Josh stuck a ringer in Douglass' face. "And do you know why we don't excuse you, boy? I don't excuse you because it's all your goddamn fault."
"I have no idea what you arc talking about," Douglass said, now alarmed as well as furious. This sort of thing hadn't happened to him in Rochester for many years. He knew too well how ugly it could get, and how fast it could get that way. Carefully, he said, "I do not know what you believe to be my fault, but I do know I have never set eyes on any of you before in my life." And, if God be kind, 1 shall never see you again.
"Not you, you—you niggers," Josh said. "Hadn't been for you niggers, this here'd still be one country. We wouldn't have fought two wars against the lousy Rebels, and they wouldn't have licked us twice, neither."
"Yeah," said Jim or Bill.
"That's right," Bill or Jim agreed.
They weren't drunk. Douglass took some small comfort in that. It might make them a little less likely to pound him into the boards of the floor. He said, "Black men did not ask to be brought to these shores, nor did we come willingly. The difficulty lies not in our being here but in the way we have been used. I myself bear on my back the scars of the overseer's lash."
"Ooh, don't he talk fancy," one of the men behind Josh said.
"Reckon that's why the overseer whupped him," Josh replied, which was a disturbingly accurate guess. He didn't attack, he didn't make a fist, but he didn't get out of Douglass' way, either. "Ought to all go back to Africa, every stinking one of you. Then we'd set things to rights here."
"No." Now Douglass let his anger show. "For better and for worse, I am an American, too—every bit as much as you. This is my country, as it is yours."
"Liar!" Josh shouted. His friends echoed him. Now he did fold his hand into a fist. Had the bottle Douglass held been thicker, he would have used it to add strength to his own blow. As things were, he feared it would break and cut his palms and fingers. He got ready to throw it in Josh's face instead.
From behind him came a short, sharp click. It was not a loud noise, but it was one to command immediate, complete, and respectful attention from Douglass and from the three white men of whom he'd fallen foul. Very slowly, Douglass turned his head and peered over his shoulder. The druggist's right hand held a revolver, the hammer cocked and ready to fall.
"That's enough, you men," he said sharply. "I've got no great use for niggers myself, but this fellow wasn't doing you any harm. Let him alone, and get the hell out of here while you're at it."
Josh and Jim and Bill tumbled over one another leaving the drugstore. The druggist carefully uncocked the pistol and set it down out of sight. Frederick Douglass inclined his head. "I thank you very much indeed, sir."
"Didn't do it for you so much as to keep the place from getting torn up," the druggist replied in matter-of-fact tones. "Like I said, I don't much care for niggers, especially niggers like you that put on airs, but that ain't the same as saying you deserved a licking when you hadn't done anything to deserve one. Now take your cough elixir and go on home."
"I'll do that," Douglass said. "A man who, for whatever reason, will not let another be beaten unjustly has in himself the seeds of justice." He tipped his hat and walked out of the store.
Once on the sidewalk, he looked around warily to see whether the white ruffians might want another try at him. But they were nowhere around. They must have had enough. His sigh of relief put a fair-sized frosty cloud in the air.
When he got home, Anna was sitting in the parlor, coughing like a consumptive. "Hold on, my dear," he said. "A tablespoon of this will bring relief."
"Fetch me a glass o' water with it, on account of it's gwine taste nasty," she answered. She sighed when he brought the medicine and the water. "I ain't been out of the house in a good while now. Anything much interestin' happen while you was at the drugstore?"
Douglass gravely considered that. After a moment, he shook his head. "No," he said. "Nothing much."
****
Snow blew into Friedrich Sorge's face. As it had a way of doing in Chicago, the wind howled. Sorge clutched at his hat. The Socialist newspaperman had an exalted expression on his face. Turning to Abraham Lincoln, he shouted, "Will you look at the size of this crowd? Have you ever in all your life seen anything like it?"
