Many our beautiful robert h. Smith auditorium this morning. Todays program, Frederick Douglass, abraham again and emancipation. Would like to thank our great trustee and benefactor, arnold schwartz, for his generosity and aking this event and many of our Public Programs possible. [applause] id also like to recognize and thank one of our trustees who has joined us today, david light. I want to recognize laura ashington and Mercedes Franklin who are cochairs of our Frederick Douglass counsel. Thank you to all members who have joined us today. [applause] and i want to recognize a longstanding and special friend of New York Historical who has joined us this morning. And thank him for all that he and his family have done over a very, very long time that institution. Thank you. [applause] this Mornings Program will last about an hour and a half and it a question and answer session. You should have received a note card and a pencil as you entered this morning. If not, my colleagues are going up and down the aisles no cards and pencils. The notecards will be collected later on in the program. There will be a book signing following the program this morning. It will take place right outside these central doors in the smith gallery. Copies of the books are vailable for purchase at our museum store, which is located to my left on our 77th street side. We are really, truly delighted to welcome our guest speakers. Professorligth is the of American History and director of the center for the study of slavery resistance and the abolition at yale university. He is the author or editor of a dozen books, including annotated editions of douglasss first two autobiographies. He won the Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction. As well as the bankroft prize and won the lincoln prize and the partman prize. N 2001, he was awarded the Frederick Douglass prize. Edna medford specializes in 19th century africanAmerican History, jacksonian era, civil war and reconstruction. She is a member of several Advisory Boards among them the study of africanamerican life, the Abraham Lincoln association, the Abraham Lincoln institute, the Ulysses S Grant association and the Scholars Advisory Group of president lincolns cottage. Dr. Medford is the author and editor of several books including lincoln and emancipation. Ur moderator this morning is jonathan s. Santon, the director of the Public Policy institute and hunter college. He served as chairman of the bicentennial foundation and cochair at the lincoln bicentennial commission, appointed by president bill clinton. He is the author of numerous books. His most recent, monument man, the life and art of Daniel Chester french. He served as chief historian through 2009 and 2010 in new york. His honors include the National Humanities medal, presented to him in 2008 by president george w. Bush. And now, as i yield the floor to our speakers, i ask you as always that anything that makes noise, like a cell phone is switched off. And now, join me in welcoming our speakers this morning. Thank you. [applause] harold thank you. It is wonderful to be at the historical society, particularly for the bill clinton lecture. Its an honor to be one of the participants in that annual event, and it is a pleasure to welcome my friends edna and david. Whose work on slavery and freedom and those involved in in promulgation of freedom has about the way we think the 1860s and 1870s. So to set the stage, 167 years and 11 days ago, Abraham Lincoln signed the most consequential executive order in president ial history, in American History, the emancipation proclamation. A milestone to be sure. A great achievement to be without question. So much so lincoln realized that if my name ever goes into history, it will be for this act. We later learned, that is why unt anyway first, 1863, he refused to sign the first document set before him because it contained what we would later see as a typo. He insisted that it be engrossed. That was the word for the fancy caligraphers did that time. He delayed further, while people in churches waited anxiously, wondering what was going on, why has the midnight hour not yielded freedom . Lynn come just waited. And then before he got before the document, pin in hand, he put his pen down. His hand, numbed by hours of new years day handshaking at a series of receptions downstairs in the public rooms of the white house. And while secretary of state seward found him. He wondered whether this meant he was changing. He acknowledged it was only because his hand was still paralyzed that he was afraid he would sign it shakily. He said, i want people to look t this document in 100 years and firm handwriting and say that he did not hesitate. The document is so faded that no one can really tell, the official document. We want to talk about things that led up to it and things that occurred afterwards, when one of the great characters who played a role, that edna and david have helped us recognize, particularly with davids autobiography. Nd that is Fredrick Doug lass. Douglas. Showering you with dual images of extraordinary people. Here they are in the 1840s. People have a tendency to think of lincoln as a bearded statesman. And Fredrick Douglas as an old man. He wasnt always an old man and lincoln didnt always have a beard. They were remarkablelooking young men. And i want to start with the origins. Douglas once said that lincoln never treated him as an inferior and he believed that even though he came from a slave state, it was because they both rose from humble origins and worked hard. Douglas called lincoln the king of american selfmade men as he wrote in the books. Tell us about the different origins that you think may have contributed to the relationship that they ultimately developed. Edna we can start with slavery. So douglas was someone who was born into slavery on the Eastern Shore of