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They met for the first time at the White House on Aug. 10, 1863, to discuss the treatment of the newly recruited Black soldiers in the Union army. Frederick Douglass was escorted into President Abraham Lincolns office by Kansas U.S. Sen. Samuel Pomeroy. As Douglass recorded the event in The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, his third autobiography, published in 1881, Lincoln rose from his seat, his hand extended, as Douglass began to introduce himself. "I know who you are, Mr. Douglass," the president said.
Indeed, Lincoln and Douglass grew up on different sides of the same street. The Lincolns were considered "white trash," a family of semi-literate Midwestern subsistence farmers. The Lincolns' sole ambition in life was to create a good harvest so that they would have food to carry them through the long winter. Lincoln often said that he understood the plight of slaves because his father worked him like a slave on the family farm.
At age 22, Lincoln, with ambitions beyond subsistence farming, left his family farm, took up residence in the Illinois community of New' Salem, worked odd jobs, and studied the law'. He eventually became an attorney and entered politics.
Douglass grew up in slavery, working on Maryland farms. At about the age of 20, Douglass escaped from bondage and became a strong voice for abolition. He edited an antislavery newspaper and gave speeches against the institution that he found so evil.
For both men, achieving literacy' was a key to the forming of their characters. Both men studied The Columbian Orator, a textbook that offered tips on public speaking and writing.
As Lincoln and Douglass grew to adulthood, their nation divided over slavery. On the slavery question, the two men were on opposing sides of the same team. Both saw slavery as a national evil. Douglass was a strong abolitionist, while Lincoln was drawn to the new Republican Party, which formed in tire 1850s after the Whig Party divided over the slavery question. Some Republicans were abolitionists, but many, like Lincoln, sought only to limit tire spread of slavery into new states and territories, which might allow for slavery's gradual demise.
Douglass supported Lincolns presidential campaign in 1860. Immediately after Lincolns election, Southern states began to secede...