"Why, yes, a great many times, as a matter of fact," Lincoln answered, and hid a smile when Sorge looked dumbfounded. He set a gloved hand on his new ally's shoulder. "You have to remember, my friend, that you have been in politics as an agitator, a gadfly. From now on, we will be playing the game to win, which is a different proposition altogether."
"Yes." Sorge still sounded dazed. "I see that. I knew our joining would bring new strength to the movement, but I must say I did not imagine it would bring so much." He laughed. The wind did its best to blow the laughter away. "Until now, I did not imagine how weak we were, nor how strong we might become. It is ... amazing. Not since I left the old country have I been part of anything to compare to this— and in the old country, we were put down with guns."
Lincoln had different standards of comparison. To him, it was just another political rally, and not a particularly large one at that. Muffled against the cold and the wind, men and women trudged south along Cottage Grove Avenue
toward Washington Park. Considering the weather, it wasn't a bad crowd at all. It was also, without a doubt, the most energetic crowd Lincoln had seen since the War of Secession.
Red flags whipped in the wind. It had already torn some of them into streamers. Men had to wrestle to keep the signs they held from flying away, JUSTICE FOR THE WORKING MAN, some said, TAX CAPITALISTS' INCOME, others urged, REVOLUTION IS A RIGHT, still others warned.
Some of the people on the sidewalks cheered as the marchers walked past. Others hurried along, intent on their own business or on finding someplace to get out of the cold. Policemen in overcoats of military blue were out in force. They had clubs in their hands and pistols on their belts. If peaceable protest turned to uprising—or, perhaps, if the police thought it might, this gathering too could be put down with guns.
Trees in Washington Park were skeletally bare. What little grass snow did not cover was yellow and dead. It was as bleak and forbidding a place as Lincoln could imagine. But it also struck him as the perfect place to hold a rally for the new fusion of the Socialists and his wing of the Republican Party.
"In the summer, you know, and when the weather is fine, the rich promenade through here, showing off their fancy carriages and matched teams and expensive clothes," he said to Friedrich Sorge.
Sorge nodded. "Yes, I have seen this." He scowled. "It is not enough for them that they have. They must be seen to have. Their fellow plutocrats must know they, too, are part of the elite, and the proletariat must be reminded that they are too rich and powerful to be trifled with."
"Thanks to their money, they think it is summer in the United States the year around," Lincoln said. "To the people coming into Washington Park now, blizzards blow in January and July alike."
"This is true," Sorge agreed emphatically. He hesitated. "It is also very well said, though with my English imperfect you will not, perhaps, find in this much praise. But I think you have in yourself the makings of a poet."
"Interesting you should say so," Lincoln replied. "I tried verse a few times, many years ago—half a lifetime ago, now that I think about it. I don't reckon the results were altogether unfortunate, at least the best of them, but they were not of the quality to which I aspired, and so I gave up the effort and turned back to politics and the law, which better suited my bent."
"You may have given up too soon," Sorge said. "Even more than other kinds of writing, poetry repays steady effort."
"Even if you are right, as you may well be, far too many years have passed for it to matter now," Lincoln said. "If, by lucky chance, some phrase in a speech or in an article should strike the ear or mind as happily phrased, maybe it is the poet, still struggling after so long to break free."
More mis
erably cold-looking policemen directed the throng to an open area in front of a wooden platform from which more red banners flew. The wind was methodically ripping them to shreds. "Say your say and then go home," a policeman told Lincoln. The former president judged that likelier to be a plea from the heart than a political statement; the fellow's teeth were chattering so loudly, he was hard to understand.
Friedrich Sorgc said, "Not too hard, is it, to know which of our followers came from your camp and which from mine?"
"No, not hard," Lincoln said. The difference interested him and amused Sorge. About four out of five people in the crowd obeyed without question the police who herded them where they were supposed to go. The fifth, the odd man out, called the Chicago policemen every name in the book, sometimes angrily, sometimes with a jaunty air that said it was all a game. The fifth man, the odd man, was far more likely to be carrying a red flag than the other four.
