life of slave holding. He would at times, take great pleasure in whipping a slave. I suffered little from anything else other than hunger and cold but my feet so cracked with the frost that the pen which im writing might be laid in the gashes. My next mistress, proved a woman of the kindest heart. She convinced to teach me the abcs. After i learned this, she assist assisted me in learning to spell words of three or four letters, but when he found out what was going on, he, at once, forbade her to instruct me further, telling her, a nigger should know nothing than to obey his master. If you teach him to read, theres no keeping him. From that moment i understand the pathway from slavery to freedom. I set out with high hope and a fixed purpose, to learn how to read. I am naturally antislavery. If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong. I cannot remember when i did not think and feel. I hold if the almighty made a set of men that should do all the eating and none of work he would have made them with mouths only and no hands, and if he ever made another class that he has intended to do all the work and none of the eating, he would have made them without mouths and with all hands. Whenever i hear someone arguing for slavery, i feel a strong impulse to see it tried on him personally. By 1834 lincoln is 25 years old and finally established on his own in new salem illinois a grocery clerk studying law, aspiring to Elective Office to procure in his natural right to rise. Not so, douglass. That year, around 16 years of age, he is still a slave and victim of repeated whippings by a brutal new owner. One day, he decides he must resist or be killed and he bravely fights back. Hes never punish again. Freedom from abuse is not enough to quench his thirst for liberty. At least hes soon hired out to yet another owner as a field hand. William freeland you couldnt invent the name. Realizes something special, not to liberate him, of course, but allows him to start a school where he is soon teaching 40 other enslaved people how to read. Within a few years hes working now in a maryland shipyard, but required to turn all of his wages over to his owner. He meets a free woman of color and gets engaged, but when his master orders him back to his home as punishment for attending a revival meeting, he believes he will be sold south. He resolves to take her and escape. September 3, 1838, he leaves baltimore by train switches to a steam boat reaches the free city of philadelphia and then heads off to new york. Finally, he reaches the abolitionist hot bed of new bedford, massachusetts where free africanamericans and antislavery whites worked together to keep slave catch eresrs from rounding up fugitives. He never forgets those days of freedom in the northeast. Just around the same time the rising young illinois politician, lincoln, delivers his first major speech in his new hometown of springfield illinois to condemn the horrors that had befallen black and white lovers of freedom in the northwest. Freedom it was a moment of the highest excitement ive ever experienced. I felt like one who had escaped a den of lions. This state of mind, however, very soon subside, and i was, again, seized with a feeling of great insecurity and loneliness. I was yet liable to be taken back and subjected to all the tortures of slavery. This, in itself was enough to damp the order of my enthusiasm. The model i adopted was this. Trust no man. To understand imagine yourself a fugitive slave in a strange land. A land given up to be the Hunting Ground for slave holders. Whose inhabitants are legalized kidnappers, where he is without home or friend, without money or credit wanting shelter and no one to give it, wanting bread and no money to buy it. In the midst of plenty yet suffering terrible hunger, in the midst of houses, yet having no home. Among fellow men, yet feeling as if in the midst of wild beasts. These were the hardships of the tall worn, and whipscarred fugitive slaves. Accounts of outrages committed by mobs form the everyday news of the times. They pregraded the country from new england to louisiana, mississippi, they commence by hanging white game bers. Next, negros suspected of conspireing to raise an insurrection were caught up and hanged, then white men, and finally, strangers from neighboring states going further on business until dead men were seen dangling from the bows of trees on every roadside and in numbers almost sufficient to rival the native spanish moss of the country as a drapery of the forest. In st. Louis, a milano man seized in the street, dragged to the suburbs of the city chained to a tree, and actually burned to death. In all within a single hour from the time he had been a free man attending to his own business and at peace with the world. Such are the effects of mob law. Such are the scenes becoming more and more frequent in this land so lately famed for love of law and order. Let reverence for the love of laws for every man, and let it become the political religion of the nation. Over the next 15 years, they take different paths to leadership. Lincoln