During the Civil War, Frederick Douglass used his stature as the most prominent African-American social reformer, orator, writer, and abolitionist to recruit men of his race to volunteer for the Union Army. In his “Colored men with arms! Now or never! ”On board, Douglass called on the former slaves to“ rise up in the dignity of our manhood and show with our own arms that we are worthy of being free men ”.
Douglass, who had gained international fame after the publication in 1845 of his first autobiography, An Account of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, saw the Civil War as the “golden moment” for African-American men to join all races of men to “claim their freedom and their manhood”. By defending their country, Douglass believed, his brothers could “claim America as his country – and uphold that claim.” As soldiers in uniform, black men could shed the image of the helpless slave and assert the rights of male citizenship that came with patriotic service.
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Douglass stood in front of his oppressor; It became a turning point
Douglass’ recruiting strategy was the fruit of his own experiences as a former slave who had suffered daily assaults on his manhood. In his autobiographies he is preoccupied with this theme, writing about his youth of “hardship, whipping and nudity”.
When he was 16 and worked in a tobacco field in Maryland, wrote Douglass, a particularly vicious overseer named Edward Covey had “managed to break me. I was broken in body, soul and spirit. But as Covey tried to mistreat him once more, Douglass said, he broke down, engaging in a deadly fight that lasted nearly two hours – and resulted in Covey never posing again. finger on him. This act of resistance, and the victory obtained, “revived in me a feeling of virility and inspired in me a determination to be free”. It took four years before Douglas was legally free, but beating Covey had made him, in essence, a free man. “My long crushed mind has risen, the cowardice is gone,” wrote Douglass, “as long as I could remain a fit slave, the day had passed forever when I could be a slave in fact.” For Douglass, the Civil War provided an opportunity for men of his race to instill that same kind of inner pride and fight – and in so doing, to defend and save their souls.
READ MORE: Frederick Douglass’ emotional encounter with his former slave master
Not just a ‘white man’s war’
From the outset of the Civil War in 1861, Douglass begged Abraham Lincoln and others to give black men a chance to fight. “Isn’t he a man?” Douglass wrote in his diary Douglass’ monthly. “Can he not wield a sword, shoot a gun, walk and reverse, and obey others like others?” Yet for most white men on the Union side, it was not about black men. It was a white man’s war.
It would be mostly a white man’s war until Lincoln, on January 1, 1863, signed the Emancipation Proclamation, which freed all slaves from states that seceded from the Union. The proclamation included a provision calling for the recruitment of African-American men into the Union’s armed forces. Now entitled to recruit with government authority, Douglass has traveled over 2,000 miles from Boston to Chicago, extolling the virtues of service to the Union cause to black men. He ended many of his recruiting speeches by leading the audience in “John Brown’s Body,” a popular Union Army song.
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Poster recruiting black men to fight in the Union Army in the American Civil War, United States, circa 1863. The poster, which opens with the statement “Colored men at arms!” To arms! ‘ is signed by many, including Frederick Douglass, a strong supporter of equality for all and a major figure in the abolitionist movement.
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The 54th Massachusetts Infantry Regiment
In early 1863, Douglass was paid $ 10 a week by the Massachusetts legislature to recruit African American men for the 54e Massachusetts Infantry Regiment, the first black military unit raised by the North during the Civil War. He would use his self-published journal, Douglass’ monthly, as a powerful communication tool – both to recruit black men and to convince whites who doubted the ability and aptitude of black men to fight. Douglass has mass-produced his Colored men wide and had it displayed widely in northern cities. According to David Blight, author of the biography Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom, Douglass, who often referred to his audience as “Brothers and Fathers”, had come to regard war as a “special affair of black brotherhood and manhood.”
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But even though African Americans have shown skepticism about the treatment they would receive in the Union Army, many were persuaded by Douglass’s appeals for their manhood and manhood rights. Douglass’s own sons, Lewis and Charles, became two of the first to volunteer for the 54th, which ultimately included more than 1,000 men from 15 northern states. On May 28, 1863, the regiment marched through the streets of Boston before embarking for Beaufort, South Carolina. Douglass was there to send his sons and several of the men he had recruited into the regiment. “No one who witnessed this event will ever forget what he saw that day,” Blight wrote.: “A thousand black men walking smart with Enfield rifles, leaning gracefully forward, moving as one body towards history, heroism and death to prove to their slave country that they really are men.
For Douglass and his recruits, wearing the uniform carried great symbolism and great pride. “An eagle on his button, and a musket on his shoulder, and his bullets in his pockets,” said Douglass, “there is no power on earth … who can deny that he has earned the right to citizenship in the United States. ” While he might not have agreed with the coarse and degrading language, Douglass reportedly agreed with the white Union officer who described the metamorphosis of a black man turned soldier: “Yesterday a dirty and loathsome ‘n **** r’, today a well-dressed man, yesterday a slave, today a free man, yesterday a civilian, today a soldier. He is nothing of what he was before, he has never been what he is now.
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The Legacy of Douglass’ Enrollment Strategy
A mural of the 54th Massachusetts Regiment, under the direction of Colonel Shaw in the attack on Fort Wagner, Morris Island, South Carolina, 1863, located at the Recorder of Deeds building, Washington, DC
Carol M. Highsmith / Buyenlarge / Getty Images
On July 16, 1863, the 54th Massachusetts suffered enormous losses in its assault on Fort Wagner, South Carolina, but the regiment’s bravery and professionalism helped prove that African-American men were more than capable as as soldiers. Their example led to the formation of other black units: while the enlistment of black men had been slow until Douglass made his passionate appeal for their military service, eventually some 180,000 African-American soldiers served. during the civil war, almost 10% of the total number. of men who fought.
Thomas Long, a enslaved Civil War veteran, expressed perhaps one of Douglass’ most beloved results of the war: “If we hadn’t become sojers, everything could have come back as before,” did he declare. “But now things can’t go back, because they showed our energy, our courage and our natural manhood.
