Frederick Douglass, January 26, 1874. John Howe Kent photographer.
The signs of the times are not all in our favor. There are, even in the Republican party, indications of a disposition to get rid of us.
—FREDERICK DOUGLASS, JULY 5, 1875
By 1875, Frederick Douglass felt adrift, frustrated, and angry. Personal losses and professional failures of recent years had left him floundering and searching for footing in the quicksand of Washington politics. Once again without a newspaper, a job, or other forms of livelihood apart from itinerant oratory, he observed with fear the unraveling of Reconstruction from under the feet of his people. Douglass’s abiding loyalty to the Republican Party and a Grant administration fraught with corruption felt more unstable than ever. His daughter’s family continued to grow as it needed his largesse. His three sons once more struggled for meaningful employment in the extended economic depression; Charles especially was helplessly in debt. Grandchildren, siblings, and various other adoptees to the extended family all needed his help. Anna’s health was not stable as she entered her sixties. Across the South, all but four of the former Confederate states had been “redeemed” by the Democratic Party; white mob violence surged again, stalking and murdering the freedmen. The man of words fell back upon his old weapon, but with a contradictory anguish reminiscent of the late 1850s.
Throughout 1874–75, Douglass followed closely the Democratic Party’s counterrevolution of white supremacy in the South as well as its takeover of the US Congress. He now lived in a capital with a scandal-ridden Republican president and with Democrats, whom Douglass still identified with slavery, the Confederacy, and the Klan, running the House of Representatives. Grant-era corruption normally involved businesses making payments to public officials for favors, contracts, and vast amounts of railroad land. Cries for civil service “reform” coming from within the Republican ranks stemmed from both moral embarrassment and political fear. Indictments and acquittals, as well as the brazen corruption of congressmen, cabinet secretaries, or vice presidents, replaced the fate of Reconstruction in the headlines.1
With Americans deflected from Southern and racial questions by economic depression, the fall congressional elections of 1874 were a disaster for Republicans. Overnight, the House of Representatives went from a Republican majority of 110 to a Democratic majority of 60. “The Republican Party Struck by Lightning!” read a typical headline, even in that party’s own papers. In thirty-five states holding elections, twenty-three were won by Democrats. Southern Democrats especially rejoiced; they now had a right to believe, as one Tennessee politician said, that this had not been an election at all, but “the country coming to a halt and changing front. . . . The whole scheme of reconstruction stands before the country today a naked, confessed, stupendous failure.” Grant’s secretary of state, Hamilton Fish, declared Republicans “so flat on our backs, that we can only be looking up.” A worried Douglass took to the road wherever invited, warning desperately of a forgetful, money- and blood-drenched “peace” that seemed to be taking over the body politic. He demanded from a New Hampshire crowd in early 1875 “not a peace which rested on one man’s standing on the neck of another, but a peace which arises out of equal justice and equal rights to all.”2 Just what kind of peace might unfold in America became for Douglass a central theme during the remainder of Reconstruction and beyond.
• • •
Douglass knew the fragility of his words and feared for the future of the cause of his life. He was left to watch more than fight, as the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments crumbled to dust in the face of armed white resistance. He especially felt shocked at the reports of intimidation and terror perpetrated against blacks in elections in various Southern states. In August 1874, resurgent Democrats in Alabama used an array of coercion, targeted assassinations, and, in one instance in Eufaula in Barbour County, the murder of seven blacks and the wounding of some seventy more on Election Day to defeat an already divided Republican interracial coalition. In Mobile, blacks were driven from polls by white mobs, and in other places ballot boxes were burned. In September 1874 in New Orleans, in the “Battle of Liberty Place,” a throng of thirty-five hundred “White Leaguers,” composed largely of Confederate veterans, drove black militiamen and Metropolitan Police away from official buildings and took over city hall, the statehouse, and an arsenal. Stunned by this uprising, President Grant, who had been reluctant to take such federal action in the states, ordered US troops to the city to restore order. But order and Republican rule did not last long in Louisiana either. Across the North, sentiment now ran against such federal interventions. A retreat from Reconstruction among white Northerners sent slow waves of fear through black communities. Indeed, assertions of states’ rights, as well as the idea that the South should be left alone to solve its problems, poured forth now even from Republicans.3
Mississippi produced the worst violence of all. Municipal and county elections in and around Vicksburg in August–September 1874 pitted “White League Clubs” (Democrats) against a weakening Republican Party, led by the Northern-bred governor Adelbert Ames. Grant refused for too long to intervene in Mississippi, and by fall some three hundred blacks had been killed in political terror throughout the countryside. In 1875 statewide election campaigns white vigilante mobs attacked and shot people with impunity in broad daylight. The Democrats’ “Mississippi Plan” used intimidation as well as murder to keep blacks from the polls in several key black belt counties. Grant’s inaction left Ames’s government on its own to face the crisis; Ames was forced to resign and leave the state in what amounted to a violent coup d’état. The one surviving black Republican from Mississippi in Congress, John Roy Lynch, said that the results of the armed white-supremacist revolt in his state meant that “the war was fought in vain.” Ames called it a “revolution . . . by force of arms—and a race . . . disfranchised [and] returned to . . . an era of second slavery.”4
Sickened, Douglass observed the bloodshed and political transformation somewhat helplessly from afar. National press coverage confirmed that Southern violence had won the day inasmuch as even Republican editors denounced further federal action in the South. The New York Evening Post held that “no political quack medicines such as federal interference or military protection” would do any good, since when troops were removed, mob violence would only begin again. The Washington National Republican offered only benign resignation: “Northern people have lost all interest in the welfare of colored Southern Republicans.”5
Outraged, Douglass responded in early February 1875 with a public letter to the National Republican. Ten years after Appomattox he declared himself in favor of the “bonds of peace” and against fanning the flames of “sectional hostility.” However, Douglass identified “two kinds of peace.” One peace lived by a “just respect . . . for the rights of all.” To describe the other peace, he returned to the old prison metaphors of his earliest autobiography. That second kind of peace, said a furious Douglass, “arises out of the relation of slavery, a peace that may be seen and felt in a prison . . . a peace where the heels of one class are on the necks of another.” The old radical found his voice again. A group of black leaders in Washington had been accused of incendiary rhetoric by some newspapers for their resolutions protesting white Southern violence. “The serpent may hiss,” wrote the old editor, “the crushed worm may turn, the wild beast may warn the hunter of dangerous pursuit, but you, colored man, must not say that there is even a possibility of danger to the midnight riders and murderers by whom you are slaughtered, lest our saying so will be considered as an invitation to a war of races.” Douglass must have felt as though it were the late 1840s again, when he was accused of being a black demagogue denouncing his country. This time, though, his fame and friendships were so widespread that he garnered some admiration for his spirited protests. Some papers published a portrait of Douglass as the “first man of his race.” The Rochester Express applauded the public letter, announcing, “Douglass was never more needed by his people than now” as their champion.6
