Word: douglass
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...Douglass was amazed by the idea. He had been a close friend of John Brown's throughout the 1850s and had championed his militant abolitionist efforts. In 1859 Brown had invaded Harpers Ferry, Va., as part of a scheme to free the slaves but was captured and hanged for treason. While Douglass considered Brown a hero and martyr, Lincoln had referred to him as a criminal and madman. Yet now Lincoln was borrowing from Brown by conceiving a similar raid. Douglass had not gone with Brown to Harpers Ferry because he had correctly predicted that Brown would fail...
After this meeting, Douglass saw Lincoln in a new light. The President was willing to go to far greater lengths in the cause of freedom than Douglass had previously thought possible. His John Brown plan "showed a deeper moral conviction against slavery than I had ever seen before in anything spoken or written...
Lincoln's strategy resembled John Brown's efforts to invade the South and free the slaves. He wanted Douglass to organize a band of black scouts "to go into the rebel states, beyond the lines of our armies, and carry the news of emancipation, and urge the slaves to come within our boundaries," as Douglass recalled. If the plan worked, it would preserve the Union and end slavery...
...When Douglass and Lincoln met for the third time, in March 1865, the mood was celebratory and they considered each other friends. Douglass came to Washington to attend Lincoln's second Inauguration. The war was almost over; some 179,000 blacks were in uniform, marching triumphantly through the South; and the recently passed 13th Amendment abolished slavery throughout...
...ceremony was "wonderfully quiet, earnest, and solemn," Douglass noted. There was a "leaden stillness about the crowd" as Lincoln delivered his address, and Douglass thought it sounded "more like a sermon than a state paper." After the ceremony he went to the reception at the White House. As he was about to enter, two policemen rudely yanked him away and told him no persons of color were allowed to enter. Douglass said there must be some mistake, for no such order could have come from the President. The police refused to yield, until Douglass sent word to Lincoln that...