“I KNOW THAT DAMNED DOUGLASS”
On February 7, 1866, Frederick Douglass led a delegation of blacks to the White House hoping to convince President Andrew Johnson that voting was an urgent necessity for black men in the South. Douglass had been making this argument for more than two years. “Slavery is not abolished until the black man has the ballot,” he insisted in May 1865.1 Having armed the former slaves with guns, the Union had a moral obligation to arm them with the ballot. Emancipation had inflamed the slaveholders, and their fury was compounded when the Union army enlisted over a hundred thousand freed blacks to help suppress the slaveholders’ rebellion. In the weeks and months after Lee’s surrender the freed people confronted a defeated but vindictive ruling class. Without the vote, Douglass warned, southern blacks would be left defenseless. Lincoln had begun to support voting rights for some blacks, but his assassination left the crucial early decisions to the new President.
Douglass was right. Through the summer and fall of 1865 southern whites showed just how angry they were. The Confederate government may have collapsed, but the ruling class did not easily surrender the habits of command. At the first sign of black resistance the former slaveholders—now landlords—instinctively reached for the whip and called for the sheriff, as though nothing had changed, as though slavery had ended in name only. Behind the landlords, stiffening their backs, were the state and local governments newly established under President Johnson’s direction. Freedom would shortly be guaranteed by the Thirteenth Amendment, but it was already being circumscribed by a series of Black Codes, laws that limited the movement of the former slaves and all but required them to go to work for their former owners. Under the reestablished state governments the freed people had few civil and no political rights. They were arrested for “vagrancy” when they went out looking for better jobs. Their employers abused them. They were accosted on the streets. But if they turned for protection to the law, they confronted sheriffs who sided with the landlords, judges who would not allow blacks to testify, and all-white juries from which few blacks could expect justice. Those blacks who set out to test the strengths and limits of their freedom found themselves largely defenseless, just as Douglass had warned. Nevertheless, at the end of 1865 President Johnson proudly presented these new state governments to the returning Republican Congress. The reconstruction of the Union, he said, was largely complete. The delegation that Douglass led to the White House in early 1866 hoped to persuade the President otherwise.
The delegates had been appointed by the National Convention of Colored Men and included thirteen representatives from several different parts of the Union. George T. Downing, representing the New England states, spoke first. He was respectful, even deferential, but he was also clear and firm. He had come to ask Johnson’s support for legislation enforcing the full meaning of the Thirteenth Amendment. As citizens of the United States, whose Constitution contains “no recognition of color or race,” blacks should be guaranteed the same civil and political rights as whites. “[We] cherish the hope that we may be fully enfranchised,” Downing told President Johnson, “not only here in this District but throughout the land.” This was their “just due,” and anything less would give “license” to those determined to “outrage” the rights of black men.2
Douglass spoke next, more briefly than Downing, no less respectfully but somewhat more firmly. Divine Providence had placed in Johnson’s hands “the power to save or destroy us,” Douglass said, “to bless or blast us. I mean our whole race.” He then raised the specter of Abraham Lincoln. “Your noble and humane predecessor,” Douglass pointed out, “placed in our hands the sword to assist in saving the Union.” He was now asking Johnson to place “in our hands the ballot with which to save ourselves.” Douglass claimed that he was not there to argue the point. As citizens of the United States and subjects of its government, blacks paid their taxes, volunteered their services to the nation, and enlisted in the military. Because they shared in the costs of maintaining the state, Douglass concluded, it was “not improper that we should ask to share in the privileges of this condition.”
When Douglass finished, the President unburdened himself with a long and remarkable rant. His entire life, Johnson said, showed him to be “the friend of the colored man.” It was true that he had owned slaves and had even bought slaves, “but I never sold one.” This, Johnson said, showed that he had always been guided by humanity more than ambition. He had always treated his slaves well, and he dealt with his former slaves the same way; some of them had even come to Washington with him. So great were the sacrifices Johnson believed he had made for his slaves that for all practical purposes “I have been their slave instead of their being mine.” Yet in spite of all this, after “my means, my time, my all has been perilled” for the sake of “the colored race,” after he had given “tangible…practical” evidence of his concern for African Americans, Douglass and his colleagues still had the effrontery to ask Johnson to establish his credentials by supporting their demands. “I am free to say to you that I do not like to be arraigned by some who can get up handsomely rounded periods and deal in rhetoric,” Johnson declared, “and talk about abstract ideas of liberty, who never periled life, liberty, or property. This kind of theoretical, hollow, unpractical friendship amounts to very little.” So the answer was no, Johnson would not support black suffrage. That policy would lead to a race war that would “result in the extermination of one or the other. God forbid that I should be engaged in such a work!”
Johnson magnanimously offered to assume the position of a Moses for black people, leading them in the passage from bondage to freedom. But not at the expense of the ordinary white farmers who had suffered at the hands of the slaveholding monopoly and who, in consequence, had come to hate the slaves as much as their masters. A war fought primarily to suppress the slaveholding oligarchy had also, if only incidentally, liberated the slaves. Wasn’t it enough that “there were two right ends accomplished in the accomplishment of one?” Besides, Johnson asked, what practical difference would it make if tomorrow every freed slave were suddenly endowed with the privilege of voting?
Douglass tried to speak. “Mr. President, do you wish…”
” I am not quite through yet,” Johnson blurted out. He said that slaves themselves had helped sow the seeds of hatred that threatened to blossom into a full-scale race war. From behind the plantation gates, he claimed, the slaves had looked down upon their poor white neighbors. “Have you ever lived on a plantation?” Johnson asked.
“I have, your Excellency,” Douglass said.
And did you not think “a great deal less” of the poor slaveless farmer “than you did of your own master?”
“Not I!” Douglass answered.
“Well,” said the President, “I know such was the case with the large majority of you in those sections.” Isn’t that the reason the freed slaves preferred to work for their former owners because “they did not consider it quite as respectable to hire to a man who did not own negroes as the one who did?”
“Because,” Douglass said, making a tactical mistake, “he wouldn’t be treated as well.”
That proved his point, Johnson shot back. “It shows that the colored man appreciated the slave owner more highly than he did the man who didn’t own slaves. Hence the enmity between the colored man and the non-slaveholders.”
Blacks who now demanded voting rights were mere ingrates, Johnson suggested. The Civil War had been a bonanza for the slaves. No one had intended to free them when the war first began. But whereas blacks had entered the conflict as slaves and come out as free men, poor whites had been dragged into the war against their will and then lost their lives and property in the bargain. It was unfair for those who had gained by the war to demand privileges that would alienate those who had lost by it. Moreover, Johnson continued, voting qualifications were left up to the states to decide. If the people of a state determined that blacks should not vote, that was the business of the majority in that state. It was not the business of the federal government.
“That was said before the war,” Douglass replied, alluding to the belief that slavery was a state institution beyond the power of the federal government.
“I am now talking about a principle,” Johnson shouted, “not what someone else said.”
Downing spoke up. “Apply what you have said, Mr. President, to South Carolina.” In that state blacks would have formed an electoral majority had they been allowed to vote.