In nearly a dozen speeches in New Hampshire in winter 1875, anticipating a congressional and gubernatorial election there in March, Douglass attacked the national retreat from Reconstruction. He used bloody-shirt language to draw audiences back to the war, to the “mourning, distress, and desolation” they had endured on home fronts and battlefronts. As Union soldier monuments had begun to appear on town greens, he gave patriotic New Englanders their due credit for answering the “hour of battle and danger.” Huge crowds in Lancaster, Manchester, and Concord applauded him for such tributes. To the constitutional argument against “centralization” advanced by opponents of Reconstruction, Douglass had ready answers. Democrats had never shied away from using federal military power when the object was returning fugitive slaves, or handing over John Brown to be executed. He wondered why if the “American people could stand centralization for slavery,” they could not also “stand centralization for liberty.” As for the charges that the new Civil Rights Act pending in the Senate (eventually passed in honor of Charles Sumner) might advance “social equality” between whites and blacks, Douglass exploited the reality of racial mixture: “What is social equality? They had a great deal of it where I came from. A great deal of the social, but no equality.” Two races arrived in North America in the early seventeenth century, said Douglass, one on the Mayflower at Plymouth, and the other on a “Dutch galliot . . . at Jamestown.” At that time there were no “intermediate races,” but now, two and a half centuries later, because of slavery and long-practiced “social inequality there had come a million and a half of intermediates.” His roaring Yankee audiences loved the joke. As for the election, a vote for Republicans meant protection for blacks, and a vote for Democrats meant more “dripping blood of my people.”7
Increasingly, Douglass found himself speaking at commemorative gatherings, probing the meaning of memory in this time of embittered national reconciliation. He was especially effective at calling his fellow abolitionists back to their story of greatness. In Philadelphia in April 1875, Douglass shared a platform with many old colleagues and rivals at the hundredth anniversary of America’s oldest antislavery organization, the Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery. He marveled at the uniqueness of a centennial celebration in such a young country, comparing the old abolitionists’ modest gathering to the anticipated centennial of the United States to occur the following year. He claimed for his fellow reformers a “higher, broader, and more sacred” purpose. Because of the unraveling of Reconstruction, Douglass put cause above country: the “Centennial of Seventy-Six stands for patriotism; ours stands for philanthropy.” The nation’s anniversary was “transient,” the abolitionists’ crusade “permanent.” Douglass insisted that he and his colleagues, black and white, survey a century of epic change in ending slavery and proudly tell the world that they had led “the noblest cause in modern history.” Generations later historians would agree.8
Douglass could soar in these commemorative moments; he made audiences all but forget dire present circumstances and dream again. He refused to countenance “talk of the dead past.” To him, “no part of the past is dead or indifferent.” He took up the great nineteenth-century abstraction of human progress, asking whether such a thing really existed. To the naysayers, he offered with exclamation the abolitionists’ story: “There is no more impressive contradiction than in the history of the antislavery cause. I know of no one period of the world’s age for which I would be willing to exchange the present.” To buttress the idea of progress, Douglass held aloft a nearly two-hundred-year-old book given him as a gift in England thirty years earlier. From the Anglican missionary Morgan Godwyn’s Negro’s and Indians Advocate, published in 1680, he took a reassuring lesson of change, since this work’s “anti-slavery tendency” had advanced not abolition itself, but the idea that it was right in God’s lights to “baptize a negro,” which two centuries earlier had been seen as a “quite radical doctrine.” With such a prop in hand, Douglass asked his audience, young and old, to fight on to a “second centennial.” The American freedmen, he said, had been given “freedom and famine” at the same time. “Talk of having done enough for these people,” Douglass insisted, “is absurd, cruel, and heartless.” Above all they needed protection for the ballot. Their challenge, he told his fellow abolitionists, was to secure the results of the great moral change they had won.9
That summer of 1875 Douglass gave a Fourth of July address in Washington that was one of the most controversial and compelling efforts of his postwar life. In the Hillsdale section of Anacostia, formerly called Uniontown and where Douglass’s sons had made their homes, a large crowd gathered outdoors in a grove for a picnic and speeches on July 5 (in black tradition the alternative date). Some 375 acres of what had formerly been the Barry Farm had been set aside by the Freedmen’s Bureau in this section of the District; five hundred black families had settled there by 1870. Following a prayer and then a twenty-five-member children’s choir singing patriotic songs, John Mercer Langston spoke, appealing vigorously for black self-help. Langston wanted blacks to manage their own institutions, singling out Howard University, where he was on the faculty and Douglass a trustee, for special criticism.10
In his turn before the holiday throng, Douglass delivered a remarkable address that was at once angry, historical, antiracist, and a confrontational appeal to black community self-reliance. In front of church ladies with fans, restless children, and male laborers with a day off, Douglass offered a history lesson. On this ninety-ninth anniversary of American independence, blacks must now face their “trial” as “citizens of this Republic,” just as the white founders had done in their time. Both the Revolution and the Civil War’s second revolution were the heritage of African Americans as well as whites. Americans collectively should be by “historic associations and achievements” all one people, he argued. Then in the form of a question, Douglass changed tone and gave the keynote not only to that day in the grove at Hillsdale, but to the concluding years of Reconstruction. He anticipated the impending US centennial the following year, when the nation would “lift to the sky its million voices in one grand Centennial hosanna of peace and good will to all the white race of this country—from gulf to lakes and from sea to sea.” As black citizen and spokesman, he dreaded the day “when this great white race has renewed its vows of patriotism and flowed back into its accustomed channels.” Proud but worried, with the promises of emancipation endangered, Douglass looked back upon fifteen years of revolutionary change and darkly queried, “If war among the whites brought peace and liberty to the blacks, what will peace among the whites bring?” Douglass warned that “justice” and “reconstruction” did not have a deep enough hold upon the nation.11 From experience and with great solicitude, the orator envisioned a road to reunion paved only for white people.
A “peace among the whites” is a striking way of thinking about the waning of Radicalism and the end of Reconstruction. The Democrats’ counterrevolution in the South was indeed a successful white-supremacist insurgency—a political war by whites to forge a peace for whites. Douglass aimed his speech in July 1875 directly at his own black community. He implored his people to fight back with the tools of peace. African Americans were a “divided people,” he argued, and lacked great men in their own ranks to lead them out of their wilderness. Langston and a few other community leaders may have bristled at that comment. In an unveiled reference to his own recent woes, Douglass lamented that the race lacked its own “grand organ” (newspaper) to defend and advance its cause. “We are disparaged, vilified, slandered as a people,” Douglass asserted, “but . . . we are dumb and have no press to answer and expose the injustice.” Blacks lacked not only leadership, but basic self-worth. Two hundred years of slavery had taught his people to “respect white men and despise ourselves.”12
As a scold, Douglass was not out to make friends that day in Hillsdale. Oddly, he demanded a reinvigorated self-reliance from the picnicking throng, condemning “the swarm of white beggars that sweep the country in the name of the colored race.” He boldly recited a slightly revised version of the opening paragraphs of the Declaration of Independence, calling on his people to exercise the right of consent and revolution and to “alter or abolish” their ties to benevolent organizations. Blacks needed less charity and more “justice and fair play.” Douglass mocked the “begging class,” which he said was “composed of broken-down preachers without pulpits, lawyers without clients, professors without chairs . . . who fail in everything but managing money given for the benefit of the negro.” The only aim of such a class, he caustically maintained, was “to slip into the money boxes of these associations.” Douglass hid nothing of his own bitterness about the Freedmen’s Bank failure as he listed the types of charitable organizations he rejected: “African educational societies, Lincoln and Howard Universities, and freedmen’s banks.” It was as if Douglass breathed real-life anger and contempt into one of the central themes—“the great Negro University Swindle”—of Mark Twain’s 1873 novel, The Gilded Age. “They [the associations] keep the public mind constantly upon the poor, wretched negro,” said Douglass, “and thus damn the whole race . . . in pity.” In the Babel that was Congress in Twain’s 1870s Washington, money flows toward any project with the word Negro attached. When Laura Hawkins, as deep in graft for her family’s interests as any congressman, lines up votes for the black university in Tennessee on her ancestral land, she hides nothing: “Now, said she, these gentlemen are to vote and work for the bill out of love of the negro—and out of pure generosity I have put in a relative of each as a member of the University incorporation.”13 Douglass and Twain were on the same page, one with a withering jeremiad and the other with a raucous satire.
