Speech on the War / “Fighting the Rebels with One Hand”

Date: January 14, 1862

Genre: Speech/address; contemporary reprint

Contemporary witness: Douglass’ Monthly, February 1862, “Speech of Frederick Douglass on the War,” delivered at National Hall, Philadelphia

Primary source link: https://transcription.si.edu/view/13141/ACM-2007.19.21_02

Critical-edition source: https://frederickdouglasspapersproject.com/s/digitaledition/item/9130

Bibliographic/context cross-check: National Park Service identifies Douglass’s January 14, 1862 National Hall address; the Douglass Papers later title the speech “Fighting the Rebels with One Hand.”

Context link: https://home.nps.gov/inde/planyourvisit/presidentshousesite.htm

Themes: wartime civil liberties; liberty of speech; liberty of press; habeas corpus; executive detention; truth-telling; government power; Lincoln and Davis

FREE SPEECH RELEVANCE: 5/5 — Essential

Relevant quotations

1.Douglass opens by saying the country’s best friend is the person who “dares tell his countrymen the truth, however disagreeable that truth may be.”

2.Describing the effects of civil war, he says “the great writ of habeas corpus is suspended from necessity, liberty of speech and of the press have ceased to exist.”

3.He immediately adds that an order from Richmond or Washington — “one stroke of the pen from Davis or Lincoln” — can send a citizen to prison.

4.The qualification immediately following this description is essential: “I speak this not in complaint; I admit the necessity, while I lament it.”

Immediate context

Douglass is describing the extraordinary political and legal conditions produced by the Civil War before turning to the Union’s refusal to enlist Black men and to slavery as the source of the rebellion.

Why logged

Concrete contemporaneous wartime evidence concerning state power: speech and press liberty are discussed alongside habeas corpus and executive imprisonment, with Douglass expressly naming both Confederate and Union executive authority in the same passage.

Search proxies

dares tell his countrymen the truth; habeas corpus; liberty of speech; liberty of the press; ceased to exist; Richmond; Washington; Davis or Lincoln; sends any citizen to prison; National Hall

Verification: VERIFIED — 2026-09-05. All three passages were directly compared with the Frederick Douglass Papers critical text, which identifies the February 1862 Douglass’ Monthly witness. The Smithsonian transcription and National Park Service context were checked in earlier reviews; the Smithsonian page could not be freshly inspected in this pass. Evidence grade A.