heads to congress in 1848. His opposition to the mexicanamerican war a conflict he believes was ibsnstigated to acquire slave territory for the south, cuts his career to a single term, but not before he takes to the house floor to condemn the glorification of war and those seeking to expand slavery as bounty. Not long afterwards as you hear he returns from the first tour in new england, now an sensation to address the society with his own breathtaking speech that declares his own new found radicalism. First lincoln. Now, sir, for the purpose of obtaining the very best evidence as to whether texas had carried her revolution to the place where the hostilities of the present war commend let him answer fully fairly, and candidly. Let him answer with fact and not with argument. Let him remember he sits where washington sat, and so remembering let him answer as washington would answer. Its not on any pretense and its what i suspect already, that hes deeply conscious of being in the wrong that he feels the blood of this war like the blood of abel is crying to heaven against him that originally having some strong motive, he is trusting to escape scrutiny by fixing the public gaze upon the exceeding brightness of military glory, that attractive rainbow that rises and showers of blood, that serpent serpents eye that charms to destroy. I have no love for america as such. I have no patriotism. I have no country. The institutions of this country do not recognize me as a man. The only thing that links me to this land is my family and the painful consciousness that hear there are millions of my fellow creatures growning beneath the ironed rod of the worse that could be devised. This and this only attaches me to the land that brings me to plea with you and this country at large. For the disenthrallment of my oppress countrymen and overthrow slavery which is crushing them to the earth. Instead in 1854 Congress Passes the kansasnebraska act which overturns the missouri compromise that at least as confined slavery to the south. The new bill makes it possible for white settlers in the new western territories to vote on whether or not to allow slavely. I was losing interest in politics when the repeal of the missouri compromise aroused me again. Out of office for six years lincoln is ready for his comeback. He returns to the political stage with a series of powerful antislavery speeches. After one of them on october 27 th, 1854, he walks down a chicago street with two fellow republicans discussing their new cause. They passed a photo gallery, and lincolns friends talk him into posing, and this image is the result. Obviously, his bow tie suggests he was not ready for his closeup. He holds a newspaper to the camera, though as if to endorse the principles of his new party. Just days before he was in illinois where he provides words that almost animate this picture. This declared indifference, but as i must think, covert real zeal for the spread of slavery i cannot but hate. I hate it. Because of the monstrous injustice of slavery itself. I hate it because it deprives our republican example of just influence in the world, enables the enemies of free institutions with plausibility to taunt us as hypocrites hypocrites, causes the real friends of freedom to doubt our sincerity, and especially because it forces so many really good men amongst ourselves into an open war with the very fundamental principles of civil liberty. The doctrine of selfgovernment is right absolutely, and eternally right but it has no just application ooze here attempted. When the white man givens himself, that is selfgovernment, but when he governs himself and also governs another man, that is more than selfgovernment, that is desperatism. If the negro is a man, well then my ancient faith teaches me that all men are created equal. And that there can be no moral right and connection of one man making a slave of another. Douglas expresses similarly. In a speech in chicago, just two weeks after lincolns address he has to justify his mere right to voice his opinion. It is said with much ajointness by theed advocates of the nebraska bill, we are solicitous for the rights of negroes. If they are left to make laws for white mennings they are safely left to make rules for the black men. I make a mean, wicked, appeal to prejudice, against the people wholly defenseless. The right of each man to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness is the basis of all social and political right, and therefore, how brash fronted and shameless is that importance . While it deprives them screams itself hoarse to the words of popular sovereignty. They still never met, but they are beginning to sound astonishingly alike not only on the issue of kansasnebraska, and popular sovereignty but on the inevidentnt of a national collision. It is, i think, pretty well settled that the liberty and slavery slavery slavery cannot dwell in the United States in peaceful relations. A house divided against itself cannot stand. This government cannot endure half slavery and half free. One or the other of these must go to the