Few of Douglass’s Reconstruction-era speeches garnered as much press attention as his Hillsdale Fifth of July address. Democratic Party papers seized on the appeal for black independence, thus using Douglass as a way of condemning the “Radical party” and remaining elements of Reconstruction policy. The Washington Gazette claimed that Douglass had urged blacks to abandon the Republicans, whereas the New Orleans Louisianan saw the speech the other way around. Another Washington paper acknowledged that the address had “been shot with more rapidity all over the country” than any other Fourth of July utterance. The American Citizen found some of the speech “enigmatical,” wondering just what Douglass had intended. But it lampooned how Democratic papers were “indulging in hearty guffaw” and “hugging, embracing, and rolling over each other . . . at having at last received the long wished for views of the colored people’s desertion of the Republican party.” Such celebration, said the Citizen, was merely an “illusion.”14
Because of so much conflicted public response, Douglass quickly released a revised edition of the text of the speech. He also published a letter in the Washington Republican explaining himself. Friends had written to Douglass worried that Democrats were making great political capital out of his chastisements of black leadership as well as charitable organizations. They especially wanted clarification of Douglass’s views on whether blacks should desert the Republicans. He responded that he had been misunderstood because of “stray sentences torn from their connections.” He tried to set the record straight: “There is no truth . . . to the story that I at Hillsdale, or anywhere else, advised colored men to abandon . . . the Republican party and set up for themselves.” That day would come, he said, only when both parties were “equally good or equally bad.” He characterized the address as “an appeal to the American people to substitute the simple rule of justice for the rule of invidious charity in their treatment of the negro—to give him his rights rather than alms.”15
This is a prototypical case of a prominent black spokesman whose forthright statements about his people’s behavior and self-criticisms were appropriated by racist forces. Douglass was a worried, ambivalent man in the mid-1870s, and feeling his sense of authority dissipating. A year after the Hillsdale speech, he still found himself defending it to the American Missionary Association. In a letter to that organization’s journal, Douglass reasserted his desire for “justice . . . more than alms,” even as he welcomed their aid. Above all, he did not want violent white-supremacist Democrats using his words to their ends any more than he could stomach the “sectarian and selfish purposes” of the “hungry class” out to lift the destitute Negro of their imaginations. We have watched this scene so many times in modern American politics: current Republicans, some of whom love to appropriate Douglass, lifting him out of context to use him in service to causes he would abhor.16
• • •
If the political scene offered only an unwelcome, dangerous peace, no economic peace took hold in the mid-1870s either. Economic strife fueled the American retreat from Reconstruction. Both before and after the Panic of 1873 widened its swath of ruin, Douglass engaged the great struggle between labor and capital. He was never fond of labor organizations and trade unions largely because of their discriminatory practices against black and Chinese workers. Douglass was a pro-tariff protectionist Republican. The high tariff on imports, he said in 1871, had “done more to promote the true interests of the workingmen of this country . . . than all the trade unions, eight hour leaguers, and other combinations to force up their wages and force down the hours of labor that will be organized to the end of time can ever accomplish.” Before the panic, at least, he put full faith in the market, what he called “the great law of trade.” Unions, Douglass believed, remembering his sons’ struggles, had no right to prevent “others from working for less.” Leaders of workingmen’s associations, in his view, spent too much time “making war on capital” and advocating “communism.” Douglass maintained that “real pauperism . . . can always be traced back to faulty political institutions.” As a true adherent of political liberalism, he argued, sometimes vaguely, that extending the franchise did more for the poor than “all those who attempt to stir up hostility to wealth and encourage outrage and violence.” Sometimes he simply retreated into conservative resignation on the labor issue. “The labor question . . . is one of the most difficult and perplexing,” he wrote in February 1872. “Its satisfactory solution seems to be reserved for a distant future.”17
But economic reality did not wait for human solutions to perplexity. Douglass’s vision of Reconstruction often lacked thoroughgoing economic analysis, which hardly made him an exception, even among Radical Republicans. For this pragmatic, classical proponent of liberal democracy, a set of fundamental assumptions about economic life created several contradictions in his postemancipation thought: a fierce belief in the sanctity of private property while demanding land for the powerless freedpeople; what often appeared to be laissez-faire individualism and black self-reliance coupled with demands for federal aid to former slaves denied human capital for generations; and political liberty viewed as the source and stimulant of economic independence and civic equality. Moral and political phenomena had always dominated Douglass’s mind; the meaning of liberty for a fugitive slave rising to fame as a reformer, repeatedly rewritten and preached by the self-made hero, had always been intensely individualistic. Despite many pesky facts in his amazing story, Douglass could never give up on the idea that he, like others, had willed his freedom, livelihood, and future. American individualism had few more potent voices than the postwar Douglass, who struggled for creative prescriptions for the improvement of America’s recently enslaved peasantry in an age rapidly growing hostile to humanitarian reform.
In September 1873, Douglass was the keynote speaker in Nashville at the annual fair of the Tennessee Colored Agricultural and Mechanical Association. A huge procession escorted him to an amphitheater at the fairgrounds, where in bright sunlight he addressed some five thousand people, not all of whom, according to press reports, were fully attentive in the “holiday” festival atmosphere. Douglass offered a prolonged apology for a lack of genuine agricultural knowledge, but then delivered a good deal of farming advice, as well as brief commentaries on meteorology, insect infestation, the history of the plow, and the romance of rural life. Above all he administered what became for him a common, stern message about the work ethic. Douglass’s prescriptions were as simple and practical as “be sure of your water and wood!” But they were ultimately moralistic and paternalistic. “Time is money,” Douglass asserted, Ben Franklinesque, and he urged farmers to maintain family “peace at home.” Above all he delivered a racial-historical plea to these black tillers of the soil to slough off slavery’s influence, the “entrenched errors and habits of centuries.” Douglass’s speech in Tennessee was at once a celebration of modernity and its new technologies and an appeal to stay on the land, “the grand old earth,” which harbored “no prejudices against race, color, or previous condition of servitude.”18
In the postwar era, few black leaders delivered more resounding pleas for self-reliance than Douglass. To Douglass, black self-improvement had always meant adherence to the traditional values of thrift, sobriety, and work; as the years passed, he became a self-styled, unapologetic advocate of the Gospel of Wealth. At the Tennessee fair he declared that the great question left unanswered by the war was “whether the black man will prove a better master to himself than his white master was to him.” Blacks must stake their own claim to civilization and create their own culture, Douglass asserted, otherwise they would continue “wearing the old clothes left by a bygone generation.” They would have “no science nor philosophy of their own . . . neither history nor poetry.”19 Such medicine about self-reliance may have been hard to take for some blacks struggling to feed their families.