“That doesn’t change the principle at all,” Johnson insisted. “Each community is better prepared to determine the depository of its political power than anybody else.” It was undemocratic for the federal government to force voting privileges for blacks onto an unwilling white majority. “It is a fundamental tenet of my creed that the people must be obeyed,” Johnson proudly declared. “Is there anything wrong or unfair in that?”
“A great deal wrong, Mr. President,” Douglass replied, “with all respect.”
“It is the people of the States that must for themselves determine this thing,” Johnson insisted. If reconstruction were allowed to proceed from that assumption, and if all parties acquitted themselves well, the day might come when whites would see the justice of voting privileges for blacks. “But forced upon the people before they are prepared for it, it will…result in the injury of both races, and the ruin of one or the other.” To deny this, the President concluded, was to reject the wisdom of Providence and the law of nature. At that point he abruptly tried to terminate the meeting by thanking his guests “for the compliment you have paid me.”
“If the President will allow me,” Douglass said, “I would like to say one or two words in reply.” He was not sure that Johnson, having “taken strong ground in favor of a given policy,” was of a mind to be persuaded differently. “But if your Excellency will be pleased to hear, I would like to say a word or two in regard to that one matter of the enfranchisement of the blacks as a means of preventing the very thing which your Excellency appears to apprehend—that is a conflict of races.”
But as Douglass suspected, the President was not inclined to argue the point. “I repeat,” Johnson said, “I merely wanted to indicate my views in reply to your address, and not to enter into any general controversy.”
“Thank you, sir,” said Douglass.
But Johnson would not take yes for an answer. Instead he revived the colonization schemes that Lincoln had already discarded. “I think you will find,” the President said, “that the colored people can live and advance in civilization to better advantage elsewhere than crowded right down there in the South.”
Douglass could not restrain himself. He alluded to the recently passed Black Codes that restricted the movement of the freed people. The masters, he said, “have the making of the laws, and we cannot get away from the plantations.”
“What prevents you?” Johnson asked, apparently unaware of the labor and vagrancy statutes passed by the recently formed state legislatures of the South.
“We have not the simple right of locomotion through the Southern States now,” Douglass said.
“Why not?” Johnson asked, “the Government furnishes you with every facility.”
“There are six days in the year in which the negro is free in the South now,” Douglass explained, “and his master then decides for him where he shall go, where he shall work, how much he shall work—in fact, he is divested of all political power. He is in the hands of those men.”
“If the master controls him in his action,” Johnson said, “would he not control him in his vote?”
“Let the negro once understand that he has an organic right to vote,” said Douglass, “and he will raise up a party in the Southern states among the poor, who will rally with him. There is the conflict that you speak of between the wealthy slaveholder and the poor.”
“You touch right upon the point there,” Johnson said. “There is this conflict, and hence I suggest emigration. If he cannot get employment in the South, he has it in his power to go where he can get it.”
By then Douglass was fed up. “The President sends us to the people,” he said to his fellow delegates as they turned to leave, “and we will have to go and get the people right.” It was an election year, and Douglass was making a political threat within earshot of Johnson.
“Yes, sir,” Johnson shot back. “I have great faith in the people. I believe they will do what is right.”
The interview was over. The delegation left. Johnson then turned to his personal secretary and erupted in fury. “Those damned sons of bitches thought they had me in a trap,” Johnson said. “I know that damned Douglass; he’s just like any nigger, and he would sooner cut a white man’s throat than not.”3
Douglass meanwhile hurried from the White House and immediately wrote up a report of the meeting. The shocking transcript appeared in several major national newspapers.
“THE ASSASSINATION AND ITS LESSONS”
Douglass had had an inkling of how Andrew Johnson would treat him. His high hopes for the new President in the immediate aftermath of Lincoln’s assassination had given way to a gloomy foreboding. He could not help making comparisons. In the year or so following the assassination Douglass drafted several versions of a lengthy speech about Abraham Lincoln. As the months passed and his opinion of Johnson sank, Lincoln’s assassination loomed larger and larger in Douglass’s thoughts.
In June 1865 Douglass was struck by a paradox of gleeful optimism amid grave national sorrow. The nation was still reeling from the recent murder of its beloved President, yet the future had never seemed so bright. African Americans felt these dueling sentiments with particular force. They sensed the loss of Lincoln more deeply, more personally than white Americans, Douglass said, yet “we find the prospect bright and glorious.” This uncomfortable irony now gripped the nation at large. “The greatness and grandeur of the American Republic never appeared more conspicuously,” Douglass believed, “than in connection with the death of Abraham Lincoln.” Sustaining this optimism was none other than the new President. Andrew Johnson had come into office with a reputation for radicalism; he had repudiated his fellow slaveholders, remained loyal to the Union, and vowed that when the war was over, the treason of secession would be punished severely. “Already a strong hand is felt upon the helm of state,” Douglass wrote less than two months into Johnson’s presidency. “The word has gone forth that traitors and assassins, whether of low or high degree, whether male or female, are to be punished: that loyal and true men are to be rewarded and protected.” Lincoln was dead, but the freed people were safe.4
In this mood of simultaneous exaltation and despair Douglass made one of his most startling observations about Lincoln. “No people or class of people in this country, have a better reason for lamenting the death of Abraham Lincoln, than have the colored people,” Douglass wrote. He was protesting the exclusion of African Americans from many of the public memorials to the murdered President, insisting that blacks had as much right and far greater reason to participate than did white Americans. What, he asked, “was A. Lincoln to the colored people or they to him?” Compared with all his predecessors, Douglass answered, most of whom were “facile and servile instruments of the slave power, Abraham Lincoln, while unsurpassed in his devotion, to the welfare of the white race, was also in a sense hitherto without example, emphatically, the black man’s President: the first to show any respect for their rights as men.” Even hedged with qualifiers and comparisons, it was an astonishing thing for Frederick Douglass to label Abraham Lincoln “the black man’s President.”5
Such sentiments did not arise from any postwar disillusion. At the time he wrote those words Douglass was brimming with optimism and full of admiration for Andrew Johnson. Before the year was out, he felt very differently, though not so much about Lincoln as about the meaning of his assassination and the character of his successor. The freed people had needs, and Johnson proved oblivious of them. Without land most of the former slaves had little choice but to return to work for the same whites who had only recently owned them, and as the new year approached and new labor contracts were due to be signed, the freed people resisted. Encouraged by unreconstructed state and local officials, whites reacted to black resistance with fury and impunity. When Douglass returned to work on his Lincoln speech in December, he had a lot more to say.6
The new draft opened with a startling image. The year 1865 had witnessed two extraordinary events—the collapse of the Confederacy and the murder of Lincoln—and seemed about to witness a third, “one which shall be more striking, and revolting than either rebellion or assassination.” What new event could possibly rise to such a dramatic level? Douglass indiscreetly named this third impending disruption, only to pull back by crossing out his own indictment: “The course of crimes to which I allude, and which I take to be impending over us, and which only needs that sanction of the Country and the Congress for its consummation: is the restoration policy of Andrew Johnson.” He had better not say that before he went to see the new President. Still, the tactful deletion reveals how closely Douglass’s first sustained postmortem on Lincoln’s presidency was intertwined with his swiftly developing contempt for Andrew Johnson. How could Lincoln not look good by comparison?