wall. The south must either give up slavery, or the north must give up liberty. The two interests are hostile and inreconcilable. The just demands of liberty are inconsistent with the overgrown exactions of the slave power. I do not expect the union to be dissolved. I do not expect the house to fall. I do expect it to cease to be divided. It will become all one thing or all the other. Either the opponents of slavery will arrest the further spread of it and place it where the public mind shall not rest in the belief that it is in the course of ultimate extinction, or its advocates will push it forward until it shall become alike, lawful in all the state old as well as new, north as well as south. Have we know tendency to the latter condition . There is not a single tendency of slavery, but is adverse to freedom. Is reading and getting ideas from rochester . Maybe, maybe not. Arriving here in new york in 1860 to speak at cooper union posing again for a photograph before he does this time to commemorate a speech that some say makes him president , lincoln, again seems somehow to intuitive par intuitive pair phrase what he was saying. Its brute force, shields itself behind might rather than right. It must be met with its own weapon. Either let us be slandered from our duty from false accusations against us nor frightened from it by men nass of destruction from the government or in dungeons to ourselves. Let us have faith that right makes might. And in that faith, let us, to the end, dare to do our duty as we understand it. As the 1860 president ial election approaches, their positions have evolved. Lincoln, seen here in june will tolerate no slavery expansion, but vows he will not interfere where slavery where it already exists. Douglass photographed around the same time, brings about slaverys ultimate extinction as quickly as possible. My position now is one of reform, not of revolution. I would act for the abolition of slavery through the government, not every its ruins. If slave holders have rule the American Government for the last 50 years, let the antislavery men rule the nation for the next 50 years. If the south has made the constitution bend to the purposes of slavery let the north now make that instrument bend to the clause of freedom and justice. Let the free men of the north who have the power in their own hands resolve to blot out forever the foul and haggard crime, which is the blight and mildew, curse, and disgrace of the United States. Lincoln wins the presidency. On march 4, 1861 he takes the oath of Office Holding out the olive branch of peace and compromise even though seven slave Holding Southern states already seceded from the union. Douglass upholds the commemoration, as some say is a giant step backwards in the fight against slavery. Our countrymen, one and all think calmly and well upon this whole subject. Nothing valuable can be lost by taking time. Such of you as dissatisfied still have the old constitution unimpaired and on the sensitive point, the laws of your own framing under it, while the new administration will have no immediate power if it would to change either. One section of the country believes slavery is right and ought to be extended, while the other believes it is wrong and ought not to be extended. This is the only substantial dispute dispute. Why should there not be patient confidence in the justice of the people. Is there any better or equal hope in the world . In your hands my dissatisfied country men, and not in mind is the issue of civil war. The government will not assail you. You can have no conflict without being yourself, the aggressor. You have no oath recommendation starred in help to destroy the government while i shall have the most solemn one to preserve protect, and defend it. I am loaf to close. We are not enemy, but friends. We must not be enemy. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic cords of memory stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearts sewn all over this broad land will yet swell the chorus of the union when again touched as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature. It was weak, uncall for, and useless for mr. Lincoln to begin the inaugural address to posture himself before the foul and withering curse of slavery. The occasion was one for honest rebuke, not for paluations and apologies. The slave holders should have been told that their system of robbery is contrary to the spirit of the age. And contrary on which the government was founded and they should be ashamed to be ever lastingly pressing that scandalous crime into notice. Some thought we had, in mr. Lincoln, the nerve and decision of Oliver Cromwell but we merely have a continuation of the buchanans, and this bends the knee to slavery as ready as any of his infamous predecessors. Hes like the great mask of the countrymen, indebted to the south of law and gospel, in which such declarations before them coming from our first antislavery president the abolitionist must know what to expect in the next four years. By Independence Day the confederacy attacked fort sumpter and troops