"Men of Color / To Arms! To Arms! / Now or Never": Monumental Civil War Recruiting Poster for African-American Soldiers

Printed Broadside, Men of Color / To Arms! To Arms! / Now or Never. Philadelphia, [ca July 1863]. The subscribers, Frederick Douglass plus fifty-four African-American leaders from Philadelphia, include ministers, merchants, teachers, a dentist, artists, a bookdealer, a shoemaker, a barber, a confectioner, and a restaurant-owner. 1 p., 30 x 42 in., framed to 35 1/2 x 48 in. Washington Conservation Studio 2017 report available on request. This very rare and dramatic recruiting poster signals a seismic shift in policy. African American men had joined Union forces in limited numbers from the start of the Civil War, but it took Lincoln's signing of the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, to officially encourage and remove barriers to their enlistment.After Massachusetts Governor John Andrew had federal permission to raise a corps of "United States Colored Troops," Frederick Douglass spent much of the spring recruiting for the 54th Regiment. His own sons Charles and Lewis were among those who heeded the call. At Secretary of War Stanton's request, Douglass traveled through the Union, with his rousing pleas printed in newspapers and broadsides across the North. In June 1863, this effort took on a new urgency as the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia started to move north into Pennsylvania. On June 23, 1863, the War Department authorized three black regiments to be raised in the Philadelphia area. Recruitment posters of all sorts and sizes were soon posted throughout Philadelphia.[1] Major George L. Stearns, chief of the government's recruiting drive, invited Frederick Douglass to speak. At Philadelphia's National Hall on July 6, 1863, about five thousand people, including blacks and whites, men and women, came to listen.Excerpts"This is our golden moment! The Government of the United States calls for every Able-bodied Colored Man to enter the Army for the Three Years' Service! And join in Fighting the Battles of Liberty and the Union. A new era is open to us. For generations we have suffered under the horrors of slavery, outrage and wrong; our manhood has been denied, our citizenship blotted out, our souls seared and burned, our spirits cowed and crushed, and the hopes of the future of our race involved in doubt and darkness. But now our relations to the white race are changed. Now, therefore, is our most precious moment. Let us rush to arms!""FAIL NOW, & OUR RACE IS DOOMED / on this the soil of our birth. We must now awake, arise, or be forever fallen. If we value liberty, if we wish to be free in this land, if we love our country, if we love our families, our children, our homes, we must strike now while the country calls; we must rise up in the dignity of our manhood, and show by our own right arms that we are worthy to be freemen. We have seen what Valor and Heroism our Brothers displayed at Port Hudson and Milliken's Bend, though they are just from the galling, poisoning grasp of Slavery, they have startled the World by the most exalted heroism. If they have proved themselves heroes, cannot WE PROVE OURSELVES MEN? ARE FREEMEN LESS BRAVE THAN SLAVES""More than a Million White Men have left Comfortable Homes and joined the Armies of the Union to save their Country. Cannot we leave ours, and swell the Hosts of the Union, to save our liberties, vindicate our manhood, and deserve well of our Country."Historical BackgroundThis broadside appeared around that July 6 mass meeting, where Frederick Douglass addressed the crowd to "deafening thunders of applause." Congressman William D. Kelley and abolitionist and women's rights activist Ann E. Dickinson also spoke, as did Professor E. D. Bassett.[2]The stirring text has often been attributed to Douglass, who had used the clarion call, "Men of Color. To Arms!," in his newspaper and in speeches that March. However, we haven't found any of the other text of this broadside in his writings. However, William Lloyd Garrison's July 31 issue of . (See website for full description).