The December draft was longer and more polished than its June predecessor, but it was still unfinished, a bit rambling. Nevertheless, Douglass had things to say about Lincoln that he had not said before, observations that reappeared in later years whenever he spoke of the former President. At a time when Douglass was redefining himself as the embodiment of the self-made American man, for example, he began to praise Lincoln for his own rise from obscurity to greatness. “He was the architect of his own fortune, a self-made man,” Douglass wrote of Lincoln. He had “ascended high, but with hard hands and honest work built the ladder on which he climbed.” They had this in common, Douglass often said, and from this shared experience of personal struggle their friendship had grown.
Lincoln’s influence on Douglass was most clear in a second theme he developed in the December draft, the sanctity of the Union. What was at stake in the war, Lincoln had always argued, was the vindication of republicanism in the eyes of the world and the annals of history. He put it most beautifully at Gettysburg when he said the Civil War would determine whether “government of the people, by the people, and for the people” would perish from the earth. Lincoln’s emphasis on the Union had been a source of frustration for Douglass during the war, but here he was in late 1865 bidding fair to catch up with Lincoln’s eloquence. He now accepted the premise from which Lincoln himself started: that to defend the Union was to uphold the principle of universal liberty upon which the Union was based. When the South first seceded, Douglass wrote, European statesmen and philosophers rehearsed their old suspicions about the intrinsic weakness of the American Republic. It could survive perfectly well in calm waters, they predicted, but “would go down in the first great storm.” With them, Douglass wrote, “there was nothing stable but thrones. Nothing powerful but Standing Armies. Nothing authoritative unsupported by the pretension of Divine Right.” Even at home there had always been men who wondered if the nation could survive the storm over slavery. “Well, the trial has come,” Douglass concluded triumphantly. “The experiment has been tried. The strength of the Republic has been tested. Tried by treason, by rebellion and by the assassination of its Chief, tried as few forms of Government were ever tried before.” And what has been the result? Douglass asked. “This it is, the Country was never stronger than today. Certainty has taken the place of doubt…. We no longer tremble for the safety of the Ship of State.” And for this glorious outcome they were indebted to no one so much as Abraham Lincoln.
“He never awed by his silence, nor silenced by the volubility or authority of his speech,” Douglass wrote as he turned his attention from the Union to the character of the man who had given his life to save it. “He managed to leave his visitor not only free to utter his opinions, but by a wise reserve in the manner of insisting upon his own, he got even a little more from his visitor than his visitor got from him.” Did Lincoln treat everyone this way? Douglass wondered. “What Mr. Lincoln was when in company with white men, of course, I cannot tell. I saw him mostly alone; but this much I can say of him.” He wanted to be precise. Lincoln, he wrote, “was one of the very few white men Americans, who could entertain a negro and converse with a negro him without in anywise reminding him of the unpopularity of his color.”
Lincoln’s last days were his best, Douglass said, for he had grown in office. “If he did not control events he had the wisdom to be instructed by them. When he could no longer withstand the current he swam with it.” Compare the first and second inaugural addresses, Douglass wrote, and notice the vast difference between them. “No two papers are in stronger contrast,” Douglass said. “The first was intended to reconcile the rebels to the Government by argument and persuasion, the Second was a recognition of the operation of the inevitable and universal Laws.” At the end of his life, Douglass concluded, Lincoln “was willing to let justice have its course.
“Had Mr. Lincoln lived…” With those words Douglass arrived at the theme toward which he had been building. With Lincoln still in command “we might have looked for still greater progress. Learning wisdom in war he would have learned more from Peace.” Before he died, Lincoln had already “expressed himself” in favor of letting some black men vote, those who were educated and those who had fought in the Union army. This may have seemed like a small step, Douglass wrote, but it was the decisive one; it placed Lincoln in firm opposition to all those who opposed the idea that any blacks should vote. “It was like Abraham Lincoln,” Douglass shrewdly observed. “He never shocked prejudices unnecessarily. Having learned Statesmanship while splitting rails, he always tested the thin edge of the wedge first, and the fact that he used this at all, meant that he would if need be, like the thick as well as the thin.” There was every reason to believe that had he lived Lincoln would have moved still further. “He was a progressive man, a humane man, an honorable man, and at heart an antislavery man.” The freed people could have reasonably hoped to vote, their lives would have been more secure, their futures brighter, had Mr. Lincoln lived. For that reason, Douglass concluded, “whosoever else have cause to mourn the loss of Abraham Lincoln, to the Colored people of the Country—his death is an unspeakable calamity.”
When Douglass finally finished writing the speech a few weeks later, he titled it “The Assassination and Its Lessons.” He delivered it a few times even before his February meeting with Andrew Johnson, and he was scheduled to give it again a few days later at the First Presbyterian Church in Washington, D.C. But after Douglass had allegedly shown his disrespect for the President by publishing the outrageous transcript of his delegation’s visit to the White House, some of the church’s trustees raised questions about Douglass’s upcoming appearance on February 13. Would they get more of the same? Having just met with a President who could barely conceal his contempt, Douglass now proposed to speak about the consequences of Lincoln’s untimely death. By then war had already broken out between Andrew Johnson and the Congress. Concerned by reports of abuse and violence against the freed people, congressional Republicans made it clear that they intended to exert some measure of control over the reconstruction of the defeated South. They refused to readmit the southern states that had been reorganized under the President’s direction in 1865. They established a joint committee to investigate conditions in the South and develop a program of their own. Radical Republicans were already calling for black voting rights. This was the backdrop against which Douglass had gone to see President Johnson and the frame of reference for his first public address about the consequences of Lincoln’s death.
The themes Douglass had been developing ever since the assassination were now polished and ready for public unveiling. There was Lincoln’s strength of character, forged by his rise from humble origins. There were his appealing virtues: “his independence, his amiable temper, his devotion to his country, his temperance, his vigilance, his ability to bring together extremes and opposites in the cause of the nation.” There was the “moral courage” Lincoln showed during the 1864 election campaign when, ignoring the demagogues, he not only went out of his way to “invite a black man to his house but also invited him to the Soldiers’ Home to take tea with him.” It was a legacy that Andrew Johnson could never match. When all of Lincoln’s attributes were taken into consideration—his ascent from obscurity to greatness, his congenial temperament, his moral courage—it was easy for Douglass to imagine how much better things would be “had Mr. Lincoln been living today.” He would have “stood with those who stood foremost, and gone with those who went farthest.” Unlike Andrew Johnson, who had set himself up as Moses only to end up as Pharaoh, Lincoln was at heart “a progressive man” who had learned from the experience of war and would have continued to learn from the experience of peace.7
In the year since the assassination Douglass had come to appreciate aspects of Lincoln’s record that had not especially struck him before 1864. Nevertheless, if “The Assassination and Its Lessons” stood as Douglass’s final word on Lincoln, it would be a disappointing one. However graciously he now spoke of Lincoln’s qualities, Douglass had yet to account for the crooked pathway by which he had arrived at his admiration. There had been too much mistrust, too many harsh words to be papered over with benign references to Lincoln’s rise from obscurity and his ability to grow. There was a lot more Douglass could have said about Lincoln in February 1866, but it would have to be said later, after the blinding contrast with Andrew Johnson had subsided.