aamass for the first battle in virginia. They are determined to fight rebellion to the end, but never mentioned slavery as the root cause or freedom as it inevitably results, and, again douglass is livid. This is essentially a peoples content. On the side of the union, it is a struggle for maintaining in the world. Thats a form and substance of government whose lead is to elevate the condition of men, to lift artificial weights from all shoulders, to clear the path of laudable pursuit for all to afford all and unfettered start and a fair chance in the race of life. Our government has been called an experiment. It is now for us to demonstrate to the world that those who can fairly carry an election can also suppress the rebellion that balance the rightful and successful successes of bullets and that when balance of fair and constitutionally decided, there can be no successful appeal back to bullets. Such will be a great lesson of peace teaching men that what they cant take by election, neither can they take it by a war. People at heart are against slavery, none other than wol ofs hearts are otherwise. All they want is a leader with power and authority. They follow where he leads, yet checked by institutional subjections and practical difficulties. President lincoln only has to divide the mode of law and practice, and they will have the joy support of the great heart of america and blessings of those ready to parrish. As the union loses battle after battle, douglass implores lincoln to employ military opportunity, disrupt the enemy home front, and preempt threat of european recognition of the confederacy by striking a transformative blow against slavery. Unbeknownst to Douglass Lincoln drafts an emancipation proclamation and proposed it to the cabinet in july of 62, but hes convinced to defer it until victory occurs so its not interpreted as an act of desperation. Lincoln tables it. He begins issuing statements to assure White America that if he does act, it will be out of necessity, not sympathy. He is that fearful about white public opposition, especially with out of year elections approaching. Dug las at first tolerates this campaign of disinformation but not for long. Ultimately lincolns words enrage him again. My object in the struggle is to save the union. It is not either to save or destroy slavery. If i could save the union without freeing any slave i would do it. I would save it by freeing all the slaves, i would do it, and if i could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone, i would also do that. I have here stated my purpose according to my view of official duty. I intend my wish that all men everywhere could be free. It is true that the president lays down propositions with many clarifications, some of which are unnecessary, unjust, and holy unwise. There are also spots on the sun. Nfzy a blind man can see where the[qq n president s heart is. I read the spaces as well as the lines of his message. What good would a proclamation of emancipation from me do . Especially as we are now situated . I do not want to issue a document that the whole world will see must necessarily be inoperative like the popes bull against the comment. He was elected and inaugurated as the representative of the antislavery representative of the republican party, and yet the actions of president lincoln are calculated in a marked and decided way to shield and protect slavery from the very blows in which its horrible crimes have loudly and persistently n djinspired. He was scornfully rejected. He has scornfully rejected the policy of arming the slaves. He has steadily refused to proclaim as he had the constitutional and more right to claim the complete emancipation of slaves. It is to reconstruct the union on the old and corrupting basis of compromise, by which slavely should retain all the power that it ever had. Your race is suffering, and my judgment greatest wrong inflict the on any people, but even when you ceasen to be slaves you are yet far removed from being placed on equality. On this broad continent not a single map of your racist made the equal of a single man of ours. It is better for us both, therefore, to be separated. The president seems to be possesseg passion for2h ejt himself appear 2gp7d ridiculous, if not worse. His argument between the white and black races renders it impossible to live together in the same country witlfh[ both. Colonization[8hi÷ is held to be the duty and interest of the colored people. It does not requir bp reat amount of still to point out the fallacy and expose unfairness of the assumption for by thiso time, every man with a brain in5ft his head, even mr. Lincoln himself must know in all places, distinct races livei dn together with the enjoyment ofk4oa civil righ9w yet he says to the colored people, itpha dont like you. You must clear out country. Slavery has caused this war, not slaves. A proclam9o m on the firstnr . R t hahp hc year of january of our2a 1all persons held asrea slaves within any states or designated part of a state, the people whereof should beg r rebellion against the United States shall