Frederick Douglass 1864

The meaning or the fight: Frederick Douglas and the memory of the Fifty Fourth Massachusetts. By: Blight, David W., Massachusetts Review, 00254878, Spring95, Vol. 36, Issue 1
“A great battle lost or won is easily described, understood, and appreciated, but the moral growth of a great nation requires reflection, as well as observation, to appreciate it.”

Frederick Douglass 1864
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–Frederick Douglass, 1864
“So they sought first to deprive the day [Memorial Day] of any significance to the living. Only the manhood and valor of the dead were to be commemorated. The dead were to be mourned; the cause for which they died forgotten. There was no other way by which the desired object could be accomplished, and the future taught to honor the soldier for his deeds, regardless of his motive.”
–Albion Tourgee, May 30, 1885
“Americans . . . have the most remarkable ability to alchemize all bitter truths into an innocuous but piquant confection and to transform their moral contradictions, or public discussion of such contradictions, into a proud decoration, such as are given for heroism on the field of battle.”
–James Baldwin, “Many Thousands Gone,” 1951
IN JULY, 1863, IN THE WAKE of the battle of Gettysburg, the New York City draft riots, and a series of failed recruiting speeches, Frederick Douglass seemed embittered, even disoriented about his own role (as recruiter, orator, and editor) in the war effort. He had run out of ways to explain away the unequal pay and other discriminations practiced against black soldiers in the Union forces. But of one thing he was still completely clear: the motives or purposes for which black men might fight in this war. “They go into this war to affirm their manhood,” declared Douglass, “to strike for liberty and country. If any class of men in this war can claim the honor of fighting for principle, and not from passion, for ideas, not from brutal malice, the colored soldier can make that claim preeminently” (italics mine). Fifteen years later, in the wake of the Compromise of 1877, and as the victories of emancipation, the preservation of the Union, and radical Reconstruction seemed increasingly abandoned, Douglass gave a Decoration Day speech in Madison Square in New York. Douglass appealed to a kind of military pathos, the Victorian sense of heroic soldiers’ sacrifice, as most Memorial Day speakers would. But, more than that, he demanded that his audience remember that the Civil War had been a struggle of ideologies on both sides. The conflict had been “a war of ideas,” Douglass announced, “a battle of principles . . . a war between the old and the new, slavery and freedom, barbarism and civilization.” It “was not a fight,” he insisted, “between rapacious birds and ferocious beasts, a mere display of brute courage and endurance, but it was a war between men of thought, as well as of action, and in dead earnest for something beyond the battlefield.”(n1)
During the war, in season and out, and for long thereafter, Douglass insisted that this conflict be understood not only as a testing of manhood, but as a full, dignified, humane recognition of manhood, not merely as soldiers’ sacrifice, however complete the victimization of ordinary
soldiers on both sides, but as a revolutionary reinvention of the rights of man and of republican government.
In the film, “Glory,” at the reception where Robert Gould Shaw is to be given his challenge to command the Fifty Fourth Massachusetts regiment, someone says: “Robert, there’s a man here who would like to meet you.” With the winds of war only in the distant background, a sincere and dedicated Governor John Andrew introduces Shaw to Frederick Douglass. The abolitionist appears to stand taller than anyone else, old and sage-like, almost half covered in the bright light from the window. Shaw is very impressed, a few noble words are exchanged, and from that moment on, having been blessed by the man with a visage and a voice, we know that Shaw is bound for “glory.” Who knows why that implausible meeting between Douglass and Shaw is inserted into the movie, except that it allows Douglass to be what he often is now in pedagogical and popular uses of his image: a great face (whose very presence on a poster, a calendar, a restaurant placemat, or in a movie– not unlike other characters such as Malcolm X, Abraham Lincoln or Michael Jordan) is supposed to invoke some kind of message in the viewer. In “Glory” Douglass only has a few forgettable lines, and then we see him waving in slow motion to the passing Fifty Fourth as they march along Boston Common. At least Ken Burns used Douglass as a significant voice in his film series on the Civil War, even if he wasn’t part of the military narrative, since he did not wear a uniform.
