Life and Times of Frederick Douglass

Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 1881

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Part 2, Chapters 9-12Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 2: “Second Part”

Part 2, Chapter 9 Summary: “Increasing Demands of the Slave Power”

The events of the 1850s proved that the slaveholding interest, or “Slave Power,” would not be satisfied until it had obliterated all impediments to slavery’s expansion and silenced all critics of slavery’s morality. South Carolina Congressman Preston Brooks’s “[s]hocking and scandalous” assault on Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner, for the crime of what Brooks considered an offensive speech, won Brooks the approval of his constituents and the admiration of many southern women. As such, it showed “the thoughtful people of the North the kind of civilization to which they were linked, and how plainly it foreshadowed a conflict on a larger scale” (247).

Meanwhile, the 1854 repeal of the Missouri Compromise had opened the entire trans-Mississippi West to the prospect of slavery. Kansas Territory erupted into open warfare, drawing thousands of pro- and anti-slavery settlers, including Douglass’s old friend John Brown, whose violent exploits there on behalf of freedom Douglass deems “a terrible remedy for a terrible malady” (254). On October 16, 1859, the night Brown and his men seized the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, as part of a plan to liberate slaves (though not the same plan Brown had explained to Douglass at their first meeting 12 years earlier), Douglass was speaking in Philadelphia. His known association with Brown, coupled with the discovery of supposed evidence linking him to the Harpers Ferry attack, made Douglass effectively a fugitive, wanted both by the state of Virginia and the federal government under the administration of President James Buchanan.

Part 2, Chapter 10 Summary: “The Beginning of the End”

Douglass’s actual connection to the Harpers Ferry raid is complicated. He met with Brown on multiple occasions, including once in Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, where Brown informed Douglass of his plan. A fugitive slave from South Carolina who called himself “Shields Green” accompanied Douglass to Chambersburg and then joined Brown at Harpers Ferry. Douglass, however, did not agree with Brown’s plan, for he thought it doomed to failure, and of course Douglass did not participate in the raid itself. Nonetheless, in the madness that grips Virginia and the entire South following Brown’s raid, Douglass believes he had little choice but to flee to Canada and from there to England, where he is “going into exile, perhaps for life” (269).

In England, Douglass applies for a passport to visit France, but the American minister, George M. Dallas, a Democrat, denies the application on grounds that, according to the United States Supreme Court in Dred Scott v. Sanford (1857), Douglass, because he is a “negro,” is not an American citizen. Meanwhile, Douglass receives news that his daughter Annie had died. At once, he returns home, “regardless of the peril” (271). His fear of reprisals from Virginia and from the federal government prove unfounded, not because the madness has subsided but because all parties involved have moved on to a much greater contest, the 1860 presidential campaign. Northern men, “singing the John Brown song” (271), elect Abraham Lincoln the nation’s first Republican president.

Part 2, Chapter 11 Summary: “Secession and War”

Douglass immediately views the Civil War as a war to end slavery. The Northern public, however, along with the Lincoln administration, seems slow to realize this truth, and the “abolition heart of the North ached over the delay” (283). When, however, General Benjamin F. Butler begins treating runaway slaves as “contraband of war” according to Virginia’s own definition of property, other commanders follow, and before long the Lincoln administration has approved the raising of two “colored” regiments, the 54th and 55th Massachusetts. Douglass begins recruiting troops.

With its ill-fated-yet-heroic assault on Fort Wagner in 1863, the 54th Massachusetts in particular rendered itself immortal. After Fort Wagner, “colored troops were called upon to occupy positions which required the courage, steadiness, and endurance of veterans, and even their enemies were obliged to admit that they proved themselves worthy the confidence reposed in them” (287-88).

In an effort to secure “just and fair treatment for the colored soldiers” (291), which the federal government has promised but not yet delivered, Douglass, at the urging of friends inside and close to the administration, makes a hitherto unthinkable visit to the White House for a memorable conference with President Lincoln. He writes, “I shall never forget my first interview with this great man” (291). The president’s “strong face, full of earnestness, lighted up as soon as my name was mentioned” (291). Having been made to feel at ease by Lincoln’s unceremonious demeanor and instant recognition of him, Douglass presents his concerns regarding unequal pay for Black troops as well as insufficient protection when they are taken prisoner by a Confederate government that regards them as criminals—concerns so serious that Douglass does not believe he can continue to recruit Black troops in good conscience. Lincoln “listened with patience and silence,” and “[t]hough I was not entirely satisfied with his views, I was so well satisfied with the man and with the educating tendency of the conflict that I determined to go on with the recruiting” (292-93).

