pation of the slaves than Mr. Garrison and the American Anti-Slavery Society. (Frederick Douglass, Monthly of March 1862). Raising the free black regiments for service in the Union Army was a policy intended to give blacks a sturdy claim on the state and prove that they were citizens of the United States. Frederick Douglass was extremely active, and his own sons were the first recruits from New York. In March 1863, he published the stirring Men of Color, To Arms! Liberty won by white men would lack half its luster. Who would be free themselves must strike the blow, proclaimed Douglass. The chance is now given you to end in a day the bondage of centuries, and to rise in one bound from social degradation to the plane of common equality with all other varieties of men....Action! action! not criticism, is the plain duty of this hour. Soon, two black regiments were formed. After learning the truth about abolition, Douglass never deceived himself by thinking that the blacks were anything but the nations foster children, taken into the family as a result of accident and necessity. Although they were not of the nation, they were in the nation. They, the black race, were citizens of the United States, and they were on equal terms. The laws of the national state guaranteed that. By 1870, Douglass and his allies had made considerable progress. Most of the measures they had originally advocated had been adopted: the immediate and universal abolition of slavery, the enlistment of black soldiers, the creation of a Freedmens Bureau, and most importantly, the incorporation of the black mans civil and political equality into the law of the land (Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth amendments). But the next decade proved to be a very frustrating one for Douglass and many of his supporters. Many of the achievements of the Civil War and Reconstruction were not concrete. It became expedient for northern political and business interests to conciliate sout...