But my function here is not to critique the film “Glory.” However regrettable Douglass’s relative absence/presence may be in the picture, it was at least an initial Hollywood attempt to confront some central questions of African American history: why did it take total war on such a scale to begin to make black people free in America? Or, why did black men in the middle of the nineteenth century have to die in battle, by the thousands, in order to be recognized as men? Or, why or how did a civil war among white Northerners and Southerners over conflicting conceptions of the future of their moral and political economies become for blacks a struggle over whether they had a future in America in the nineteenth century? “Glory” is a war movie, a Civil War platoon drama that follows certain predictable formulas. But it is also a war movie that says that sometimes wars have meanings that we are obliged to discern. That would surely have been Douglass’s own demand of any film or other artistic representation of the Fifty Fourth Massachusetts and the cause they served. But such is the oldest, and in some ways, the most important question in Civil War remembrance: do we remember the meaning or just the fight? Would we rather feel–or see–the spectacle of battle, or face the unending challenge of its political consequences. Are we ennobled by St. Gaudens’s brilliant relief, or deflected by it? When we look at the Shaw-Fifty Fourth Memorial does our eye follow Shaw on his eternal ride into military glory, as Robert Lowell put it in his great poem, with “wren-like vigilance, a greyhound’s gentle tautness . . .” leading “his black soldiers to death, he cannot bend his back?” Or, do we rather see those noble black soldiers’ faces arched forward, and with William James in his dedication speech, “almost hear the bronze Negroes breathe?” To which kind of meaning does our own gaze lead? Which kind of details do we see or evade? Which kind of memory, to borrow again from Lowell, “sticks . . . in the city’s throat?”(n2) The meaning or the fight? Of course, it does not have to be either/or. But it was precisely that separation that Douglass anticipated in what I think was his greatest wartime speech, “The Mission of the War,” delivered many times across the North in 1863-64. “A great battle lost or won is easily described, understood, and appreciated,” said Douglass, “but the moral growth of a great nation requires
reflection, as well as observation, to appreciate it.”(n3) In that passage, it was as if Douglass had somehow already anticipated the thousands of regimental histories, battle memoirs, and veterans’ reunion rituals of the late nineteenth century, not to mention the near industry of battle reenactments in our own time. His moralizing was not always appreciated in his own time, nor would it be today. Even those who appreciate the search for moral content in history would sometimes prefer to kill off the moralizer.
Lewis Mumford once put it well when he said that “living itself in post-Civil War America was an uphill job; living well, living with integrity, living for the sake of ideas–these things required exceptional stamina and intellectual hardihood.”(n4) In relation to the way public memories of the Civil War have been constructed, perhaps it has ever been so. Explanations of the meaning of the Civil War–whether expressed in fiction, monuments, historiography, politics, journalism, public schooling, veterans’ organizations, reenactments, the strongly gendered attractions of war- gaming, tourism, or film and others arts–have, intentionally or not, provided a means of assessing the illusive question of national self-definition in America, of the persistence of racism and the dilemma of race in public policy, and of our on-going challenge to build one political structure that can encompass the interests of the many. By and large, the legions of Americans who transmit a fascination for the Civil War across generations still prefer the drama of the immediate event to discussions of causes and consequences. This is, of course, partly a measure of human nature, of audiences, and of public tastes for history generally.
For Americans broadly, the Civil War has been a defining event upon which we have often imposed unity and continuity; as a culture, we have preferred its music and pathos to its enduring challenges, the theme of reconciled conflict to resurgent, unresolved, and conflicted legacies. We have displaced complicated consequences by endlessly focussing on the contest itself. We have sometimes lifted ourselves out of historical time, above the details, and rendered the war safe in a kind of Passover offering as we watch the Blue and the Gray veterans shake hands across the little stone walls at Gettysburg. Like stone monuments, and some monumental books, monumental films are sometimes as much about forgetting as they are about remembering. Deeply imbedded in American mythology of mission, and serving as a mother lode of nostalgia for anti-modernists and military history buffs, the Civil War remains very difficult to unshuck from its shell of sentimentalism. As we continue to look at interpretations of the Civil War in the broad popular culture, we will understand perhaps what Daniel Aaron meant when he said that, among American writers, the conflict “has not been so much unfelt, as it is unfaced.”(n5)
Although earlier black units had been organized in Kansas, Louisiana, and South Carolina, official recruiting of black troops in the wake of the Emancipation Proclamation began in the winter and spring of 1863. War weariness on the part of white Northerners made them increasingly more pliant to the revolutionary strokes of emancipation and black enlistment. The Conscription Act of March, 1863, by subjecting the mass of white Northerners to the draft, also created willingness to use black soldiers–that blacks could “stop a bullet as well as any white man” became a common attitude in the North as the war in Virginia and in Tennessee became ever more costly. Moreover, the rise of the Copperheads gave black spokesmen like Douglass an effective contrast for their assertions of black loyalty. Black people who “did not cease to love their country, though rudely dealt by,” wrote Douglass in February, 1863, and who were “waiting to be honorably invited forward” compared well with Copperheads, whom Douglass defined
simply as “men who hate the Negro more than they love their country.”(n6) Thus could Douglass make authoritarian appeals to loyalty, American nationalism, and a kind of race pride all at once.
