During an age when letter writing was the typical mode of
communication for even the shortest distances, the eloquence in those missives,
(from the meanest, most pedestrian communiqués to the most important and formal
declarations) was a common feature and a common courtesy. This was especially
true during times of conflict and national upheaval, such as the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, and War
Between the States.
Letters that readily illustrate this fact are still in existence from each of
those periods.
Yet some orators (or
writers) managed to stand out and above this practice of ‘common eloquence’,
elevating writing to the level of prose so powerful that some of it now ranks
as part of the national heritage of American literature. Two such writers of
this caliber were the firebrands of their age: Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln.
Douglass and Lincoln
had a common goal, but did not always agree on how to achieve it. They also had
an unusual and rather uncommon background,
one that they shared and which made them brothers of sorts: Frederick
Douglass’s father may have been white, and was probably his owner, albeit one
who apparently loved and doted on him. (He also most likely arranged for both his
escape from slavery, and his education.)
Lincoln had worked
as an indentured servant from childhood to young adulthood, a type of bonded servitude,
the polite term for slavery, which was used when referring to whites and
foreigners of European descent. He was ‘rented out’ by his own father, Thomas
Lincoln, for menial, backbreaking labor (such as rail splitting and hog
butchering) in rural Indiana, until he was twenty-one. His earnings amounted to
thirty-one cents a day, presumably none of which he was allowed to keep.
As an adult, he grew
to detest the work and the practice whereby one human being used another to
perform endless, backbreaking, menial labor. The memory of that period of his
life would eventually inform and influence his opinion of slavery, once he
realized abolishing it for all time was, in fact, the only way to bring the
country back together. However, at onset of the war, this was, admittedly, not
his primary goal; it had originally been the salvation of the Union no matter
the cost, with slavery, or without it. There was a time when that choice did
not matter to him, where the fate of the Union was concerned.
Douglass, on the other hand, saw no other
option and no course of action other than the instant, ultimate, and complete abolishment of ‘that most
peculiar institution’ slavery, including
equal treatment and pay for freed blacks enlisted in the Union army.
Herein lay the vast,
roiling sea of the differences between them, and what was to become the seed of
their eventual respect for each other, and their friendship.
Lincoln had the more
difficult challenge before him, convincing a culture that had owned slaves for
generations to give up the plantation lifestyle and the considerable wealth
that came with it, and the divestiture
of their ‘property’ with freedom and full citizenship for persons who had once
been held as valuable chattel.
If he proceeded too
quickly, the enterprise would be doomed from the start. Even though Douglass knew
Lincoln’s reason for erring on the side of caution, he had neither his
adversary’s time nor patience to proceed at the beleaguered president’s
maddeningly measured pace. Still, Douglass had to admit this himself, after the
fact, that Lincoln had been right.
The two, Mr. Frederick
Douglass and President Abraham Lincoln, possibly greatest leaders of their time,
met on three occasions (in 1863, 1864 and 1865, the same year Lincoln was
eventually assassinated), to discuss these most poignant concerns. Each went on
to write about those meetings and their common goals. Ultimately, the most
powerful voices of the Civil War became, if not the greatest of friends, then
great respecters of each other’s ideals, burdens and integrity.
Together, their words
forced a nation to free itself from the hideous institution of slavery that had
existed from long before the War of Independence until the end of the Civil
War.
What the Founding Fathers
could not (or would not) address in the Declaration of Independence or the
Constitution was left to be hashed out by Lincoln, Douglass, and their
contemporaries. The words they left behind on paper bear witness, both silent and
thunderous, to a time and place in American history when finally, the lofty ideals
espoused so eloquently by the Founders began to be fully (if somewhat reluctantly
) embraced and expanded to include more than just the privileged few.