Douglass’s rising dissatisfaction with Andrew Johnson put him right in step with the Republican Party. Congress was already wary by late 1865. At first the Republican majority merely refused to accept the new state governments presented by Johnson. As winter gave way to spring and Johnson grew more intransigent, moderate Republicans helped override several of the President’s vetoes. During the summer of 1866 whites in Memphis and New Orleans took to the streets in murderous riots against blacks attempting to secure the vote for themselves. Johnson blamed the Republican radicals. He had gone on the road hoping to drum up support for his own program, but his intemperate remarks had the opposite effect, and his campaign swing backfired. Shocked by events in the South and by the President’s disgraceful behavior, northern voters gave their overwhelming support to the Republicans in the fall elections. By the time Congress returned to session in December the Republicans—moderates and radicals alike—had concluded that if the South were to be reconstructed, black men would have to be given the vote. Over Johnson’s veto the Republicans first enfranchised black men in the District of Columbia and the federal territories. It took the congressional majority several months to agree on the broad outlines of its plan for dealing with the defeated South, but in March 1867 the Republicans passed their own Reconstruction Acts. They divided the South into ten military districts; they required every southern state to pass a new Fourteenth Amendment; they disenfranchised thousands of disloyal whites. And in its most revolutionary move, the thing that made Radical Reconstruction “radical,” Congress required the former states of the Confederacy to let all black men vote before any of those states could be readmitted to the Union.
In 1866 reconstruction politics had shifted from the White House to Congress. In 1867 it shifted again, this time from Washington, D.C., to the South, where black voters began asserting themselves in every political arena from statehouses to county courthouses. From all walks of life a new class of black political leaders emerged. Some came from the North, some from the ranks of antebellum free blacks. They were teachers, ministers, businessmen, and craftsmen. But many hundreds of them had been slaves only months before, some barely literate, but nearly all of them inspired by the desire to build an equitable new democracy on the ashes of the defeated Confederacy. They were the backbone of the coalition with white Republicans that rewrote the southern state constitutions, elected thousands of new lawmakers and public officials, and began to confront the problems of equal justice, public education, fair taxes, and economic opportunity. As the Democrats feared, and as Frederick Douglass foresaw, the black vote revolutionized southern politics just as emancipation had revolutionized southern society.
“MEASURE HIM BY THE SENTIMENT OF HIS COUNTRY”
In 1872 Frederick Douglass’s home in Rochester burned to the ground. His personal belongings were lost, including his library and his papers. It would cost him fifteen thousand dollars to rebuild. But not in Rochester. He had moved there more than two decades before, no doubt attracted by the city’s reputation as a nerve center of antebellum reform. But he felt no strong ties to the city itself, and when his house was destroyed, he decided to go elsewhere. By then he was a prosperous lecturer, well paid and in great demand. For the first time in his life Douglass had the means to live anywhere he chose, and the place he chose was telling, Washington, D.C. From upstate New York, the district “burned over” with the flames of antebellum radical reform, Frederick Douglass moved to a place he now felt more comfortable, the center of American political power. If you had been paying close attention during the previous years, you could have predicted the move.
In 1868 Douglass had campaigned vigorously for Ulysses Grant, the Republican presidential nominee, more so than he had ever campaigned for Lincoln. By then his allegiance to the party was fixed, as much by his contempt for the Democrats as by the Republican record on emancipation, black troops, and now the black vote. For his unstinting support Douglass hoped for the proper reward, perhaps a job as postmaster in Rochester. But the patronage never came. Instead President Grant appointed Douglass to a commission sent to Santo Domingo to study the possibility of annexing the island to the United States. It was understood that the commission would produce a report favorable to annexation; Douglass’s appointment was calculated to neutralize Senator Charles Sumner’s opposition. But having done his duty, and risked undermining his friendship with Sumner, Douglass was rewarded with an insulting slight by the President. When the commissioners returned to Washington, Grant invited the three white members to the White House for dinner but conspicuously failed to invite Douglass. Rather than recoil from the affront Douglass relocated his family in the nation’s capital and campaigned even more strenuously for Grant’s reelection in 1872.
Throughout the 1870s, despite his party’s waning support for reconstruction, Douglass remained committed to the use of the ballot as a weapon for the advance of black interests in the South. It was not an unreasonable position to take. President Grant had effectively suppressed the Ku Klux Klan in the South, and as a result, blacks were voting and even winning elections throughout much of the former Confederacy. As sheriffs, justices of the peace, marshals, city councilmen, judges, and state legislators, black public officials were able to provide some measure of security against whites who might otherwise have been unrestrained in their vengeance. This was precisely the sort of protection Douglass had predicted the vote would give blacks. Beside these crucial gains, he concluded, the petty insults and shortcomings of party politics could be borne. It was from this perspective that Douglass formulated his most complex and compelling evaluation of Abraham Lincoln.
On April 14, 1876, Douglass delivered the keynote speech at the unveiling of an emancipation monument in Washington, D.C. Paid for with small donations accumulated over a decade from freed men and women across the South, mostly black veterans, the monument was placed in Lincoln Park, where it still stands. Douglass later said he disliked the statue. It depicted a slave on bended knee rising to freedom beside Abraham Lincoln, who stood with one hand on the slave and the other clutching a copy of the Emancipation Proclamation. But on the day of its unveiling Douglass was more concerned with Lincoln’s record than with the statue’s demeaning symbolism. The dedication ceremony attracted a host of dignitaries, including President Grant, Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase, and a number of congressmen, diplomats, and members of the clergy. They must have squirmed in their seats as Douglass began speaking.
He gently warned his listeners that it was only proper to speak the truth as he and his fellow African Americans saw it. As he had in his great Fourth of July speech years before, Douglass set himself up as the spokesman for black Americans by speaking in the first person plural—“we”—while provocatively distinguishing himself from “you,” the largely white audience. “Abraham Lincoln was not, in the fullest sense of the word, either our man or our model,” Douglass declared. “In his interests, in his associations, in his habits of thought, and in his prejudices, he was a white man.” A decade before, Douglass had written that Lincoln was “emphatically the black man’s president.” Ten years later he was to call Lincoln a “leader of the colored people, far greater than I.” But on this occasion, in 1876, Douglass opted for an opening shocker to set up the more profound argument that was to follow. Lincoln, Douglass told his listeners, “was preeminently the white man’s President, entirely devoted to the welfare of white men.”8
This startling pronouncement was immediately followed by a scandalous rehearsal of all the criticisms Douglass had hurled at Lincoln during his presidency. Until the very last years of the war Lincoln had been willing to sacrifice the interests of blacks for the sake of whites. He had taken office committed to halting the extension of slavery and nothing more. His arguments against slavery’s extension had been framed, Douglass said, in “the interest of his own race.” He had entered the presidency vowing to “draw the sword” in defense of slavery wherever it already existed. He would enforce the “supposed constitutional guarantees” of slavery, not least the notorious Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. “You and yours,” Douglass told his white listeners, “were the object of his deepest affection and his most earnest solicitude. You are the children of Abraham Lincoln. We are at best only his step-children.” It is therefore you, the whites, who should be hanging pictures and dedicating monuments to the memory of Abraham Lincoln.9
How inappropriate. The audience had come to sing Lincoln’s praises and instead Douglass subjected them to a caustic summary of his old abolitionist indictment.