Although he never espoused the “divine right” doctrine of government held by many conservative northern intellectuals, Douglass did believe the government had earned black allegiance. The “government” was now something precious and “rebellion” against it a heinous act; abolition and black citizenship depended upon its preservation. In his famous broadside “Men of Color to Arms!” written in March, 1863, Douglass tried to make this message clear to his fellow blacks. “I urge you to fly to arms,” he pleaded, “and smite with death the power that would bury the government and your liberty in the same hopeless grave.”(n7) A reverence for authority and hostility to dissent are often natural results of war, but demands for loyalty do not always coexist with appeals to the right of revolution. From Douglass’s perspective, however, blacks could demonstrate allegiance to country as well as make revolution against the old order. The black soldier was, to him, the embodiment of both themes.
After Governor Andrew, and his director of recruiting, George Luther Stearns, launched the effort to create the Fifty Fourth Massachusetts, Douglass joined with numerous other black abolitionists, and threw himself into recruiting black troops. He thrilled at the opportunity to make his people warriors. Language had always been the primary means by which he could vent his rage against slavery and racism, but now he could convert rhetoric into action and apply his literary and oratorical skills to the specific purpose of recruiting black men to make war on slaveholders. Recruiting became Douglass’s own means of active service in the war.
Douglass first met with Stearns in late February, while the latter was establishing recruiting posts all across the North. Within days, he issued “Men of Color to Arms!” and began barnstorming the towns of western and upstate New York. In April he traveled to New York City and Philadelphia to speak at large recruiting meetings. Douglass pledged to raise one company for the regiment, and two of his sons, Charles and Lewis, were his first recruits. He had traveled this lecture circuit many times before, but never with such a purpose. In town after town, the orator appealed to young blacks to join up. By mid-April Douglass had sent, by his count, more than one hundred men off to Readville, Massachusetts, the training site of the Fifty Fourth.(n8), to imagine Frederick Douglass standing before gatherings of blacks, exhorting his people to grasp the opportunity to fight. His listeners were wary and sometimes openly distrustful because of all the discriminations in the Union army. At times, though, Douglass’s appeals to patriotism and self-interest must have been irresistible. At the end of some of his speeches he broke into song and led the assembled in singing “John Brown’s Body.”(n9) Somehow, it is hard for me to understand how the makers of “Glory” could have missed the filmic possibilities in such scenes. Perhaps in their “research” they simply didn’t know about it.
Douglass recruited twenty-five men in Syracuse, and twenty-three more followed him away from his lectures in Glen Falls, Little Falls, and Canajoharie. But in other places he was less successful–the war had caused full employment, even among blacks, in many northern communities. Privately, Douglass admitted to some initial “hesitation” about black enlistment due to the denial of officer’s status, but for the moment, he told Gerrit Smith, blacks “should hail the opportunity of getting on the United States uniform as a very great advance.” Publicly, Douglass counseled “Action! Action! not criticism.” “Words are now useful only as they
stimulate to blows,” he declared in “Men of Color to Arms!”(n10) He was preparing men for the fight, and he would offer them plenty of meanings for that fight in due time.