maryland. He did not know his mother very well. His mother died when he was about 6 or 7 years old, and he lived with his grandmother before that. By the time he learned his mother was dead, she had been dead for some time. And so he had not had the a ortunity to establish relationship with her the way a parent and child would. His earliest years, up until he was 20 those years were shaped by his experience in slavery. As slavery went during that period, douglas was better off than the average enslaved person at least for a few years. He had the opportunity to experience freedom in baltimore, in a setting that was different than a plantation setting. In rural maryland. He had the opportunity to learn, read and write during that period, so he had very humble eginnings. David, i will leave it to you to talk about his humble beginnings. David keep going. This is good. Well, first of all, louise, thank you. Tall magnificent staff at the New York Historical and all of you crazy people who came out this early on a saturday. [laughter] it is always an honor to be on anything with edna. We go back many years ago, ed na many, many. David sitting on the front lawn of cedar hill. And harold do you know how daunting it is to sit across from harold with that stack of note cards . [laughter] you have always had 112 note cards. Harold most of them are blank. I just use them to intimidate you. [laughter] david all right. Well, then i thats vicious. No. But harold knows everything about lincoln. Help even knows facts that dont exist about lincoln. Sorry. They do both have humble origins. That is one of the interesting ways to think about their laterevolving relationship. I think some of the Mutual Respect that they did have, even from the very first meeting is due to that. Douglass later called lincoln the plebeian. Which is an interesting choice of words. No one ever called douglas a plebeian. D na really nailed it there. Douglass youth is privileged because of being sent to baltimore. He spent nine of his 20 years as a slave in baltimore. Without baltimore, he would have never escaped without that. There were 17,000 free blacks in baltimore in 1838, when he escaped. There were about 3,000 slaves. So he mingles among. He learned from. He attends church. Gets in involved as in a debating society as a slaved teenager. He meets anna murray, his first wife, who was free. She worked as a domestic and a white persons home. He also experienced just about very kind of savagery that slavery could wreck upon people from the every day treatment to the brutal treatment. He was not beaten himself, so far as we can tell, until he was a teenager. By his overseer and another guy named colby. He knew slavery inside and out. He knew mental humiliation, psychic traumas and physical traumas. But he also as he said had his baltimore dreams. In that maritime city on the ocean one of the greatest ports in america at the time. And it was his place where he gained literacy. Again and again he gained literacy, which was his most prized possessions. One other quick thing about their youths i mean, both of them we know a lot about lincolns reading from various works, what he read as a very young man, as a kid. But among the books lincoln cherished was this book called colombian ora or the. The school meter that douglas discovered among his white playmates when he was 11 and begged, bartered and finally got his own copy when he was 12 years old. An amazing book published in 1797, which was a huge it was a collection of oratory over the ages, but most importantly, the ntroduction to it was a manual on oratory, how to position your body, your shoulders, how to modulate your voice. It is a guide to oratory. I do not know that douglas ever read aristotle. But he read caleb binghams colombian orator. That book was among the cherished books when he was a teenager. So it is interesting. They both had read that and used that, and other kinds of moralistic literature that they read. There are other things that we could say. Harold we will skip to win we get closer to the ultimate moment. My next set of images shows lincoln and douglas in the 1850s. Speaking of parallel oratory, i found using edna and david as my guides, it is easy to find these wonderful parallels. Lincoln says in 1858. A house divided against both cannot stand. Ouglas said that liberty and slavery cannot dwell in the u. S. With peaceful relation. I do not know if lincoln knew about douglas at this point. Probably. Well, he will in the debates. Douglas says it is pretty settled that one or the other of these number freedom or slavery, must go to the wall. The south must give up slavery or the north must give up liberty. Lincoln said it would be one or the other, meaning the opponents of slavery will arrest further spread of it or its advocates will push it forward until it comes alike, lawful in all the states. And then in the listen convictsdouglas debates, stephen douglas, the sitting democratic senator running for a third term and allowed lincoln to challenge him, it gave lincoln a National Reputation even he lost the senate seat. Stephen douglas, who by scholarly conjecture dropped the second s in his name because he did not want it to be like Frederick Douglass. Thats never been proven. But its an interesting story. Douglass edrick David Douglass would have loved to claim that. Harold douglass becomes a subject in these debates. Why dont we just talk about that for a minute. Edna they are debating throughout seven cities where they had not done joint speeches efore. Hey are trying to win over the crowd, so they are giving their perspective on slavery, its onnection and development of the country, and where the country is going. Douglas is someone who was if not proslavery, but very much prosouth. Very much antiblack. He made a point, consistently to say things that would get his audience to