"Some people, Lincoln, you see, truly do believe in the revolution of the proletariat," Sorge said.
"I do recollect that, believe me," Lincoln answered. "What you have to remember is that some people don't. Looking over the crowd here, I'd judge that most of the people in it don't. What we have to do to build this party is to make the people who don't believe in revolution want to join so they can reform the country, and at the same time keep the ones who are revolutionaries in the fold."
Sorge's mouth puckered as if he'd bitten into an unripe persimmon. "You are saying—you have been saying since we first spoke— that we must water down the doctrines of the party the way a dishonest distiller will water down the whiskey he sells."
"Look at the crowd we have here today," Lincoln said patiently. "With a crowd like this, we can make the bosses think twice before they throw workers out in the streets or cut their pay. With a crowd like this, we can elect men who see things our way. Wouldn't you like to see a dozen, or two dozen, Socialist congressmen on the train for Washington after the elections this fall?"
"I do not know," Sorge said. "I truly do not know. If they call themselves Socialists but hold positions that are not Socialist positions—"
"If they're not pure enough to satisfy you, you mean," Lincoln said, and Sorge nodded. Lincoln's sigh swirled him in fog. "You can stand against the wall and shout 'Revolution!' as loud as you like, but you won't have many people standing by you if you do. If you want to get on the floor and dance, you have to know the tunes the folks out there arc dancing to."
Another policeman made his way over to Lincoln and Sorge. He was swinging his arms back and forth and beating his hands together, and still looked miserably cold. He wore a bushy mustache full of ice crystals. "If you ducks have to go speechifying, why the hell don't you do it and get it over with?" he said. "More time you waste, the better the chance somebody's going to freeze to death waiting for you to get on with it. Me, for instance."
"That's a good idea," Lincoln said, and Sorge did not disagree.
They ascended to the platform together. A hum of anticipation ran through the crowd. The hard-line Socialist minority began shouting slogans: "Workers of the world, unite!" "Down with the capitalist oppressors!" "Revolution!" They tried to turn that last into a rhythmic chant.
Abraham Lincoln held up his hands for quiet. Slowly, he gained it.
Friedrich Sorge had agreed, with some reluctance, that he should speak first. Lincoln's logic was that a fiery call for revolution would frighten off the more moderate members of the crowd if they heard it before they heard anything else: they would think the party had no room for them. Lincoln hoped to show them otherwise. Once he'd done that, Sorge could be as fiery as he liked.
"My friends," Lincoln said, "let me begin by speaking to you of religion." That intrigued some of the crowd and, no doubt, horrified the rest, including the men waving red flags. Intrigued or horrified, they listened. He went on, "Some men think God has given them the right to eat their bread in the sweat of other men's faces. That is not the sort of religion upon which people can get to heaven."
Silence persisted for another few seconds. Then a great roar rose up from the crowd, not only from the ordinary, respectable folks who had been Republicans and were trying to find out why Lincoln was abandoning the party he had led to the White House but also from the hard cases waving red flags. Friedrich Sorge clapped his gloved hands together again and again.
"Here," Lincoln said, and now the crowd hushed at once to hear him. "I am a poor hand to quote Scripture, but I will try it. It is said in one of the admonitions of the Lord, 'As your Father in heaven is perfect, be ye also perfect.' He set that up as a standard, and he who did most toward reaching that standard, attained the highest degree of moral perfection. So I say in relation to the principle that all men are created equal. If we cannot give perfect freedom to every man, let us do nothing that will impose slavery on any man." He had to pause again, for no one could have heard him through the cheers.
When he could speak once more, he went on, "Let us turn this government back into the channel in which the framers of the Constitution originally placed it. Let us stand firmly by each other. And let us discard all quibbling about this class and that class and the other class." Now Sorge looked less ecstatic. Lincoln did not care. He forged ahead: "Let us hear no more how this man is only a labourer, and so counts for nothing. Let us hear no more how that man is a great and wealthy capitalist, and so his will must be obeyed. Let us discard all these things, and unite as one people throughout this land, until we shall once again stand up declaring that all men are created equal."