Part 2, Chapter 12 Summary: “Hope for the Nation”

On January 1, 1863, Douglass is in Boston, where an “immense assembly convened in Tremont Temple to await the first flash of the electric wires announcing” President Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation (296). Considering the tepid and occasionally pusillanimous manner in which some Union officers have conducted the war to this point, the crowd has some cause for anxiety that the president might change his mind at the last minute. When the announcement comes that Mr. Lincoln has made good on his promise, its effect is “startling beyond description […] one of the most affecting and thrilling occasions I ever witnessed” (297). Notwithstanding the Proclamation’s uninspiring language and limited immediate effect, Douglass views it for what it is: “the end of all compromise with slavery” (296). The Emancipation Proclamation lent fresh urgency to the Union cause, though not without violent resistance, including the shameful New York City riots of July 1863.

Douglass senses urgency in Lincoln’s appointment of General Ulysses S. Grant to command the hitherto floundering Army of the Potomac. Grant inspires Douglass’s confidence “by his prompt cooperation with President Lincoln in his policy of employing colored troops and by his order commanding his soldiers to treat such troops with due respect,” thus showing himself to be “not only a wise general, but a great man” (300). In 1864, President Lincoln invites Douglass to return to the White House to discuss ways to ensure that news of the Emancipation Proclamation reaches the slaves of the South. Douglass again joins the president in March 1865 at his Second Inaugural. News of Lincoln’s assassination one month later reaches Douglass in Rochester, leaving him and his fellow mourners “stunned and overwhelmed” (312).

Part 2, Chapters 9-12 Analysis

Douglass tells the history of the 1850s as it occurred, not as revisionist Confederate apologists have told it. Long after the Civil War, as part of the reconciliation process, and perhaps from sheer exhaustion, Northerners quietly acquiesced in Southerners’ self-deluding efforts to sanitize the war’s origins. Slavery disappeared from the story, replaced by something called “states’ rights,” a nobler-sounding principle, for sure, but one that does not appear in the documentary record of the 1850s. The actual written evidence from that era reveals, as Douglass does, that the “slave power,” contemporary shorthand for slaveholders and their allies, controlled the federal government and used it to advance their interests until thwarted by Abraham Lincoln’s 1860 election.

Of the decade’s most significant political events, such as the 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act and the 1857 Dred Scott decision, Douglass had little firsthand knowledge. That changed on October 16, 1859, when his friend and ardent abolitionist John Brown led an armed raid and seized control of the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia. News of the attack sends Douglass to England and possible exile, for authorities in Virginia and at the federal level believe they had evidence linking Douglass to the raid. The fact that Douglass has not participated in the attack makes little difference. In the hysteria that ensued, his close connection to Brown probably would have sealed Douglass’s doom if caught.

John Brown’s raid had world-changing consequences. In the North, particularly in anti-slavery circles, Brown became a martyr. In the South, Brown’s name conjured the decades-old bugbear of slave insurrection. Everywhere, feelings about Brown’s raid eventually faded in intensity as the country encountered the crisis of secession and war.

Tales of intransigence and/or incompetence among Union commanders in the Civil War’s early years constitute a familiar story, as does the federal government’s reluctance to deal harshly with slaveholding rebels by liberating and arming their slaves. In hindsight, it is possible to view these circumstances as mere prelude to glorious victory for the slave. At the time, however, not knowing what the future holds, Douglass and many of his fellow abolitionists regard the three-year period between Brown’s 1859 raid and President Lincoln’s promise of an Emancipation Proclamation as one of the darker periods in the history of their great crusade.

President Lincoln did make good on his promise, however, and on January 1, 1863, he transformed the Civil War into a war of liberation. A keen observer with a profound understanding of human nature, Douglass sees in Lincoln a moral greatness that many abolitionists miss. The president confirms Douglass’s impressions on multiple occasions, during meetings at the White House, and when Douglass hears the president’s Second Inaugural Address. In that “sacred” speech, Lincoln described the Civil War as God’s judgment for the sin of slavery (308). The president is no equivocating moderate. He is Douglass’s kindred spirit.