In such settings Douglass exhibited a hidebound traditional conception of history and culture. He knew that William Wells Brown and William Cooper Nell had written histories; and he surely knew the poetry of Phillis Wheatley and the numerous slave-narrative authors, among whom he was the most famous. Moreover, he was not the only black journalist in a tradition now decades old. His musings on a lack of black cultural creativity were not generous. But perhaps as a way of prodding the young in his audiences, he pronounced, “The books we read, the sermons we hear, the prayers we repeat, are all obtained from the white race. We have neither made books, sermons, prayers or hymns.” One wonders if Douglass knew that such a statement was both false and painfully useful. He had, after all, sold thousands of his own books. But the forbidding scold could make the pill even more bitter to swallow with invidious ethnic comparisons. According to Douglass, blacks lacked the unity and peculiar skills of other American immigrant groups, images of which he fashioned in well-worn stereotypes. “We are not like the Irish, an organized political power, welded together by a common faith.” His people also were “not shrewd like the Hebrew, capable of making fortunes by buying and selling old clothes.” Further, they were no match for the Germans, “who can spend half their time in lager beer saloons and still get rich.” Blacks, said schoolmaster Douglass, were a “laborious, joyous, thoughtless, improvident people,” just released from slavery.20
As Douglass counseled the freedpeople to not migrate, to “accumulate property,” and to create lives “founded on work,” he sometimes revived his older notion that blacks should be left alone to work out their own destiny. He often couched this “let alone” or “do nothing” dictum in an equally vehement appeal for justice and fair play. But undoubtedly, in the midst of the political wars over Reconstruction policy, and this new age’s constant strife over the meaning of activist government, Douglass’s plea that the nation leave the freedmen alone sometimes puzzled his friends and armed his enemies. While his son Charles sent him volumes of documents from within the Freedmen’s Bureau, detailing massive efforts for freedmen’s education and land acquisition, Charles also reported that John Mercer Langston and director Oliver O. Howard both wanted clarification of what Douglass meant by “let alone.” According to Charles, Langston had said, “I don’t understand him,” and hoped that the elder Douglass would “read this report and look over the statistics.” More so, the son conveyed Howard’s direct request: “Write to your father and give him the facts as to the condition of the freedmen in the South. . . . A great many old and infirm colored people . . . would perish if let alone.”21
Douglass had staked out a moral position on self-reliance that no amount of data could dislodge, although he modified it with time and events. His position was a mixture of moral philosophy and political strategy. Too much had been done to blacks throughout the history of slavery; the idealist in the postemancipation Douglass wanted political democracy to be laid so deep in law and society that his people could simply rise each day, make their own livings, and pursue an education in peace. But the elusiveness, even impossibility, of such a peace became the reality of Reconstruction; Douglass understood this evolving truth deep in his bones even as he preached bootstrap sermons to his fellow former slaves. Confounding both friend and enemy, he developed canny ways to condemn sloth, indulgence, and indifference in one breath, while in the next demanding the highest forms of political and legal justice.
Douglass advanced his “let alone” philosophy throughout the Reconstruction years, but in New York in May 1869, at the meeting of the American Anti-Slavery Society, he had delivered one of its most forceful assertions. This audience of old abolitionists was especially pliant to the argument. They had met to push with confidence for ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment, what Douglass called the keystone of their cause. He entertained with mimicry and raucous humor about the many times he had been called “nigger” but still, by close associations or experience, had won over his adversaries. The great obstacle in front of the freedpeople was their poverty; they desperately needed aspiration and education. Douglass told of running into a black whitewasher one day recently. “We are great on white!” Douglass shouted to his laughing throng. Then he quoted the “colored man” with the brush: “As to this thing you call learning, book learning, I ain’t much at that; but that thing you call laying whitewash on the wall, I am dar.” What blacks most needed, the orator maintained, was “elbow room and enlarged opportunities.”22 Humor could assuage pain and make an audience listen.
So “let alone” was really a companion to its apparent opposites: protection, a social contract, government responsibility and enforcement. Douglass wanted land, jobs, and education. “My politics in regard to the negro is simply this,” he announced in clear terms. “Give him fair play and let him alone, but be sure you give him fair play [as] a man before the law.” Blacks needed money and a “class of men of wealth.” They needed leisure to pursue intellect and the arts. If his auditors or readers were confused by his position, Douglass was not. He believed government must act as the arbiter of fairness. He gave his fellow white citizens, if they would listen, their marching orders. “If you see a negro wanting to purchase land, let him alone; let him purchase it. If you see him on the way to school, let him go; don’t say he shall not go into the same school with other people. . . . If you see him on his way to the workshop, let him alone; let him work; don’t say you will not work with him.”23
In other words, “let alone” meant rule of law and social peace. It meant stop killing the freedmen and denying them access to civic life, make the revolution of emancipation real, enforce it by law, protect it in the courts, teach it in schools, keep the ballot box safe and free to defend that revolution, and reimagine government itself as the source and shield for a brave new economic world. “Let alone” and “fair play” demanded that whites open their minds and let blacks find their own place in equality before the law, announced in the Fourteenth Amendment. Douglass chose unfortunate passive words for a plan of social and political action. He knew this was a somewhat utopian vision. But he was in for the long haul, and he often prefaced any talk of his “let alone” theory with the sobering admission that slavery “did not die honestly.” It had died in all-out war, from necessity, not from enlightenment and morality alone. It had been crushed in blood, not merely legislated out of existence. Its ideology and habits, its racial assumptions, lived on in virulent forms. When those were crushed too, then, said Douglass to friend and foe, “you shall have peace.”24
One of Douglass’s fullest expressions of the doctrine of self-reliance, though it is much more, was his famous speech “Self-Made Men,” delivered dozens of times from 1859 to the early 1890s. The lecture reflected the culture and political economy of the Gilded Age; he appears to have carried it along with him on many of his speaking tours. For example, on the day after he addressed the Tennessee agricultural fair in 1873, he lectured on “Self-Made Men” to the black students at the new Fisk University in Nashville. The speech was very much a celebration of representative “great men” (borrowing from Emerson, whom Douglass warmly acknowledged) and a meditation on success, while offering an extended philosophical discussion of individualism. Emerson’s notion that “all history resolves itself very easily into the biography of a few stout and earnest persons” echoes loudly in Douglass. “Mr. Emerson,” said the orator, “has declared that it is natural to believe in great men. Whether this is a fact or not, we do believe in them and worship them.” Before launching into his own litany of models for great men, Douglass was cautious, warning of how history so often produces the “false prophet.” But like Emerson, who told of the “sot” who “now and then wakes up, exercises his reason and finds himself a true prince,” Douglass cherished the underdog Lincoln, “the King of American self-made men,” who “mastered his grammar” in a “log hut . . . by the steady glare of a pine wood knot.”25 Whenever Douglass delivered those lines, he felt their roots in his memory of the loft at the Aulds’ house in Baltimore, the boy by glare of a candle reading his Columbian Orator.
A freedwoman with seventeen children in front of their cabin, c. 1870. The Civil War had wrought great change, but in much of the South, Douglass’s message of self-reliance confronted poverty, lack of education, and terror.