Again he drew cheers from both factions in the crowd. When they washed over him, he felt neither chilled nor old. As they ebbed, he resumed: "I think this new Socialist Party is and shall be made up of those who, peaceably as far as they can, will oppose the extension of capitalist exploitation, and who will hope for its ultimate extinction— who will believe, if it ceases to spread, that it is in the course of ultimate extinction.
"We have to fight this battle upon principle, and upon principle alone. So I hope those with whom I am surrounded here have principle enough to nerve themselves for the task and leave nothing undone that can be fairly done, to bring about the right result. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this. I shall not keep you here much longer, my friends. Our purpose should be, must be, and is simple: to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves, and with all nations."
He stepped back. For a moment, no applause came, and he wondered if he had somehow lost his audience as he ended. But no: when the cheers and clapping thundered out, he realized the crowd had granted him that moment of enchanted silence every speaker dreams of and few ever get. He bowed his head. In that brief stretch of time, some of the bitterness of almost twenty years' wandering in the wilderness left him at last, and, when he stood straight again, he stood very straight indeed.
Friedrich Sorge tugged at the sleeve of his coat. He bent down to listen to his colleague through the ongoing roar of the crowd. Half angrily, half admiringly, Sorge demanded, "What am I supposed to say, after you have said all this?"
"What you were going to say—what else?" Lincoln answered. "I spread oil on the waters where I could. Now you go on and stir them up to a storm again."
And Sorge did his best. It was a speech that would have set a torch under one of the small crowds of dedicated men he was used to addressing, and it did set a torch under some of the crowd in Washington Park. When he spoke of Marx, when he spoke of 1848, when he decried the brutal suppression of the Paris Commune, he struck chords in many of them. To many who heard him, though, those were foreign things of little meaning, and he did nothing to relate them to the experience of the working man in the United States.
Listening to him, Lincoln understood why Socialism had remained so small a movement for so long: it simply was not, or had not been, aimed at the common American labourer. He aimed to change that. He thought he'd made a good start.
On and on Sorge went, c
onsiderably longer than Lincoln had done. People began drifting out of the park. When the Socialist finished—"Join with us! You have nothing to lose but your chains!"— some of the applause he got seemed more relieved than inspired.
Policemen began shouting: "Now you've heard 'em! Now get the hell out of here! Show's over. Go on home." Near the platform, one of those policemen turned to his pal and said, "Anybody wants to know, we ought to take all these crazy bomb-throwing fanatics and string 'em up. That'd go a long way toward setting the country to rights."
He made no effort to keep his voice down; if anything, he wanted the men on the platform to hear. Sorge turned to Lincoln and said, "You see how the oppressors' lackeys have learned their masters' language. You also see how they ape their masters' thoughts. When we go to the barricades—"
But Lincoln shook his head. "You notice he does not do anything about it. The first amendment to the Constitution protects our right to speak freely." He let out a chuckle the wind flung away. "The first amendment also protects his right to speak freely, however distasteful I find his opinion."
Sorge made a sour face. "Bah! You Americans, I sometimes think, suffer from an excess of this freedom."
"If you feel that way, you should have allied yourself with Benjamin Butler or with the Democrats, not with me," Lincoln answered. "And when you say you Americans, you show why the Socialists have not made a better showing up until now. You must remember, you arc not looking at the United States and their citizens from some external perspective. You are—we are—a part of them."
Had he spoken angrily, the union between his wing of the Republican Party and the Socialists might have broken down then and there. As it was, the look Sorge sent him was thoughtful rather than irate. "Perhaps you touch here on something important. Perhaps you do indeed," the newspaperman said. In musing tones, he went on, "Socialism from France is different from Socialism in Germany. Perhaps Socialism in the United States will prove different from both."
"Come on down from there, you damned crazy loons," said the policeman who'd called a moment earlier for hanging them, "before you both freeze to death, and before I do, too."
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