come to his sidebyside negative things about black people. So to talk about douglass in relation to an alleged relationship with lincoln the two had not met at the time. Ut to suggest that they were friends, he brought those things up to get the audience to see lincoln as someone who was problack. And we think of illinois because it was free state. We assume that there is a kind of if not a tolerance of black people there was not. You have a lot of people in Southern Illinois coming from the south and even people coming from the north are not necessarily problack. And so, he was very effective, stephen a. Was very effective in invoking the name of Fredrick Douglass, whenever he talked about lincoln being a black republican or someone supportive of the rights of africanamericans. And of course, lincoln countered by saying that he was not interested in promoting the rights of africanamericans. He just believed that they were entitled to whatever they had earned through their labor. David there is a reason they call the southern half of illinois little egypt. And sometimes central alabama. In fact, at one point during the debates in illinois, douglas came up with the story of, i saw lincoln riding around in a carriage with Fred Douglass. Douglass hated being called fred in public. But yeah, he would make up these stories. He ran around in carriages with Fred Douglass. Its a wedge issue. Harold in 1864, during lincolns Second Campaign jumping ahead but on this subject. You told us not to jump ahead. Harold one of the antilincolns cartoons shows a carriage with a white driver, driving a black couple. This is like the height of humiliation for white supremacists. That there could possibly so anyway. He said Fred Douglass was in the arriage. Again, the name being raised in these debates. We move to 1860. And theres a great pairing. Theyre almost confronting each other. David that is a debate we would ave liked to have had. Harold could douglass vote . To be no clue he voted for . David yes. He could vote. He owned 250 worth of property. He owned quite a bit of property in new york state. He campaigned ferociously to eliminate the law and it lost. On a referendum. Yes, he could vote. The truth is, we are not sure because in the 1850s, he rode a roller coaster in terms of the republican party. In president ial election years, he tended to support the republicans, whoever the candidate was. And then in offyears, he would go hide in the radical abolition party. It got plenty of votes. So douglas had that tendency of know notting what to do not knowing what to do with his vote, with his support. My guess is that he voted for lincoln in 1860 with both eyes open. Harold the referendum that took place that same year that lincoln won 50 or so of the vote. Two other name candidates, competing breckin ridge and douglas, the blacken franchisement resolution went down 41. David a lot of people voted for lincoln that voted not to eliminate that bill. Harold lets talk about both men more seriously. Both men were Newspaper Publishers even during the campaign of 1860, lincoln secretly owned a german newspaper published out of springfield, which did you know that . Go back and look at lincoln and the power of the press. You were busy with this. David owned a german language newspaper . Was that a good investment . Harold it depends on his goals. You guys can talk about rederick douglass. Lincoln learns that a publisher has relocated to springfield to restart his german language paper in the state capitol, except that hes in hock up to his ears and his creditors seized the Printing Press. Lincoln learned about it. It will cost 500 to get it r to get the press and the type out of hawk. Lincoln goes to the state committee and says, you should do this because it will be a republican paper. They say, this guy is no good. He is a bit of a charlatan. Lincoln gives him the 500. Writes out crafpblgt contract. He says keep this paper going until december 1860. That is the end of the election period. My only requirement is that you say nothing against the principles of the state republican or National Republican platform. If you comply in 1860, you can have the Printing Press and everything. For 13 or 14 david what a pow. Arold lincolns friends david did he read german . Harold he did not. The only word that he knew was schnider. That means taylor. E knew that. Anyway, the paper was constantly being observed in the republican english language in public and papers in springfield and later credited with giving lincoln a big german immigrant boost in the election of 1860 in llinois. After the election, lincoln may be the publisher consult. 1500 a year. Private second earned that. One more anecdote. He asked the state legislature to buy up all the back copies of the stock so that the publisher could have a little bit of a stipend to buy strudel in gina, i guess. [laughter] david probably wine in vienna. Harold the paper dies. We have this contract. One is in springfield. Ne is in the john hay library. Never be your own lawyer, but lincoln was his own lawyer in that transaction. Ok. That is really a side story, to say the least. Because they bought up all the back copies, not one copy of the paper exists. They are all gone. Somewhere in illinois, there has to be a copy, in case any of you have relatives, it would be a valuable relic. Douglasss lk about series of newspapers that had such consequence. Edna he has three before the war is over. David three different names to it. Ed na the first one is the northstar. The paper is very important. People read during those days believe it or not. It was important that it was a way to get word out to the public. And he had significant support from white readers. They were supporting him quite ell. His editorials, if you look at the papers now, they are absolutely extraordinary. You know exactly what is hap