Douglass rejected the idea of “genius,” abhorred the “accident or good luck theory” of human achievement, and above all exalted hard work. Winners and achievers in the race of life could be comprehended by “one word, and that word is WORK! WORK!! WORK!!! WORK!!!!” “Chance” could never explain greatness or even professional accomplishment; only a sense of “order,” trained “habit,” and “systematic endeavor” could lead to world-changing ideas. He had no patience either with those who looked to divine favor to find good fortune. The “miracle working priest” was a mere “pretender.” In his elder years, Douglass certainly did not reject the Bible as a source of wisdom, but he levied harsh criticisms at black ministers who with emotional “fervor . . . prayed for knowledge . . . [yet] they who prayed loudest seemed to get the least.” Douglass much preferred to employ passages such as John 5:17, when Jesus is condemned to death because he broke the law and labored on the Sabbath: “My father worketh, said the Savior, and I also work.”26
“Self-Made Men” was Douglass’s ultimate commentary on human nature, a theme he first explored in his early two autobiographies. People were essentially “lazy,” Douglass believed. “All men,” he said with his well-honed Protestant ethic, “however industrious, are either lured or lashed through the world.” The lecture is at times knitted together by lines that read like platitudes in a young man’s advice manual. “A man never knows the strength of his grip till life and limb depend upon it. Something is likely to be done when something must be done.” A laborer with “broad axe or hoe” needed “hard hands . . . for the blister is a primary condition to the needed hardness.” For Douglass the greatest cause of human striving was the “sting” of “necessity.”27
Like Emerson, Douglass’s embrace of individualism called for finding motivation, truth, and one’s own character from within one’s own “soul.” Douglass may have borrowed actual words as well as ideas from Emerson’s classic essay “Self-Reliance.” But Douglass’s assertion of individualism was cautionary. Emerson beautifully urged us to listen to the “voices which we hear in solitude,” but warned that they “grow faint and inaudible as we enter into the world. Society everywhere is a conspiracy against . . . every one of its members . . . a joint stock company, in which the members agree, for the better securing of his bread to each shareholder, to surrender the liberty and culture of the eater.” Douglass, however, chose his metaphors from nature. Absolute “individual independence,” he wrote, “of the past and present . . . can never exist.” “I believe in individuality, but individuals are, to the mass, like waves to the ocean. The highest order of genius is as dependent as the lowest. It, like the loftiest waves of the sea, derives its power . . . from the grandeur and vastness of the ocean of which it forms a part. We differ as the waves, but are one as the sea.” Douglass’s striving self was forever dramatically leaping above the waves in rare moments of greatness after years of treading water.28
Amid bland comments about an alleged harmony between labor and capital, Douglass trumpeted his demand for fair play and justice for blacks. The speech also contained a remarkable critique of inequality and what might be done about it in the vicious materialism of the Gilded Age. African Americans, he insisted, began life at a very different starting line from whites. Some scholars have suggested that inside the “Self-Made Men” lecture was Douglass’s theory of “reparations.” Whether we should call these ideas by that term is debatable. But his judgments about the need for historical justice were unequivocal: “Should the American people put a schoolhouse in every valley of the South and a church on every hill side and supply the one with teachers and the other with preachers, for a hundred years to come, they would not then have given fair play to the negro.” Lacking specifics, Douglass nevertheless called for a debt to be paid over time with action. “The nearest approach to justice to the negro for the past,” said the orator, “is to do him justice in the present. Throw open to him the doors of the schools, the factories, the workshops, and all mechanical industries.”29 Americans were brutally unequal in their beginnings; so act now to repair the past, Douglass seemed to say to white Americans, for you can never really act enough.
Douglass especially celebrated those, such as himself, who rose from the depths to the heights of their fields. No one could miss the self-references as he honored those men especially “who owe little or nothing to birth . . . to wealth inherited or to early approved means of education.” Particularly in America, the best self-made men were those “who are not brought up but are obliged to come up . . . but often in open and derisive defiance of all the efforts of society . . . to repress, retard and keep them down.” One hears the repressed voice of Fred Bailey in these passages, and that of Frederick Douglass unleashed on the lecture circuit in the early 1840s. By the time Douglass achieved ever-growing fame by giving this special speech in so many places in the 1870s and 1880s, he had long stood as America’s representative self-liberated slave, who with “derisive defiance” had remade himself. In America, he claimed, men were not judged by their “brilliant fathers,” but merely on their own merits.30 Four younger Douglasses—Rosetta, Lewis, Frederick Jr., and Charles—had so long wished that this piety were true.
The “Self-Made Men” address is an exaltation of at least the promise in American democracy. Douglass plied the depths of American mythology, sounding like the early Whitman: “We have as a people no past and very little present, but a boundless and glorious future.” Douglass kept that line in the speech even as it did not fit his own emerging mood during the unraveling of Reconstruction. America was, he claimed, still “the social wonder of the world,” tolerating no “fixed classes” as did the older Europe. Douglass celebrated the overwork of Americans. He offered a flawed prediction about the future of American capitalism: “To my mind, we have no reason to fear that either wealth, knowledge, or power will here be monopolized by the few as against the many.”31 To understand Douglass during the Gilded Age we have to comprehend why he could be so wrong with such a surmise, and why he needed to believe in it.
Although he invoked many passages from the Bible and Shakespeare as well as other poets and literary worthies throughout the speech, he borrowed as much as any from Robert Burns. “Scotia’s matchless son of song,” as Douglass called Burns, was a lifetime passion for the black writer. Burns’s spirit of democracy, cultivated in Ayr on the west coast of Scotland during the maritime threat of the American Revolution, his rebellion against monarchy, aristocracy, and all manner of convention, and especially his literary probings of the idea of equality had always inspired Douglass. The American also felt a personal affinity with the legendary Scot because, as historian John Stauffer has said, “Both men had been born poor, were oppressed by elite whites and treated like brutes, and found in language a way to remake themselves and build a vision of humanity.” In “Self-Made Men” Douglass used Burns to assert the majesty of work well done, and especially to show how the lowly can achieve greatness: “I see how folks live that hae riches, / But surely poor folks maun be wretches.”32
In Douglass’s pantheon of self-made men, Burns, like Lincoln and others, provided a model of self-education combined with a holy respect for learning. The orator’s self-revelatory meditation on a life of the mind at the end of the speech is its most moving element. He took his jabs at America’s most elite universities: “There is a small class of very small men who turn their backs upon anyone who presumes to be anybody, independent of Harvard, Yale, Princeton or other similar institutions of learning. . . . With them the diploma is more than the man.” He lampooned the “haughty manner” of Yale boys, but never learning itself. “There never was a self-educated man who, with the same exertion, would not have been better educated by the aid of schools and colleges.” How viscerally Fred Bailey had yearned for formal education. Douglass worshipped books, cherished contemplation and debate; he all but lived for his next well-crafted sentence. Words and ideas were the bread and wine of his life. But always, from the streets of Baltimore to an ancient hall in Edinburgh, under a New England church steeple, or in the shadows of the US Capitol, this self-made man had worried how he could measure up. “A man may know much about educating himself,” Douglass said, “but little about the proper means of educating others.” A self-made man, he well knew, would always be insecure and self-conscious. He “is liable to be full of contrarieties. He may be large, but at the same time awkward; swift but ungraceful; a man of power, but deficient in the polish and amiable proportions of the affluent and regularly educated man.”33 An almost magical fact of Douglass’s life is how gracefully he hid such insecurity.