In the creation of the black soldier, literally and symbolically, Douglass had found the most meaningful use for war rhetoric, and at every stop he offered his potential volunteers an elaborate list of reasons why they should enlist. Some were pragmatic; some stirred the soul and gave meaning to the war as nothing else could. Douglass urged enlistment for the following practical ends: self-defense through learning the “use of arms”; self-respect by proving the manhood and courage of black people; self-involvement by controlling their own destiny and making their own history; and finally–perhaps the ultimate act of self-interest– retribution against slaveholders. In Douglass’s view, these ends were tied to larger and nobler purposes. He encouraged blacks to join “for your own sake,” but always with an eye on the “more inviting, ennobling, and soul enlarging work . . . of making one of the glorious band who shall carry liberty to your enslaved people.”(n11) Again, one wonders about the missed filmic opportunities in all of this: Denzel Washington (Trip) hearing the echoes of Douglass’s voice as he confronts Mathew Broderick (Straw) at the flogging he receives after stealing shoes, or while charging the earthworks at Fort Wagner. Imagine the use of less apocalyptic music and more of Douglass’s apocalyptic voice.
Letters Douglass received from the front in 1863 must have encouraged him as a recruiter, at least at first. A George Evans wrote to him in June asking for a recommendation to Governor Andrew for a commission as lieutenant in the newly organized Fifty Fifth Massachusetts Infantry Regiment. Describing the situation in Virginia in that pivotal summer of the war, Evans wondered about “the future of the immense multitudes of the flying fugitive slaves . . . thronging the roads with their bundles upon their heads not knowing which way to go.” Evans observed many slaves being sent south, thousands “throwing up rifle pits — and building fortifications for the rebels,” and still more “swallowed up in death” by the contending armies. Evans described this scene as “an amazing subject for our thoughts.”(n12) Surely, Douglass must have agreed. To him, the black soldier was the principal symbol of an apocalyptic war, liberating warriors who alone made suffering meaningful, a physical force that gave reality to millennial hopes.
It is interesting, maybe even useful, to contemplate what Douglass would have thought or said, had he lived two more years to be present at the unveiling of the Shaw/Fifty Fourth Memorial. His numerous emancipation anniversary or Memorial Day speeches during the final twenty years of his life would, no doubt, have been the text he would have rewritten for this special occasion. We might even, with filmmaker’s license, imagine him at the ceremony next to, or instead of Booker T. Washington, who gave one of the two major addresses. If an old, sage-like Douglass could be invented to meet Robert Gould Shaw at a reception in 1863, why not invent another Douglass and place him out at the corner of the common, next to William James, addressing the survivors of the Fifty Fourth on May 31, 1897. Instead of hearing Washington’s brief rehash of Up From Slavery, combined with artful strokes of Southern sentimentalism and sectional reconciliation, we might have heard Douglass deliver a jeremiad about the meaning of emancipation and the 14th and 15th Amendments. Instead of hearing Washington declare “we are coming up . . . ” we might be shook by Douglass’s demands to “never forget.”(n13) But, ah, I have lost myself in further filmic and fictional possibilities.
Back within real time we are left with other interpreters of the meaning of the Fifty Fourth Massachusetts, albeit those interpretations are often no less artistically rendered. William James’s speech at the unveiling in 1897 and Robert Lowell’s poem in 1961 almost speak to or with each other. Both suggest in subtle and unforgettable ways that monuments are always about remembrance and forgetting even as they are unveiled, and certainly as they outlast underground garages or facelifts. In the opening lines of his speech, James worries about “the memory of this possibly too forgetful generation,” a claim that can be made through time about America’s general stance toward the past. Similarly, Lowell sees the St. Gaudens monument “shaking over the excavations” of the new underground garage in Boston Common, and through “finned cars” seeking the ever-important “parking spaces” of American life. It seems a bit of a cliche, but what do we really see at that corner of the Common: the meaning of the monument, or the fight for a parking space? Lowell borrows — rewrites — James’s concern about how the “abstract soldier’s monument. . . reared on every village green” might in time allow Americans to forget the “profounder meaning of the Union cause” represented in the black regiment, whose ordinary men fought for elemental notions of freedom. When Lowell looked up from his television set in 1961, looking away from the drama of the Civil Rights movement, where “the drained faces of Negro school children rise like balloons,” he too worries about all those “stone statues of the abstract Union soldier” on every New England town green, where “they doze over their muskets and muse through their sideburns….”(n14) Something is inexorably being forgotten in James’s demand for meaning; something has already been forgotten in Lowell’s bitter, modernist search for the meaning of the Union dead at the Civil War Centennial.
