Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era

by James M. McPherson

Events during the 1850s had converted some abolitionists to Brown’s view. Violence had won the Southwest from Mexico; threats of violence by southerners in Congress had opened most of it to slavery. Armed filibusters tried to win Cuba and Central America for slavery. Closer to home, the fugitive slave law did more than anything else to discredit nonviolence. Before 1850 Frederick Douglass had been a pacifist. “Were I asked the question whether I would have my emancipation by the shedding of one single drop of blood,” he said in the 1840s, “my answer would be in the negative. . . . The only well grounded hope of the slave for emancipation is the operation of moral force.” But a month after enactment of the fugitive slave law he changed his tune and advocated “forcible resistance” to the law. “Slave-holders . . . tyrants and despots have no right to live,” said Douglass now. “The only way to make the fugitive slave law a dead letter is to make half a dozen or more dead kidnappers.”3 One of Douglass’s favorite sayings became, “who would be free must himself strike the blow.” Like Frantz Fanon and other philosophers of anticolonial revolution a century later, Douglass came to believe that only through violence could the oppressed earn self-respect and the respect of their oppressors.