• • •
In the pivotal political year of 1876, Douglass worried less about his gracefulness than about his country, the fate of the freedmen, and especially that of his own burgeoning family. In the 1870s, Douglass carried on a deeply personal correspondence with Rosetta, especially when she moved back to Rochester with her brood of children. The “peace at home” that Douglass had urged upon black farmers was sadly missing for at least two of his own children. Little record exists of how or about which personal matters the old abolitionist talked to his wife in the couple’s later years. But to his daughter Douglass frequently complained about aging, about his weariness and bad health, and about the rigors of the road. “I find my continuous working power, in some measure failing me,” he admitted in late 1873, “and my health rather uncertain as I grow older.” Two months later, the fifty-five-year-old confided that he had “little heart left for the field,” and that only the “lash and sting of necessity” compelled him to get on the trains. Many of the behavioral prescriptions and ambitions he recommended for his thousands of auditors in “Self-Made Men” were all but killing him. So weary of travel, he told Rosetta, he often wished to stay home in the “chimney corner.”34
Only a few days before delivering the Hillsdale Fifth of July speech in 1875, Douglass wrote to Rosetta of his desperation for the hearth. Such fatigue and desire for domestic peace were also exacerbated by financial anxiety. In Anna’s much smaller garden at the A Street town house than the one she’d had in Rochester, Douglass had himself a little corner of his own to cultivate. He cherished it, he informed his daughter, as he also did his “horse and carriage, and my house duties.” He considered the next lecture journey a “positive misfortune.” Instead he yearned to “remain in the same place, dine at the same table, sleep in the same bed, bathe in the same tub, and do an hundred other same things.” Douglass was tired and otherwise unemployed. He told Rosetta that a “thousand times” he had wished that he had never left Rochester. “I have been nearly ruined financially by coming here [Washington].” He looked forward to talking with his mature daughter because his affairs now made him “fear the worst. Age and want are an ill matched pair.”35
Moreover, when one of Rosetta’s daughters, Alice, died rather suddenly that same summer at age six, Douglass wrote with a mixture of grief, spiritual sterility, and fear. His devastated daughter might not have been much comforted by her father’s philosophizing about death. First, he hoped that Rosetta would not suffer from the “superstitious terrors with which priest craft has surrounded the great and universal fact of death.” Douglass, who would later lose many more grandchildren to early and infant death, urged calmness. “Death,” he said, “is the common lot of all—and the strongest of us will soon be called away. It is well! Death is a friend, not an enemy.” Its real “price . . . is with the living, not with the dead.” These were hard but genuine lessons all nineteenth-century families learned; Allie’s passing surely brought a rush of memories of Annie’s death in 1860. As for afterlife, Douglass counseled a sorrowful Rosetta to think rationally: “Whatever else it may be, it is nothing that our taking thought about it can alter or improve. The best any of us can do is to trust in the eternal powers which brought us into existence, and this I do, for myself and for all.” The grandfather did not go to Rochester for Allie’s burial in Mount Hope Cemetery. Anna apparently did, since Douglass told Rosetta that he did not want to leave the A Street house unoccupied. He expressed fear about arson and terror, even in Washington: “We have been burnt out once and may be burnt out again, and if burnt out a second time I have no more strength to start life anew again. . . . We are not among friends here any more than in Rochester.” The elder Douglass was wracked with self-pity at this juncture. “It is our misfortune to create envy wherever we go. The white people don’t like us and the colored people envy us.” A depressed Douglass seemed to lean on his grieving daughter as much as she could lean on him. His stated reason for not attending the funeral, however, may have been, in part, disingenuous; Ottilie Assing was in all likelihood staying at the Douglass house at that very time.36
A year later, Rosetta’s life took worse turns yet, and she begged her father for comfort. She and Nathan were undergoing a marital separation, and she was desperate for help. “My breaking up has caused such a flitter among Nathan’s creditors and I am being sued on every side,” Rosetta lamented. One creditor pursued the thirty-seven-year-old mother of five surviving children with a note for $91.48. Rosetta refused to sign, and soon a constable arrived to confiscate all manner of household goods—furniture, clocks, rugs, and even her piano. She was selling off “many of Charles’s things” to make money, as a court was about to determine whether she was responsible for Nathan’s debts. “I am all torn up,” she reported. “Dear father, I wish I could be with you tonight—and be out of this turmoil. I never knew so little what to think in my life.”37
We do not have the father’s response to his daughter’s distress. But he likely helped financially. The three years after the bank and the newspaper failures were troublesome financial times for Douglass. Charles was once again mired in desperation over money and livelihood. After leaving the Treasury Department, Charles had moved back to Rochester, but his debts had pushed him into legal trouble and damaged the trust between father and son. In 1875 and 1876 some of Charles’s creditors threatened legal action and adverse publicity against Douglass himself. Charles sought and received a new job in the foreign service (with the help of his father), as a man named Hollensworth pursued him for payments of obligations several years old. Charles wrote to his father in July 1875 saying that this creditor claimed that the elder Douglass had advised him (Hollensworth) to go to the State Department and prevent the younger Douglass from going to his appointment in Santo Domingo. “I am not running away,” Charles pleaded to his father. “I am under obligations to you in a larger sum by five times than to all others together.” Charles knew he had lost his father’s faith; worse, his marriage to his wife, Libbie (Mary Elizabeth Murphy), was in trouble due to her claims about his infidelity. “I know how you feel towards me and would do anything to change that feeling,” wrote son to father. Douglass immediately replied and apparently accused his youngest son of “dissipation,” of squandering money on extravagance and parties. Charles shot right back, saying, “I have acknowledged my faults to you over and over again,” but denied the frivolity and irresponsibility. His problems were due, he said, to “making bad investments,” and he maintained that he had held only “two gatherings at my house” in eight years. He did admit to some unfortunate choices about “furniture.”38
In early 1876, Charles’s creditors continued to stalk his famous father, who everyone seemed to assume was wealthier than he was. A W. B. Shaw, a Union veteran amputee, wrote to Douglass and demanded payment of a $175 debt run up for services unpaid when Charles had served as treasurer of a county school board. Shaw heard that Charles was heading for Santo Domingo and told Douglass that he would suffer unwanted “publicity” if he did not pay up the “defrauded” money on behalf of his son. As in other situations, the father probably settled this mess out of court with quiet payments of cash. From Puerto Plata, Santo Domingo, in August 1876, a lonely Charles, feeling pathetic, wrote in a tone his father had heard all too many times. “Under the circumstances of the many failures in life,” he declared, “I have felt my letters were not desired. . . . It seems that under any circumstances I am to fail in my undertakings, and my life is to be one series of blunders. I have been here nearly a year and I don’t know how I have lived.” Correspondence such as this from his children, riddled with despair, must have sent Douglass into hiding in his chimney corner. Charles’s travail became worse when two years later his wife, Libbie, died and left a helpless husband seeking assistance from his extended family in raising his two children. The family was relatively silent on this horrible loss; the burial of “Mary Elizabeth Douglass, wife of Charles R. Douglass,” on September 21, 1878, “in Cypress Hills Cemetery . . . next to a tree, near Corona, NY state,” was recorded in the handwriting of one of the brothers in their scrapbooks.39
It was not only his children who so often pressed the peripatetic orator for money. The depression had hit the District of Columbia black community hard. Douglass’s close Washington friend and occasional political collaborator George T. Downing asked him in early 1877 for a loan of $500 so he could keep his home. In these same years Douglass became a mentor and sometime benefactor for the young historian-minister George Washington Williams, paying for him a $14-per-month board during his first year in the capital. When Williams moved out to Cincinnati, he kept his older hero informed of his scholarly habits and endeavors. By 1879, Douglass sent a $1 contribution to Amy Post’s ongoing efforts to financially support Sojourner Truth in her elderly years. He wished he could send $10, he said to Post, but “Washington has been a financial misfortune.” He reminded his old Rochester neighbor that he had lost $10,000 on his newspaper, and tragedies within his family had created more dependents than ever. Moreover, he complained, “My position here exposes me to an unceasing stream of applications for help and I try to respond favorably to most of them.”40 It turned out that self-made men did not live lives of heroic contemplation and achievement alone.