James’s speech has a fair portion of Mugwumpery’s demand for civic virtue, and one can already see in that address the outline and substance of his later, and more famous, “The Moral Equivalent of War” speech (1910). But James hit the chord of what was happening in Civil War memory in the 1890s: sectional reconciliation was being achieved in an avalanche of stories of soldiers’ valor in romantic far-off battles, which had become staples of mass market magazines as well as the seven-volume history of the war era by James Ford Rhodes. “Only when some yellow-bleached photograph of a soldier of the ‘sixties comes into our hands, with that odd and vivid look of individuality due to the moment when it was taken, do we realize the concreteness of that by-gone history, and feel how interminable to the actors in them were those leaden-footed hours and years. The photographs themselves erelong will fade utterly, and books of history and monuments like this alone will tell the tale. The great war for the Union will be like the siege of Troy; it will have taken its place amongst all other’ old, unhappy, far-off things and battles long ago.” Listening to those lines makes one wonder if almost exactly the same passage might not be a description used by veterans of the sixties in our own century, speaking to the young, in these our own nineties. Moreover, one wonders if the same passage might not apply to “Gettysburg the movie.” James answered his own challenge. In all such remembrance of war, he claimed, “two things must be distinguished — the moral service of them from the fortitude which they display.” In other words, we are bound by our humanity to distinguish between the meaning and the fight. James wrote, of course, while still an occupant of the nineteenth century. He hadn’t lived to witness the most violent century in history, the most unrelenting assault on the notion that wars have meaning, as we have. So he could insist that nations build monuments to “civic courage” rather than “battle instinct,” at the same time he acknowledged that “the survival of the fittest has not bred it [civic valor] into the bone of human beings as it has bred military valor….” If Douglass could have lived to hear, or read, James’s speech, he would surely have remembered
his days recruiting the regiment. He might have forgotten some of his own thumping appeals to the battle instincts of young black men; he might have ignored his own role as a war propagandist. But the whole unveiling event would have surely been, for Douglass, a grand recognition scene of the meanings within the fight, of what memory theorist Frederick Bartlett once called an “effort after meaning.”(n15)
But in real time, and in political contexts, as Douglass and James alike understood I think, meaning is something we often impose on events, however much we believe in the inherent content of our own version of that meaning. As Eric Hobsbaum and others have ably shown, expanding nations in the late nineteenth century engaged in elaborate rituals of public commemoration and monument building as a means of laying down –inventing — traditions in the service of nationalism. The dual historical process of, on the one hand, the sectional reunion of North and South, and on the other hand, the development of an eventually virulent nationalism in the late nineteenth century in the United States is a classic illustration of Hobsbaum’s paradigm of “invented traditions.” James could, therefore, refer to Fort Wagner as an “ancient site,” and almost hear the monument breathe in the living present. We like to look at the Fifty Fourth Massachusetts Memorial as different or unique, somehow above or apart from all that purposeful sectional reconciliation that only made racial reconciliation of any kind all but impossible during the age of Jim Crow. But that memorial, containing the meaning of the ordinary black men in the regiment, is both alternative counter-memory and part of a piece. It is different; that regiment fought for ideals and purposes that seem higher than the mere abstractions we see through our late twentieth century filters in all the thousands of other Civil War monuments we pass by in our towns and cities. The Fifty Fourth Memorial is different; it speaks about emancipation, as well as manly, selfless devotion. It tells us that horror, conquest, and destruction on the scale of modern total war can have meaning. It takes Oliver Wendell Holmes’s “soldier’s faith” and converts it into political and moral purposes, rather than merely into the late nineteenth century’s love of the manly, strenuous life.(n16) It allows us a way to see soldiering as a testing of ideas, instead of only a testing of Victorian notions of masculinity. It gives us a picture and an experience through which to see the human aims of that war, as well as its beastliness. As long as that memorial stands out on the corner of the Common, those who choose to notice must realize, through all the haze of Civil War nostalgia practiced and nurtured in this society, that a great revolution of emancipation lay at the heart of the cause against which Robert E. Lee made his noble fight in a “lost” cause.
