Four Hundred Souls: A Community History of African America, 1619-2019

In 1859, Douglass moved to Britain in part because of his association with John Brown. Brown’s attack on Harper’s Ferry threatened anyone close to him with guilt by association. Douglass had not been a fugitive since 1838, when he escaped to the North in pursuit of freedom. He eventually returned.

In the years before the Civil War, Douglass “became a prophet of a United States who embodied the courage of its convictions, a country that, as Douglass put it, ‘shall not brand the Declaration of Independence as a lie’” (226). He knew that the South would completely change after emancipation, but Douglass knew the North would have to change as well.

Abraham Lincoln approved the recruitment of Black soldiers, leading to the “abolition war” (227) Douglass had hoped for. Two of his sons enlisted. The Black regiments were seen as inferior and treated in ways that foreshadowed the postwar Jim Crow era. Douglass saw that the challenges during Reconstruction would be difficult to overcome, and the nation he envisioned could not exist until African Americans were accepted and treated equally.

Bouie writes that by 1864 “nearly 400,000 enslaved people had escaped to Union lines. They had won themselves freedom in the process” (230).