Then, almost imperceptibly, Douglass shifted his ground. Having rolled out his indictment, he proceeded to roll it back up and put it away. Having reminded his listeners of how Lincoln’s presidency had once appeared to a committed abolitionist, he proceeded to argue that there were other points of view to consider. Radical abolitionists may have had nothing good to say about the President, but in the eyes of most black Americans Lincoln’s record was a good deal more complicated. Maybe he had been the white man’s President, but if so, Douglass hoped that whites would nevertheless accept “the humble offering” that African Americans were that day unveiling. For although white Americans had every reason to honor the memory of Lincoln, African Americans had good reasons of their own. “Abraham Lincoln saved for you a country,” Douglass said, but “he delivered us from a bondage, according to Jefferson, one hour of which was worse than ages of the oppression your fathers rose in rebellion to oppose.”10 From the beginning of the Civil War blacks understood this, Douglass said, and for this reason they had never lost faith in Lincoln. Whether the war was going badly or well, whether northern morale soared or sank, blacks remained faithful to Lincoln—even when he himself “taxed” their faith. And tax it he did. He was slow to move against slavery, he told them they were the cause of the war, he invited them “to leave the land in which we were born,” he resisted making them soldiers, and when he relented, he resisted retaliating “when we were murdered as colored prisoners.” He said he would save the Union with slavery; he rebuked General Frémont but stayed too long with General McClellan. “When we saw this, and more, we were at times stunned, grieved, and greatly bewildered.” And yet they remained faithful. In the face of all of Lincoln’s apparent failings, “our hearts believed.” Why? Because despite the tumult and confusion of the war, “we were able to take a comprehensive view of Abraham Lincoln, and to make reasonable allowance for the circumstances of his position.” 11
Each of the criticisms that Douglass had earlier specified he now dismissed, for each was based on “partial and imperfect glimpses” of Lincoln—on his “stray utterances” rather than long-standing commitments, on “isolated facts torn from their connection.” Blacks, Douglass said, were able to look beyond these to see the “broad survey, in the light of the stern logic of great events.” To “us,” he said, it mattered little what language Lincoln chose to use on any particular occasion. What mattered was that he sympathized with the great movement he found himself leading, the complete destruction of slavery in the United States. When considered in the light of his irreducible greatness, all of Lincoln’s failings were but minor irritations rather than fundamental flaws. “We came to the conclusion that the hour and the man of our redemption had met in the person of Abraham Lincoln.”12
Lincoln may have loved the Union more than he hated slavery, Douglass continued, but he always hated slavery. It was by no means an accident that it was abolished “under his wise and beneficent rule, and by measures approved and vigorously pressed by him.” Under Lincoln’s rule “we saw our brave sons and brothers laying off the rags of bondage.” Under his rule two hundred thousand blacks fought as soldiers in the U.S. military. Under his rule the republic of Haiti was finally recognized, and its minister, a black man, was “duly received” in Washington. Under his rule slavery was abolished in the nation’s capital, and the illegal Atlantic slave trade was effectively suppressed. Under his rule, the Confederacy—“based upon the idea that our race must be slaves, and slaves forever”—was utterly destroyed. Lincoln’s great proclamation, “though special in its language, was general in its principles and effect, making slavery forever impossible in the United States. Though we waited long, we saw all this and more.” Once that proclamation was issued, “we forgot all delay, and forgot all tardiness…and we were thenceforward willing to allow the President all the latitude of time, phraseology, and every honorable device that statesmanship might require.”13 The flaws that were inexcusable to an impatient radical seemed more like forgivable lapses to most black Americans.
Broader and more generous than that of radical abolitionists, the African American perspective on Lincoln was still a limited one. A great statesman must have a wider field of vision. So Douglass shifted perspective again, this time to see events from Lincoln’s point of view, that of a democratically elected official with legitimate obligations to all the people. When Douglass looked at events in that light, Abraham Lincoln’s record soared to greatness. Lincoln, he said, brought to his politics extraordinary personal qualities. “Though high in position, the humblest could approach him and feel at home in his presence. Though deep, he was transparent; though strong, he was gentle; though decided and pronounced in his convictions, he was tolerant toward those who differed from him, and patient under reproaches.” This was high praise, but it was nothing new. Even at his most critical moments during the Civil War Douglass was usually careful to note Lincoln’s unimpeachable character even as he scolded the President for his policies. What was new in Douglass’s speech was his final evaluation of those policies.14
“I have said that President Lincoln was a white man,” Douglass said, “and shared the prejudices common to his countrymen towards the colored race.” But appealing to those prejudices may have been necessary if Lincoln was to crush the rebellion and end slavery. “Looking back to his times and to the condition of the country,” Douglass now saw that Lincoln’s ability to mobilize loyal Americans for a long and painful conflict depended on his sensitivity to popular opinion, and to popular prejudice. Lincoln’s “great mission” was to accomplish two things: restore the Union and “free his country from the great crime of slavery. To do one or the other, or both,” Douglass acknowledged, Lincoln “must have the earnest sympathy and the powerful cooperation of his loyal fellow-countrymen.” That sympathy would have been lost “had he put the abolition of slavery before the salvation of the Union.” It would have “rendered resistance to rebellion impossible.” It may be that Lincoln shared the prejudices of his fellow whites, but “it is hardly necessary to say that in his heart of hearts he loathed and hated slavery.”15
By the time Douglass reached his conclusion he had long since retreated from the provocative claims with which he had opened his speech. It was certainly true that from the perspective of the abolitionists “Lincoln seemed tardy, cold, dull, and indifferent,” Douglass admitted. But Lincoln was a statesmen, the elected President of the nation at large, and it was by the standards of the nation at large that he should be judged. “Measure him by the sentiment of his country,” Douglass finally said, “a sentiment he was bound as a statesman to consult.” By that measure, Lincoln “was swift, zealous, radical, and determined.” Never before had Douglass so clearly distinguished the role of a reformer from that of a politician. He did not claim that the abolitionist perspective was invalid, only that it was partial and therefore inadequate. Lincoln was an elected official, a politician, not a reformer; he was responsible to a broad public that no abolitionist crusader had to worry about.
In a sense Douglass’s speech mimicked his own shifting perspective, from the unyielding abolitionist to the leading voice of black America to the loyal member of the Republican Party. By the 1870s Douglass could shift from one voice to the other with remarkable ease, but never did he manipulate those voices as brilliantly as he did at the dedication of the emancipation memorial. It gave his evaluation of Lincoln a depth that has rarely been matched and that not even Douglass reproduced. He saw how tempting it was for elected officials to lapse into cynicism and demagoguery, but he also recognized that the political independence of the abolitionist reformer could lead to irresponsible criticism and contempt for democracy itself. African Americans were more forgiving, but theirs was inevitably a view of the world too partial for a President elected to serve all the people. The great politician was the one who could sustain the highest principles of the reformer and acknowledge the legitimate grievances of minorities—without losing the trust of the whole people. The finest statesmen could hold the people’s trust without becoming a cynic or a demagogue. By this standard Lincoln was one of the great politicians of all time.