r ÷ be then henceforward0r9÷ and forever freed. Signed Abraham Lincoln, december 22nhi÷v6tpo x, r ;y1862. i krut shout for joy sw a we live. To record this 0n righteous decree,aj free foreverhob of long ghenslavedc÷ millions whose cries vexedg sky, suffer on a few more days q sorrow. The hour of your deliverance draws knigh. Y no Abraham Lincoln x will take no step backo his word has gone out over the whole country and the world, giving joy and gladness to the friends of freedo he will stand by themhih and carry them out to the letter. Mr. Lincolnqqk will not budge appn inch. We cannot escape history. B u÷ we of4e thissb6÷xrn and administration will be remembered in spicete of which we pass light us down in hop nor or ]f;. Lydishonor to the latest generation. In givinghdz8 freedomp[jv q slave, heg we are sureyn freedom toth the free. Hop norble, alike in give and what we aal[preserve. We shall 3tez noblydusave or meanly lose thez tfn last best2 hope of earth earth. Thev way is o peaceful generous, just, a way which, if followed, the world will forevery9t[ bless. Its effect will be great and7 t÷ opg increasing. It an important principlec . 6]as9f an october. Instead of a national pridep hlnr interest. It recognizes the content and places tvqon the side of justice and civilization and the rebels on the side of robbery and barberism. Upon this act, believed to be an act of justice, warranted by the constitution upon military necessity, i invoke to consider a judgment of mankind and gracious favor of almighty god in witness whereof ive set my hand to this final emancipation proclamation, Abraham Lincoln, january 1st 1863. This is scarcely a day for prose. It is a day for poetry and song. A new song. Perhaps it is not a proclamation of liberty throughout the land unto habitants thereof as we hoped it would be, but was one marked by reservations and discremedis discriminations, but it is a vast and glorious step in the right direction. Men of color to arms words are now useful only as they stimulate blows. Now or never. Liberty won by white men would lose half its luster. Better even to die free than to live slaves. And so the recruitment of black troops begins as does the First Military draft for all. New york responds with bloody draft riots in which africanamericans are the principle victims. Around the same time of the riot riots riots, black soldiers died bravely on an assault on a confederate stronghold in which douglasss own son recent recruit to be the fabled 54 massachusetts, fights in the ranks and is one of the few to survive. But still black troops are paid less than white. While white soldiers earn bonuses to buy uniforms, black recruits pay out of their meager paycheck for theirs. On august 10th 1863, doug lass timely pays his first call on the white house. His first visit ever to any american president to protest. He vividly remembers the confrontation with the literally larger than life lincoln he found sitting in the chair waiting. On my approach he slowly drew his feet in from the different parts of the room into which they strayed and he began to rise and continued to rise until he look down upon me and then extend myhis hand to give me a welcome. I began with hesitation to tell him who i was, but he soon stopped me in a sharp voice you need not tell me who you are, mr. Douglass. I know who you are. Then he invited me to take a seat beside him. Seeing that he was busy, i stated to him the object of my call at once. Mr. Lincoln, im recruiting colored troops. I have assisted in fitting up two regimens in massachusetts, and im not awe work in the same way in pennsylvania. I have come to say this to you, sir, if you wish to make this branch of the service successful, you have to do four thinks. First, give color soldiers the same pay you give white soldiers. Sect, you must compel the Confederate States to treat color soldiers when taken prisoners as prisoners of war. Third, when any color soldier performances brave notorious exploits in the field enable me to say to those that i recruit that they will be promoted for such service precisely as white men are. Fourth, in case any colored soldiers are murdered in cold blood, you retaliate in kind. To this little speech, mr. Lincoln listened with earnest attention and sympathy. I told douglass about the opposition generally about employeeing negros as soldiers at all, the prejudice against his race and of the advantage to colored people that would result from their being employed as soldiers and defense of their country. Now, as to the pay we had to make some cop session to prejudice for there were threats that if we made soldiers of them at all white men would not enlist. Would not fight beside them. Besides it was not believed they would make a good a soldier as a white man, and, hence rs it was thought he should not have the same pay as a white man. I assure you, mr. Douglass, that in the end, they shall have the same pay as white soldiers. I met him several times after that, and on another occasion while talking to him in the white house, the governor of connecticut sent in his card. I