But we should not ignore the American nationalism within that monument, and within its counter-memory. James made this point quite explicitly in his dedication speech, and so did Douglass on dozens of other similar occasions in the 1880s and 90s. As Hobsbaum, Benedict Anderson, and other theorists of nationalism have demonstrated, what makes nationalism so problematic — so enduring, intractable, and useful — is that it is not pure invention. The most successful examples of the manipulation of nationalism, writes Hobsbaum, are those that serve a deeply “felt need” in society. However terrible have been its practices and outcomes, nationalism — with its concomitant appeals to identity, heritage, ethnicity, blood or religion — does not go away because it remains, for better or worse, as Anderson writes, “the most universally legitimate value in the political life of our time.”(n17) Certainly that could be said even more unequivocally about the 1890s. The regiment of black soldiers in the war for emancipation and the Union became the central symbol of the achievement of citizenship, of a yearning for secure
social identities among black Americans in increasingly desperate times, of an insistence on belonging in the land of one’s birth. In spite of Postmodernism’s wish fulfillment, nations, it turns out, still have histories and futures. So, the Fifty Fourth Memorial is different; it has a special place — and meaning-on the blurred landscape of Civil War memorialization. It sticks, we might say revising Lowell, in the nation’s throat.
(n1) Frederick Douglass, “The Commander-in-Chief and His Black Soldiers,” Douglass Monthly, August, 1863, in Philip S. Foner, ea., The Life and Writings of Frederick Douglass (1952), vol. 3, 370; Frederick Douglass, “Speech in Madison Square,” Decoration Day, 1878, Frederick Douglass Papers (LC), reel 15.
(n2) Robert Lowell, “For the Union Dead,” in Norton Anthology of American Literature (1980), vol. 1, 842; William James, “Robert Gould Shaw,” delivered in Boston, May 31, 1897, in Memories and Studies by William James (1934), 40.
(n3) Frederick Douglass, “The Mission of the War,” delivered in New York City, February 13, 1864, in Foner, ea., Life and Writings, vol. 3, 401.
(n4) Lewis Mumford, “Brown Decades” (1932), in Mumford, Interpretations and Forecasts: 1922-1972 (1973), 88.
(n5) Daniel Aaron, The Unwritten War: American Writers and the Civil War (1973), 328.
(n6) Frederick Douglass, “Condition of the Country,” Douglass Monthly, February, 1863.
(n7)Frederick Douglass, “Men of Color to Arms!,” March 21, 1863, in Foner, ea., Life and Writings, vol. 3, 318.
(n8) The frantic activity of the recruiting process is documented in George Stearns to Douglass, March 24, 1863, Douglass Papers (LC); and in “Movers,” Douglass Monthly, April, 1863. Stearns paid Douglass’s expenses at ten dollars per week. This was less than Douglass believed his services were worth, and, although he raised no public objection, he did complain privately. See Douglass to Gerrit Smith, March 6, 1863, in Gerrit Smith Papers; Smith to Douglass, March 10, 1863, in Douglass Papers (LC).
(n9) Douglass Monthly, April, 1863.
(n10) “Men of Color to Arms!,” 318.
(n11) “Why Should Colored Men Enlist?,” Douglass Monthly, April, 1863.
(n12) George Evans to Douglass, First Mass. Light Artillery, Army of the Potomac, on the Rappahannock, Virginia, June 6, 1863, in Douglass Papers (LC).
(n13) Booker T. Washington, “A Speech at the Unveiling of the Robert Gould Shaw Monument,” Boston, May 31, 1897, in Louis Harlan ed., Booker T. Washington Papers (1978), vol. 4, 385-89.
(n14) James, “Robert Gould Shaw,” 13, 42-43, Lowell, “For the Union Dead,” 842.
(n15) James, “Robert Gould Shaw,” 55-57, Frederick C. Bartlett, Remembering: A Study in Experiential and Social Psychology (1932), 265-67.
(n16) Eric Hobsbaum and Terence Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition, 1-14, 263-307; James, “Robert Gould Shaw,” 55; Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., “A Soldier’s Faith,” address delivered on Memorial Day, May 30, 1895, at a Harvard University Commencement, in Speeches of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. (1934), 56-66.
(n17) Hobsbaum and Ranger, eds., Invention of Tradition, 307 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (1991), 3.
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By David W. Blight