Douglass’s speech is often read as a devastating critique of Lincoln, but it is far more interesting for its undertone of self-criticism. Douglass had many virtues, but introspection was not one of them. Yet here he was carefully and sensitively distancing himself from a part of himself. Few great men, he said, have ever been subjected to “fiercer denunciation” than was Abraham Lincoln during his administration. Reproached by his fellow Republicans, Lincoln was often “wounded in the house of his friends.” He was “assailed by abolitionists; he was assailed by slaveholders; he was assailed by men who were for peace at any price; he was assailed by those who were for a more vigorous prosecution of the war; he was assailed for not making the war an abolition war; and he was most bitterly assailed for making the war an abolition war.” No one knew better than Douglass that he himself had been one of those assailants. But this was 1876. Lincoln’s work was done. Douglass had made his peace with American democracy. He understood the limits of what a statesman like Lincoln could do and so appreciated all the more deeply how much Lincoln had actually done.16
In the very act of criticizing himself Douglass was also identifying with Lincoln, and this added yet another layer to his already remarkable speech. He had begun to develop this theme shortly after the assassination, but never more elaborately than on this occasion. Lincoln had been the object of ferocious criticism, but Douglass too had been assailed from every side, subjected to the vengeful gossip of the Garrisonians and the vicious race-baiting of proslavery Democrats. Both Lincoln and Douglass were able to withstand the assaults because each had been toughened by youthful deprivation and a determined rise from obscurity. By the 1870s, famous and prosperous, Douglass liked to give speeches about the self-made man. His own life was his most compelling example, but in the popular imagination it stood well behind that of Abraham Lincoln. And so Douglass closed his speech by evoking Lincoln’s rise to greatness in terms he could as easily have applied to himself: “Born and reared among the lowly, a stranger to wealth and luxury, compelled to grapple single-handed with the flintiest hardships from tender youth to sturdy manhood, he grew strong in the manly and heroic qualities demanded by the great mission to which he was called by the votes of his countrymen. The hard condition of his early life, which would have depressed and broken down weaker men, only gave greater life, vigor and buoyancy to the heroic spirit of Abraham Lincoln.” By day the young Lincoln performed the most arduous physical labor while by night he studied his English grammar. “A son of toil himself he was linked in brotherly sympathy with the sons of toil in every loyal part of the Republic.” It went without saying that Douglass saw himself in precisely the same way.17
The inner strength that enabled Lincoln to rise above his impoverished origins later steeled him against all efforts to compromise with the forces of disunion. When others suggested that a war against the Confederacy could not be won, Lincoln resisted. “He calmly and bravely heard the voice of doubt and fear all around him, but he had an oath in heaven, and there was not power enough on the earth to make this honest boatman, back-woodsman and broad-handed splitter of rails evade or violate that sacred oath. He had not been schooled in the ethics of slavery; his plain life favored his love of truth…. His moral training was against saying one thing when he meant another. The trust which Abraham Lincoln had of himself and in the people was surprising and grand, but it was also enlightened and well founded. He knew the American people better than they knew themselves, and his truth was based on that knowledge.”18
There it was, Douglass’s longest and most considered evaluation of Lincoln. By the time he delivered the address, in 1876, Douglass was living in Washington, D.C., in close quarters with the Republican Party establishment. The perspective on Lincoln at which he arrived mirrored Douglass’s own journey from slave to alienated outsider and then from skeptical engagement to a full embrace of the American political system. From that final perspective Lincoln now struck Douglass as a principled statesman, a man who always hated slavery, a politician with a keen sense of how far the American people could be pushed in an antislavery direction, and a leader willing to push them when the time came.
The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass
In 1877 the patronage Douglass had waited for finally came. He had not been made postmaster of Rochester, and he had been passed over as ambassador to Haiti. But upon taking office after the disputed election of 1876, the Republican President, Rutherford B. Hayes, appointed Douglass marshal of the District of Columbia. Douglass accepted the position gladly and fulfilled his responsibilities professionally. He was nearly sixty years old and much in demand as the elder statesman of American blacks and a leading fixture in the Republican Party. The steady job in Washington allowed him to cut down on his grueling lecture schedule without diminishing his now-substantial income. In keeping with his status, Douglass moved to a new home just across the Anacostia Bridge. Cedar Hill was a large, comfortable house that sat atop a hill overlooking the river and the nation’s capital beyond. It had a library large enough to hold his two thousand volumes and grounds ample enough to entertain his growing family of grandchildren. Douglass enjoyed his status as America’s most influential black man, but he also seemed to enjoy—perhaps for the first time in his life—the steady company of his children and grandchildren.
As he settled into a life of public acclaim and private contentment, Douglass took up his pen once more to produce the last, and least compelling, of his three autobiographies. Published in 1881 and updated ten years later, Life and Times of Frederick Douglass lacks the hard Garrisonian edge of the 1845 Narrative and the analytical depth of the 1855 My Bondage and My Freedom. Douglass was a proud man, and Life and Times was a proud book, but unlike his earlier autobiographies, this one tended to slip into self-satisfaction. Douglass’s theme was his rise to prominence as a self-made man in a nation of self-made men. However compelling this was in his own case, it sat uncomfortably amid the desperate struggles of most black Americans in the late nineteenth century. But it did provide Douglass with another opportunity to reexamine his relationship with Abraham Lincoln.
Nothing in Life and Times conflicted with the views Douglass had expressed in his earlier retrospectives of Lincoln. Indeed, he reprinted both of them—“The Assassination and Its Lessons” of 1866 and the brilliant 1876 memorial—in an appendix to the 1881 autobiography. Like those earlier speeches, Life and Times evaluated Lincoln in terms far more glowing than anything he had offered during the President’s lifetime. But because this was an autobiography, Douglass had to be specific about how he had responded to Lincoln beginning with his first campaign for the presidency. How would Douglass handle the disjunction between the way he felt in 1881 and what he had said back in 1861? The unflattering answer is: He backed away from the burden of candor, rewriting his own history to cleanse it of his earlier criticism of Lincoln. He softened his once harsh attacks. He omitted crucial events that reflected his earlier feelings. He even rearranged the sequence of events to leave the impression that his criticism had ended earlier than it had.
Mostly, however, Life and Times relied on the distinction between a reformer and a politician that Douglass developed after the war. Lincoln first appeared as the Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate from Illinois in 1858. At the time Douglass had mixed feelings about the moderate position Lincoln was articulating, but in 1881 he was more understanding. Lincoln’s words were not those “of an abolitionist—branded a fanatic, and carried away by an enthusiastic devotion to the Negro—but the calm, cool, deliberate utterance of a statesman, comprehensive enough to take in the welfare of the whole country.”19 This was the same point Douglass had been making for some time: that the obligations of a statesman were different from those of a reformer and that by the standards of statesmanship Lincoln’s record was impeccable.20
Douglass elaborated on this theme in his discussion of the Emancipation Proclamation, singling out Lincoln’s skillful navigation of public opinion. The proclamation, he wrote in Life and Times, was “framed with a view to the least harm and the most good possible in the circumstances…. While he [Lincoln] hated slavery, and really desired its destruction, he always proceeded against it in a manner the least likely to shock or drive from him any who were truly in sympathy with the preservation of the Union.” Douglass still allowed himself to wonder if Lincoln’s concern with the border states had earned as much as it had cost. But as for the “wisdom and moderation” of Lincoln’s general policy, Douglass now had nothing but the highest praise.21
Even so, the memory of Douglass’s wartime rancor haunts the passages on Lincoln in Life and Times, especially his concluding observations about the former President. He was “a man so amiable, so kind, humane, and honest,” Douglass wrote, “that one is at a loss to know how he could have had an enemy on earth.” Lincoln certainly had his accusers, “in whose opinion he was always too fast or too slow, too weak or too strong, too conciliatory or too aggressive,” but “they would soon become his admirers,” Douglass pointed out. They would realize that Lincoln “had conducted the affairs of the nation with singular wisdom, and with absolute fidelity to the great trust confided in him.”22 Douglass had been one of those accusers, soon to become one of those admirers. In saying so, he was not merely paying his respects to Abraham Lincoln but offering his apologies.