During the 1870s, Ottilie Assing remained very much part of the universe of Douglass’s family, as well as his personal life. Lewis and Charles, and perhaps Rosetta as well, took loans from her at times. Her retreat in Rochester no longer an option, she now spent parts of summers and some autumns in Washington, living at the A Street house, especially after a new wing was completed in 1874. Assing liked the political hustle and gossip of the capital. Her new hideaway, only a few blocks from the Douglass home, was the Library of Congress, where she could escape for whole days in books. Ottilie continued to nudge Douglass to make the European tour with her. In 1876, with the continued urgings of her German friends in the Hoboken circle, she finally planned her trip. In June she may even have extracted some kind of promise (she at least interpreted it this way) from Douglass that the following spring, after his winter lecture commitments, he would join her in Paris.41
Some of Assing’s friends were concerned about her psychological state and pushed her to travel to Europe for health. It was “a huge decision to tear myself away from here,” she wrote her sister in Italy, “and especially the long separation from Douglass and from my faithful green macaw [her bird] will almost kill me, so that I am already homesick while I am still here.” Her annual ritual of such indecision finally ended because Douglass joined her for three special days in early June visiting the opening of the US Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia. Among the attractions was Rochester artist J. M. Mundy’s bust of Douglass. But for Ottilie the days alone with her man were a rare kind of happiness. She called it her “experiment . . . so perfect in every respect.” Whether Douglass actually promised to go to Europe the following year we do not know. He may have thoroughly enjoyed the dreamy conversations about Parisian delights with his friend on their days wandering the exhibitions; or he may also have, as Maria Diedrich speculates, “tired of her pleading” and just decided to assuage her any way possible. Ottilie departed on a steamer on July 13, and she and Douglass would not see each other again for more than a year.42
After twenty-three years away from her homeland, Assing conducted a journey full of spectacular excursions to art museums, the Alps, historic sites and ruins, and especially Rome, where she experienced intense loneliness and a horrible estrangement from her emotionally tyrannical sister. Ottilie and Frederick carried on a correspondence during her year in Europe; she all but punished him with long descriptions of beauty and a historical sense of place at every turn, as she somehow kept alive her hope of his joining her in spring 1877. Douglass continued to confide in Assing, as her letters show her well informed of some of the family dramas and financial debacles. Their rendezvous never occurred, and likely Douglass never intended it to. Assing worried endlessly about Douglass’s health and well-being as she described the romance and layered character of Roman history. She cherished his occasional letters. As she told of her new and old friends, kept up with news of American politics, and painfully recounted the destruction of her relationship with Ludmilla, Douglass seems to have pulled back and begun to sever a deep connection in his life that he either no longer needed or could no longer manage with the logistical and emotional dexterity he had so long maintained.43 A complete severing would take a few more years and come at a great price for the sad, devoted Ottilie.
• • •
Even before Assing went to Europe in 1876, Douglass was engulfed in the new election season. As early as the fall of 1875 he toured, especially in New England, on behalf of Republicans. He spoke at a huge clambake in September in Old Orchard Beach, near Portland, Maine, at what a local paper called the largest rally ever held in that state. Some seventeen thousand to twenty thousand people arrived on special trains for this combination of late-summer state fair and political festival. Douglass did not disappoint. He told all who could hear him that everything was at stake in the next presidential contest. Blacks in the South faced “utter extinction” if Democrats won. “I beseech you, shelter us from the storm.” At these rallies, and throughout the campaign the following year, Douglass made the case about what the nation, and therefore white people, owed blacks. Reconstruction had to be sustained. “Save us a few years more, until the old rebels die out,” he pleaded, “and we have a chance to present ourselves to hands unstained by treason.” Douglass asked his countrymen to enlist in repairing the past with their votes in the present. “I tell you all you can do for the next fifty years,” he shouted, “will not atone for the wrong and oppression of two hundred years.” At the end of his address, according to the Portland Daily Press, a huge throng “crowded about” Douglass congratulating him and wanting to shake his hand or touch his coat, as “women were moved to tears and men to righteous wrath.”44
As the election neared in 1876, all knew that the last vestiges of Reconstruction policies and regimes were at stake in the remaining “unredeemed” Southern states. One was Louisiana, which for three years had experienced not only continued violence, but also labyrinthine politics that had produced a US senator, or at least aspirant, P. B. S. Pinchback, a black Republican of mixed race and a flamboyant past. Pinchback, who briefly served as Louisiana’s governor, and Douglass became correspondents and friends. The Louisianan stayed at Douglass’s house during some of his long visits to Washington awaiting congressional approval of the legitimacy of his seat. Perhaps no other electoral saga of Reconstruction is quite as Byzantine as Pinchback’s. Everyone seemed to know about Pinchback’s past as a riverboat gambler, a street fighter, and allegedly a dandy among women. Closely tied to former Louisiana governor Henry Clay Warmoth, Pinchback also had his hands in financial corruption and vote buying. But he was a staunch advocate of black civil and political rights as well as federal engagement and Republican rule in his state. Pinchback was first appointed by the Louisiana legislature to the US Senate in January 1873. But partisan warfare, as well as the man’s taint of corruption, led to one delay or vote to block his seating after another.45
Douglass, as he tended to do with most accusations of Republican corruption, ignored Pinchback’s background and embraced him as a pioneer black politician with a genuine right to his place in the Senate. Douglass had long ago learned that politics contained multiple rights and wrongs; in this case Reconstruction itself, and therefore the rights of black people, were at stake. In the New National Era, the editor had declared that slavery had been “so monstrous that the blackest charges and . . . rumor grow clean under its awful enormities. Some become great rowers in Harvard or Cambridge who would have been boatmen without the opportunities of an education, others gamble with cards because they are reduced by the laws” to other means in the “management of men.” The escaped slave who led by language and symbol knew a useful boatman when he met one.46
Douglass did all in his power to support the black senator from Mississippi Blanche K. Bruce, as well as the handful of other black Southerners who were elected to the House of Representatives. They all represented a dream come true, Douglass believed, as long as the Republican Party survived to defend them. Most black Southern politicians came from different pasts than Douglass; some were former slaves, and even Union soldiers, while some also had been educated in the North, as had Bruce. Few had careers in the abolition movement or had achieved any literary fame like Douglass. They were all Republicans, but struggled mightily to sustain faith in the party as Reconstruction waned. In April 1875, Pinchback wrote to Douglass, complaining about the compromises of Louisiana Republicans, many of whom, he thought, were only interested in “unloading the Negro.” He worried about “cowardly white Republicans” nationally who would ultimately betray black rights. Pinchback looked up to Douglass: “Oh God how I wish I had your knowledge and ability to grapple with the difficulties I see on every hand besetting us.” Their people, he told Douglass, needed a “great mind to guide them in this crisis of our history.”47 Both men were vexed about solutions.
Pinchback went in and out of favor even with his fellow Republicans in the bizarre twists and turns that led to a final vote on his seating in March 1876. Seven cold-footed Republicans joined with Democrats to block Pinchback’s entry to the Senate by a vote of 32–29. Bitter partisanship and questions about his character led to the final failure of Pinchback’s appointment. On the night after the vote Douglass spoke at a rally on behalf of the Louisianan in Washington, attended by more than four hundred, mostly black, supporters. It was easy to blame the racist Democrats, but primarily Douglass vented anger on the “mean and malignant prejudice of race” from the small group of recalcitrant Republicans. A great wrong had been done, but Douglass tried to rally the gathering. He still believed the Republicans were the “party of justice and freedom,” and he trusted that American voters would not deliver the country later that fall “back into the hands of the party of rebellion and slavery.” After the speeches, much of the crowd of supporters marched to Douglass’s house on A Street, for one final rally.48
A month later, Douglass delivered his magnificent “Freedmen’s Memorial Address” at the unveiling of the Lincoln monument in Washington, the speech assessed at length in the opening chapter of this book. In that remarkable oration, Douglass offered perhaps his most sophisticated warning on behalf of black people about the consequences of a failure of Reconstruction.49 The fate of the era’s transformations lay in the balance, Douglass firmly believed, in the election of 1876. The standing Lincoln and the kneeling slave were either gazing out at an egalitarian future rooted in black freedom and equality, or at their disastrous betrayal in a political culture stultified by racism and economic strife.