was amused by the way lincoln told his messenger. Tell the governor to wait. I have to have a long talk with my friend douglass. He use those words. I said, mr. Lincoln i will retire, but he said oh, no, no, no you shall not. I want the governor to wait. And he did wait. For at least a half hour. In all my interviews with mr. Lincoln, i was impressed with his entire freedom of popular prejudice against the colored race. He was the first free man i talked to in the United States freely, who in one single instance reminded me of the difference between myself, himself, and difference of color. I thought that was all the more remarkable because he came from a state where there were no there were black laws. I account parolly for his kindness to me because of the similarly of which i fought my way up. We both started at the lowest rung of the ladder. A few months after lincoln and douglass first meet, few days after he sits for this photo, the president heads to a small town in pennsylvania where a fierce battle in july the biggest in the history of the continent had been fought and won, and here in gettysberg he provides poetry for which douglass yearned after reading the realistic prose of the emancipation. The date is november 19 1863. Four score and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now were engaged in a great civil war testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated can long endure. Were men on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live it is all together fitting and proper that we should do this. But in a larger sense we cannot dedicate. We cannot consecrate, we can want hallow this ground and the living and dead who struggled here have consecrated it far above our power to add or subtract. The little with little note or long remember what we say here but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work, for they who fought here have thus far so nebraska nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us that from these honored dead, we take increase devotion to that cause for which they gave the last measure of devotion. That we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain, that this nation under god shall have a new birth of freedom and that government of the people by the people, for the people shall not parrish from the earth. Thousands of negros are now being end rolled in the service of the federal government. They freely and joyously rejoice around the flag of the union and take all risks involved in the war. They do it not for the money. For thus far their pay is less than that of white men. They go into the war to affirm manhood to strike for liberty and country. If any class of men in the war can claim the honor of fighting for principle not for passion for ideas not of brutal malice the color soldier makes that claim, for he streaks for freedom. There are those who are dissatisfied with me. You say well not fight to free negroes. Some of them seem willing to tight for you, why should they do anything for us if we do nothing for them. If they stick their lives for us, they must be prompted by the strongest motive even the promise of freedom and the promise being made it must be kept. The signs look better. Peace does not appear as distant as it did. I hope it will come soon and then there will be some black men who can remember that with silent tongue and clench teeth and steady eye and wellpoised bayon bayonettes, they helped men to this consummation. There will be white ones unable to forget with malignant heart and hurtful speech they strove to hinder it. By september 1864 lincoln comes to the conclusion hell lose his campaign for a second term. The north is tired of military failure and slaughter. Lincoln prepares to turn the government over to the democrats, aware theyll likely cancel the emancipation proclamation for their first day of office, but first summons lincoln to the white house to bring freedom to as many slaves as possible while they can. Lincoln wins a second term ultimately, but not before douglass submits a bold plan to spread the word of emancipation. Since the interview in which your excellency was pleased to honor me a few days ago, i conversed with many colored men concerning your suggestion that something should be specially done to inform slaves in the restates in a true state of affairs. We have discussed how best to warn them as to what will be their probably condition should peace concludetf0i whil mk e aat jp r t hahp hc in the rebel hc lies and urge on them necessity of making their escape. I submit ways and means by which such persons may be rested from the enemy and brought within our68 nbw lines. The planp lf asked me to composr pr t hahp hc was evidence conclusive on mr. Lincolns partsa that the proclamation so fartg at least as far as he was concerned was not offer merely as necessity. The election of a necessity, but we cannot have free government without election. If the rebellion could force us to forego or postpone a national election, it might fairly claim to have already conquered and ruined us. On march 4th 1864, a visibly exhausted Abraham Lincoln makes his way to the capitol to taket i was president at the inauguration. I felt there was murder in the air, and i kept close n q carriage on the way to the capital for i felt i would see him fall that day. It was a vague presentment. I could feel is in the atmosphere. I got right in front of the east of the capitol and witnessed his being sworn in. I heard mr. Linc 4k n deliver a wonderful address. It was very short. The confederate causexeee was on its last legs, but he answered all objections to the prolonging the war in one sentence. It was a remarkable sentence. Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass u away, yet if god wills that it piled by the bondsmen 250 years of toil shall be sunk and until every drop of blood drawn with the last shall be paid by another drawn with the sword as was said 3,000 years ago, so still is must be said the judgments of the lord are true and righteous, all together. With malice towards none with charity for all, with firmness in the right as god gives usgjas to see the right let us strive on to finish the work we are in to bind up the nations wound, to care for him who shall have born the battle and for his widow andou his orphan to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and withqj all nations. For the first time in my life, and i suppose for the first time in any colored map eded mans of president lincoln on the evening of the inauguration. As i approached the door, i was seized by propolicemen and and forbidden to enter. I burst right past them. On the inside, i was taken charge by two other policemen who conducted me out the window on a plank. Oh i said this will not do gentlemen. Just say to mr. Lincoln that Fred Douglass is at the door. In less than half a minute, i was invited to the east room. I could not have been more than 10 feet from him when mr. Lincoln saw him. His he lighted up and said in a voice heard all around here comes my friend, douglass douglass, i saw you in the crowd today, listening to my inaugural address. There is no man whose opinion i value more than yours. What did you think of my speech . Mr. Lincoln, i can want stop here to talk to you. There are thousands waiting to shake your hand. What did you think of it . Mr. Lincoln, it was a sacred effort. Im glad you liked it. [ laughter ] and that was the last time that i saw him. Six weeks later, just as douglass feared on inauguration day, Lincoln Falls victim to an asassin, in fact was at the capitol on inauguration and restrained by a policeman. 11 years later on the anniversary of the murder, douglass rose to6crb deliver the principle address of the unveiling of theuim statue of lincoln as the emancipator. While the kneeling slave seems incorrect by modern standards, it was, in fact commissioned and entirely funded by three people of color. Douglass enjoyed now more than a decade to think about lincoln the man, the president , and the liberator he once regarded as slow but sure. This is what he said to the white crowd that day. Theqn. L race to which we belongnu. I conceive to you, my white fellow citizens that you and yours are the objects of his deepest affections. You are the children of Abraham Lincoln, we are at best stepchildren, children by adoption, children by forces of necessity. He was preeminently the white mans president. While lincoln saved for you a country, he delivered us from bondage. One hour of which was worse than ages of the oppression your fathers rose in rebellion to oppose. We saw him, measured him, and estimated him. And in view of that divinity that shapes our soul review them how we will. We came to the conclusion that the hour and the man of our redemption met in person of Abraham Lincoln under his wise and rule, we saw us lifted from the depths of slavery to the heights of manhood. He could receive counsel from child and gave counsel to a sage. The simple approached him with ease and learned approached him with deference. To lincoln, the entire struggle both for the union and black freedom had been conducted for one reason, to extend and preserve the american promise of equal opportunity, so he had made abundantly clear in the final speech to Union Veterans before his death especially after desperate confederates recruited slaves into their depleted army. Having in my life heard many arguments or strings of words meant to pass for arguments intended to show that the negro ought to be a slave if he shall now really fight to keep himself a slave, itll be a far better argument why he should remain a slave than any i have ever heard before. Ive always thought that all men should be free. Whenever i hear anyone arguing for slavery, i feel a strong impulse to see it tryied on him personally. I suppose you are all going home to your family and your friends, but the service you have done in this great struggle i present you, myself, and the country. It is not merely for today, but for all time to come that we should perpetuate for our childrens children this great and free government. I happen temporarily to occupy this big white house. I am a living