“IT WAS NOT SO MEANT BY ABRAHAM LINCOLN”
Scrounge through the heap of Douglass’s postwar writings and it is possible to find scraps of evidence which, carefully arranged, suggest an aging lion unable to find either the cause or the words to reanimate his roar. When the Civil War ended, he recalled, “I felt that I had reached the end of the noblest and best part of my life.” Douglass had been an abolitionist since the day he learned what the word meant. The abolitionist movement had been his base of operations for most of his adult life. But now “my school was broken up, my church disbanded, and the beloved congregation dispersed, never to come together again.”23 He found a new home, a new loyalty, in the Republican Party. Too much loyalty, critics said. Worse, he had taken up the nostalgic cult of the martyred Lincoln.
But Douglass had experienced no sudden postwar conversion; his drift into politics was a long time in the making. He had begun his public career as a protégé of William Lloyd Garrison’s, repudiating the U.S. Constitution and with it all attempts to end slavery by political means. In the early 1850s he changed his mind about the Constitution and became a convert to antislavery politics. He had mixed feelings about the new Republican Party, but those feelings actually reflected his growing attraction to the political mainstream. During the Civil War, as Lincoln and the Republicans became the party of emancipation, Douglass allied himself with its radical wing. By the fall of 1864 he was hoping and praying for Lincoln’s reelection. Radical reconstruction cemented his party allegiance. Once the Republicans committed themselves to the black vote, Douglass’s political conversion was irrevocable. Looking backward from 1885, Douglass had little trouble tracing the roots of his commitment to the “great Republican party.” It had emancipated the slaves, saved the Union, reconstructed the South, and enfranchised black men. It had carried the country through a terrible and costly war, yet it had raised the nation’s credit, backed up the nation’s currency, and lowered the nation’s debt. In all this the Republican Party had enhanced “the honor, prosperity, and glory of the American people” as no party had ever done before. Now his party was in trouble. The Republicans had lost the 1884 presidential election, and for the first time in twenty-four years a Democrat occupied the White House.24
As in 1864 so in 1884. The threat of an overtly racist Democratic Party anchored Douglass firmly among the Republicans, notwithstanding their retreat from reconstruction, notwithstanding their personal slights. “If the colored man does not depend upon the Republican party, he will depend upon the Democratic party,” Douglass explained, “and if he does neither, he becomes a nonentity in American politics.” For him, he added, “I must say that the Democratic party has as yet [not] given me sufficient reasons for doing it any such service, nor has the Republican party sunk so low that I must abandon it for its great rival. With all its faults it is the best party now in existence.”25 To withhold support from the Republicans was to hand power over to the Democratic Party, the declared enemy of all African Americans. Douglass could see no alternative. And unlike his critics, then and now, Douglass was not equipped with the exquisite moral calculus that apparently enables them to determine the precise moment at which his allegiance to the Republican Party became disgraceful.
The only thing remarkable about Douglass’s position was that it made sense. Compared with where he and the Republicans had begun thirty years earlier, in 1856, it was as if Douglass had stepped through a looking glass into a world of reversed images. Before the war he was a radical first, increasingly committed to politics but always in the service of reform. After the war he was a Republican, still committed to equal justice but always by means of party politics. He was surely right to point out that black voters had solid reasons to support the Republicans and oppose the Democrats. But the Republicans of the postreconstruction years did not repay African American voters for their unswerving fidelity. The party lost its radical edge, its idealism withered away, and it settled into the easy corruptions of entrenched political power. The Republicans held Douglass at arm’s length, alternately embracing, using, and insulting him for his unstinting efforts. Through it all he remained loyal.
Loyal but critical. Douglass was not blind, and he was not stupid. He knew when he was being treated shabbily by his own party. He saw how Republicans began to look away as white southerners did all they could to deprive blacks of the full measure of their freedom. “I am a Republican,” Douglass openly declared in 1888. “I believe in the Republican party.” But there were limits, he warned; his loyalty was not unconditional. He was a Republican in large measure because of the party’s great history, but it “can no longer repose on the history of its grand and magnificent achievements.” Much of what the Republicans had accomplished was now being nullified all across the South; the party had a moral and political obligation to stop that nullification. “It must make the path of the black citizen to the ballot box as safe and smooth as that of the white citizen.” If the Republican Party failed to do this, Douglass declared, “I for one shall welcome the bolt which shall scatter it into a thousand pieces.”26
Douglass was becoming angry again. By the early 1880s he had sensed a great white reaction beginning to sweep across the South. African Americans were being lynched in growing numbers, their homes burned, their families terrorized—just because they went looking for work, just because they tried to vote, just because they were black. By 1890 the spearhead of reaction was passing from vigilante mobs to state legislatures. Meanwhile the U.S. Supreme Court was whittling the Civil War amendments to the Constitution down to almost nothing. The Fifteenth Amendment prohibited the use of race as qualification for voting, but white officials in the South were devising devilishly ingenious means to circumvent it. Grandfather clauses, literacy tests, poll taxes, and even the much-heralded secret ballot were successfully eliminating black men from voter registration rolls across the South. This was “disfranchisement.” Enlightened southerners thought of it as a progressive reform necessary for good government. What it produced was white government. As black voters disappeared so did black state legislators, black sheriffs, black justices of the peace, and black jurors. When the war ended, Douglass had said that black men needed the vote because they needed political power to protect themselves. Now black political power was being destroyed, and southern blacks were losing their defenses. It was reconstruction in reverse.
Watching in horror, Douglass raised his voice in furious indignation. There was no justice for blacks in southern courtrooms, he shouted. Mob violence passed without rebuke from the press. And all the while the northern people said they were growing tired of the Negro’s demands. The fire had returned to Douglass’s speeches, and so had the old themes. Back in the 1850s Douglass used to argue that slavery was as much a threat to northern whites as to southern slaves. In the 1890s he made a similar argument about disfranchisement. What was happening to southern blacks, he said, was neither a “southern problem” nor a “negro problem.” The “suppression of the legal vote in the south,” he insisted, “is as much a question for Maine and Massachusetts as it is for the Carolinas and Georgia.”27 It was a “national problem,” he said, demanding action from a seemingly paralyzed Republican Party.