In this intensely hot political context Douglass attended in June the Republican National Convention in Cincinnati. Since Grant had decided not to run for a third term, something Douglass had openly advocated, the frontrunner for the Republican nomination was the former House Speaker James G. Blaine. But in April a story broke that Blaine had used his influence to garner land grants for one railroad and taken a personal “loan” from another that went unpaid; his candidacy steadily collapsed. Many Republicans concluded that they needed a candidate untainted by scandal. So the party chose the safe, unoffending, relatively little-known Union veteran and three-time governor of Ohio Rutherford B. Hayes as its standard-bearer. Hayes was sturdy, favored hard money over paper currency, possessed a Harvard law degree, seemed to have no obvious enemies, and was willing to soft-pedal on the “Southern question,” which was always code language for black rights. The party’s platform was rather tepid on further enforcement of Reconstruction policies, vague on women’s suffrage, and promised to prosecute corruption. Hayes strove for an honest, if naïve, sectional “pacification,” a new harmony between the races and the sections.50
Contrary to those who claim that Douglass “did not see what was happening” in the 1876 campaign, the orator was deeply engaged and profoundly worried. The Cincinnati convention included a significant number of black delegates, many of whom were serving congressmen. Following after the Reverend Henry Highland Garnet, Douglass was one of the black speakers welcomed to the rostrum. In a short but poignant address, Douglass provided a mixture of entertainment, bloody-shirt waving, abolitionist principles, and jeremiad. He garnered laughter by saying this was the first time he had ever enjoyed the “pleasure of looking the Republican party squarely in the face,” and that they seemed “pretty good looking.” He invoked the battlefields where their sons had “poured out their blood.”51
Then Douglass directly challenged the white delegates on the vagueness of their platform and the weakness of their commitments. Reminiscent of the Fourth of July address of twenty-four years earlier, he flung the pronouns “you” and “your” down on his audience, as they ceased laughing. “You have emancipated us. I thank you for it,” Douglass announced. “You have enfranchised us, and I thank you for it. But what is your emancipation . . . if the black man, after having been made free by the letter of the law, is unable to exercise that freedom; and after having been freed from the slaveholder’s lash he is to be subject to the slaveholder’s shotgun?” He reminded this political class that in Exodus the Israelites, when emancipated, “were told to go borrow of their neighbors . . . [to] load themselves down with the means of subsistence after they should go free in the land which the Lord God gave them.” But now, more than a decade after the revolution, he bemoaned the situation: “You turned us loose to the sky, to the storm . . . and, worst of all, you turned us loose to the wrath of our infuriated masters.” Douglass left the Republicans with a resounding question: “Do you mean to make good the promises in your Constitution? Talk not to me of finance. Talk not of mere reform in your administration . . . but tell me, if your hearts be as my heart, that the liberty which you have asserted for the black man in this country shall be maintained!”52 This was hardly the rhetoric of a man merely seeking favor and office with the pliant Hayes.
Douglass’s courage was both rewarded and attacked. He received mostly favorable press from Republican friends, but racist loathing and lampooning from Democrats. His enemies had noticed the speech. A Port Jervis, New York, paper reported that “Fred Douglass got off a lot of nonsense about Southern outrages” and Republican Party failures “to do its whole duty to the colored people in not giving each voter forty acres and a mule, and providing a file of soldiers to take him to the polls.” The New York Evening Post “regretted that Frederick Douglass will not teach the colored people the lesson of self-dependence, instead of always demanding . . . fresh guarantees, by proclamation, by statute, and by bayonet, of the rights which they must largely maintain for themselves.” The Post’s editors had missed the countless appeals the orator had made to black self-reliance. A Tuscaloosa, Alabama, paper complained that the Centennial Exposition opening in Philadelphia had allowed “a nigger” like Douglass any official status. Later that summer, Douglass campaigned vigorously for Hayes, especially in New England, his expenses paid by the Republican Party. For the busy orator, faith and fear marched together.53
What choice did he have? The Democrats ran as their presidential candidate Samuel J. Tilden, governor of New York, one of the richest men in America and the legal counsel to financial titans on Wall Street. A Democratic victory would plainly bring white supremacy forcefully back into federal power, endangering all the Reconstruction legislation. Hayes himself, who proffered a naïve goodwill and preferred ambiguous suggestions of “a hearty and generous recognition of the rights of all,” and an end to the “distinction between North and South,” nevertheless admitted openly that “the true issue in the minds of the masses is simply, shall the late Rebels have the Government.”54 Douglass could only hope that Hayes’s particular combination of the bloody shirt and sectional reconciliation might serve the cause of black life and liberty, and not merely Republican power.
• • •
In 1876 the project of Reconstruction, and perhaps the United States itself, were like a huge battleship slowly turning around as it lost power; once turning, it could hardly be stopped, even if the same group of officers remained at the helm. That year the Supreme Court weakened the Reconstruction-era constitutional amendments by emasculating the enforcement clause of the Fourteenth Amendment and revealing deficiencies in the Fifteenth Amendment. In US v. Cruikshank, based on prosecutions for the horrible Colfax massacre of 1873, the Court overruled the conviction of Louisiana whites who had attacked a political meeting of blacks and conspired to deprive them of their rights. The justices ruled that the Fourteenth Amendment did not give the federal government power to uphold a conviction against the whites who had committed a mass murder of more than one hundred black Louisianans exercising political liberty. The duty of protecting citizens’ equal rights, the Court said, “rests alone with the States.” Such judicial conservatism and embrace of states’ rights doctrine, practiced by the justices, all of whom had been appointed by Republican presidents Lincoln and Grant, left a resounding imprint on what remained of Reconstruction.55
In the disputed election of 1876, Tilden in all likelihood won the popular vote by more than two hundred thousand votes and 3 percent, but did not become president. When election returns poured in, it appeared that Hayes had failed, but the three “unredeemed” Southern states of Louisiana, Florida, and South Carolina were fiercely and violently contested. With 185 electoral votes needed for victory, without the three disputed states Tilden had 184 and Hayes 166. Both sides claimed they had won and accused their opponents of fraud in the disputed states, although most of the bloodshed and intimidation committed in those states had been against black Republican voters. To resolve this unprecedented situation, Congress established a fifteen-member electoral commission, balanced between Democrats and Republicans. Because Republicans held a majority in the overall Congress, they prevailed 8–7 on repeated attempts to “count” the confused returns. As the midwinter crisis dragged on in Washington, it appeared Hayes would become president. Democrats controlled the House and launched a filibuster to block action on the count.56
Many Americans worried that the nation would once again slip into civil war, as some Southerners vowed, “Tilden or fight!,” and Hayes’s managers refused any retreat from their claim to the 19 disputed electoral votes and therefore a victory of 185–184 in the Electoral College. This cliff-hanging constitutional crisis found an end in what became known as the Compromise of 1877, a deal struck in part in a smoke-filled room of a Washington hotel at the eleventh hour. Democrats acquiesced in the election of Hayes in exchange for promises to the South of government aid to railroads, internal improvements, federal patronage, possibly one cabinet position, and the removal of any remaining troops in the ex-Confederacy. Thus Hayes became president, inaugurated privately inside the White House to avoid any threat of violence. White Southern Democrats rejoiced in what they clearly saw as the end of Reconstruction, while African Americans had little choice but to grieve over what appeared as a betrayal of their hopes for equality.57
Douglass watched and worried about the disputed election of 1876 and its subsequent compromise. He saw grounds for hope in that the Republicans held the presidency, even as judicial and congressional intervention on behalf of black rights seemed in grave jeopardy. He dearly wanted to trust Hayes. Soon, the new president, continuing his remarkable dance between vague promises to enforce equal rights and actions that eroded or destroyed those rights, offered Douglass the salaried federal appointment, subject to Senate approval, that he had long coveted. Douglass was not silent or out of touch as some suggested during the 1876–77 crises, and he had bravely challenged his own party to live up to its promises.58 But words had, for once, partly failed him at this turn in his career. Soon he was sworn in as marshal of the District of Columbia and could leave the speaking circuit to a degree. Above all, he had to serve and symbolically lead now in an America he had painfully predicted, one taken over by a “peace among the whites.”