Then he invoked Lincoln’s famous metaphor of the house divided. “What Abraham Lincoln said in respect of the United States is as true of the colored people as of the relations of those States. They cannot remain half slave and half free.”28 He used the same metaphor several times in the 1880s and 1890s, but not as often as he played off the Gettysburg Address, which itself played off the Declaration of Independence. “We hold it to be self-evident that no class or color should be the exclusive rulers of this country,” Douglass snapped in September 1883. “If there is such a ruling class, there must of course be a subject class, and when this condition is once established this Government of the people, by the people and for the people, will have perished from the earth.”29 So went the lineage: from Thomas Jefferson to Abraham Lincoln to Frederick Douglass.
Echoes of Lincoln reappeared over and over in Douglass’s words. More than once Lincoln had associated slavery with the divine right of kings or with predatory aristocrats who lived off the fruits of other men’s labor. In 1894 Douglass used nearly identical language to rebuke those who favored stripping black men of their voting privileges. Those who now denounced black suffrage as “a blunder and a failure” thought they were saying something new, Douglass noted. In fact the argument “is as old as despotism and about as narrow and selfish…. It is the argument of the crowned heads and privileged classes of the world…. It does away with that noble and just idea of Abraham Lincoln, that our government should be a government of the people, by the people, and for the people, and for all the people.”30
This was Lincoln without tears, Lincoln with a purpose. Douglass the politician was enlisting the former President in the cause of reform. He did it quite consciously. For years he had been taunting listeners with the suggestion that John Brown and Abraham Lincoln were two of a kind. By the 1880s Douglass often recited a litany of the great men he had known, not only John Brown but William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Phillips, Charles Sumner, and Gerrit Smith. Sometimes the names on the list changed, but Lincoln’s was always there, right beside the radical reformers he had worked so hard to distance himself from. Lincoln had become the model for the public person Douglass was now trying to be, the loyal party man who somehow remained a steadfast reformer. Those two identities, once so incompatible, might be reconciled after all. But it would not be easy, for the politician’s job was to make friends, and the reformer’s fate was to make enemies. “The reformer,” Douglass explained in 1883, had “a difficult and disagreeable task before him. He has to part with old friends; break away from the beaten paths of society, and advance against the vehement protests of the most sacred sentiments of the human heart.” It was a path strewn with victims. “Garrison was mobbed and haltered,” Douglass recalled, and “Lovejoy shot down like a felon…John Brown hanged, and Lincoln murdered.”31
Having conscripted Lincoln into the company of radical reformers, Douglass began to speak of him in the same heroic terms he had once reserved for the likes of John Brown. Lincoln’s name, he said, “should never be spoken of without reverence.” In 1883 he called Lincoln “the greatest statesman that ever presided over the destinies of this Republic.” Five years later he was “one of the greatest and best men ever produced by his country, if not ever produced by the world at large.” When Lincoln died, Douglass suggested, he went before his Maker “with four millions of broken fetters in his arms as evidence of a life well spent. Glorious man!” Douglass now claimed to have seen in their very first meeting “real…saintliness” in Lincoln’s face. It is hard to imagine that Douglass’s estimation could go any higher, but it did. He had known men “who stood only a little lower than the angels,” Douglass exclaimed in 1893, but he had met with no man “possessing a more godlike nature than did Abraham Lincoln.”32 A great statesman was one thing. But a saint? Godlike? What was going on? There was method to this hero-worshiping madness. As the condition of southern blacks grew increasingly desperate, Douglass raised up Lincoln as the standard of justice against which he measured his contemporaries.
In 1888 Douglass’s anger and frustration boiled over into one of the most shocking pronouncements of his entire career—with Lincoln figuring as a dramatic coda. Notwithstanding all the disadvantages of their condition and the obstacles thrown in their way, Douglass had always been optimistic about the prospects for the former slaves. Now he was not so sure. He felt “compelled to admit” that the Negro in the South “is worse off, in many respects, than when he was a slave.” He had been swindled, his energy paralyzed, his ambitions suppressed, his hopes blasted. Nominally free, “he is actually a slave.” Here and now, Douglass shouted, I “denounce his so-called emancipation as a stupendous fraud—a fraud upon him, a fraud upon the world.” This was not what freedom was supposed to be. It was not what emancipation was supposed to be. “It was not so meant by Abraham Lincoln.”33
Here was the old Frederick Douglass—scathing, sarcastic, and urgently angry—still able to denounce injustice with all the contempt of an unreconstructed Garrisonian but with all the wounded patriotism of a Lincoln Republican. His critical edge was as sharp as ever. The difference was that Douglass had revived his lifelong struggle for equality from within the political mainstream, and in his search for an ally he had turned to the memory of Abraham Lincoln. Black Americans “look to you as a leader,” a reporter for the Washington Post said to Douglass during an interview in 1884. “I do not presume to be a leader,” Douglass said. He was being disingenuous—of course he presumed to be a black leader—but he wanted to make a point. “Mr. Lincoln and Mr. Sumner were leaders of the colored people, far greater than I, an humble citizen, can ever hope to be.”34 Douglass was puffing up Lincoln for a reason. If he was going to do battle under the protective shadow of Abraham Lincoln, he wanted that shadow to be an imposing one.
When Douglass said to an audience of Brooklyn Republicans in 1893 that Lincoln was the most “godlike” person he had ever known, he was setting his listeners up for a jolt at the end of the speech. He lured them in with exalted words about their party’s founding hero, only to regale them at the end with a chanting refrain of possibilities, all of them implying the same hypothetical question: What if Lincoln were alive today? “Did his firm hand now hold the helm of state; did his brave spirit now animate the Nation; did his wisdom now shape and control the destiny of this otherwise great republic; did he now lead the once great republican party…” If Lincoln were still with us, if he were still in command, Douglass charged, officials in Washington would not be spouting the “weak and helpless” claim that “there is no power under the United States Constitution to protect the lives and liberties of American citizens in any one of our own Southern states from barbarous, inhuman and lawless violence.”35 It was nearly thirty years since Douglass had first laid the same trap, when his disillusionment with Andrew Johnson led him to emphasize the greatness of the murdered President so that he could speculate more freely about what might have happened “had Mr. Lincoln lived.”
For northern whites at the end of the nineteenth century the memory of Lincoln was becoming an empty artifact, an exercise in nostalgia. For Frederick Douglass the memory was something else entirely: Lincoln was his bludgeon, his sledgehammer, the destructive weapon Douglass wielded as he charged back into battle against the regrouping forces of injustice and inequality.
He never abandoned the fight. On February 10, 1895, he drove down into Washington from his home atop Cedar Hill to join his old friend Susan B. Anthony at a rally for women’s rights. Douglass had been committed to her cause from the beginning, but after the war they had quarreled over whether black men should get the vote before women did. That was all behind them now, and as Douglass entered the hall, the two great reformers locked arms and proceeded to the platform amid wild applause. Late in the afternoon Douglass went back to Cedar Hill for dinner all full of enthusiasm. He started to tell his wife, Helen, about the day’s events, mimicking one of the speakers in a way that only he could. Midway through the performance he rose from his chair, fell to his knees, then to the floor. The old warrior was dead. Just then the carriage arrived to take Douglass back to the rally, where he was scheduled to deliver his own speech for women’s rights. Three days later they took his body back to Rochester and buried him at Mount Hope.