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NY Times Op-Ed, Nov. 6, 2018
What America Owes Frederick Douglass
He said black people had three tools: their voice, their pen and their
vote. Today all three are under threat.
By David W. Blight
(Mr. Blight is a professor of history at Yale and the author, most
recently, of “Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom.”)
In the introduction to Frederick Douglass’s second autobiography, “My
Bondage and My Freedom,” published in 1855, his friend James McCune
Smith wrote that if a stranger landed in the United States and sought
out its most prominent men by using newspapers and telegraph messages,
he would discover Douglass. Born a slave in Maryland, Douglass had
escaped to the North to become a renowned abolitionist orator and
writer. He was, Smith said, the sort of person people would ask, “‘Tell
me your thought!’ And somehow or other, revolution seemed to follow in
his wake.”
When he started his career, Douglass eschewed politics in favor of
changing hearts and minds through moral suasion. But in the decade
before the Civil War, he had become a thoroughgoing political
abolitionist, a believer that slavery could be destroyed only through
power politics.
At the end of the memoir, Douglass admitted that he had, until recently,
fought only with “pen and tongue.” But now, in the roiling crises over
slavery in the 1850s — fugitive slave rescues, violent clashes in Kansas
over slavery’s expansion and a nation enthralled by the antislavery
novel “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” — the author announced his new “disposition.”
He had discovered the force of politics in a republic dominated by
slavery. He wished to add his own story to the nation’s “blood-written
history” as clouds of “wrathful thunder and lightning” hovered over the
land. Then he gave voice to his life’s work. He would, as long as
“heaven” gave him the ability to speak and to write, fight for abolition
and the beginning of black equality with “my voice, my pen, or my vote.”
So much of Douglass’s life echoes down through American history, but
especially this week, perhaps nothing more so than those words. All
those Americans voting across our country right now, and especially
those whose votes are thwarted by people who still refuse to accept
historical verdicts a century and a half old, owe Douglass a nod of
recognition.
In 1866-67, the United States had no obvious path ahead in the wake of
the Civil War. A people — North and South, black and white, still
mourning 700,000 dead — faced elections without clearly defined rules
about who could vote. Nearly four million former slaves, many living in
physical hardship and under the threat of terror and violence in the
South, did not yet know what “freedom” would mean, nor what kind of
civil and political rights they might exercise.
Americans ached to be put back together in some new, reimagined way.
Hundreds of thousands had fled their homes during the war. The nation’s
politics was shredded into blood-born hatreds and seemingly hopeless
polarization. Its national and state governments had to be remade.
Racism, fear and hope all marched together as traumatized soldiers from
both sides made their way home to farms in a thriving Northern economy
but an utterly devastated South.
The party in power in Washington was led by a group of visionaries, the
“radical” Republicans who had championed the cause of emancipation
during the war and believed in an interventionist federal government as
a means of fashioning a second American republic out of the destruction
of the first. They imagined at least the beginning of a revolution in
racial equality. The war was over, but everything still seemed at stake
in the struggle over Reconstruction. Whether free exercise of voice, pen
and vote would really be protected for all remained to be seen.
The president was Andrew Johnson, a Tennessean who had been invited onto
Abraham Lincoln’s ticket in 1864 because he had been the sole senator
from a Confederate state who did not secede with it. Johnson’s support
of the Union notwithstanding, he was a staunch proponent of states’
rights, a virulent white supremacist and a believer in limited federal
government. Johnson grudgingly accepted the end of slavery but denounced
the extension of civil and political liberty to black Americans. His
spirit lives on today, in more subtle ways, in the voter suppression
practices of the Republican Party and in the desire to revoke birthright
citizenship.
As Johnson and the radical Republicans locked horns over fundamentally
different visions of Reconstruction in the winter of 1866, Douglass led
a delegation of 12 black leaders to the White House. Hoping for an
honest hearing of their hopes and grievances, they received a barrage of
vitriol from an angry racist who hoped to thwart any revision of the
Constitution that would guarantee rights for blacks. Johnson and his
anxious conservative followers desired an America that was largely
pre-1861, a society many Northerners believed had been buried by the
sacrifices at Antietam, Fort Wagner and Gettysburg.
Douglass led off the encounter by respectfully informing the president
that they had come to ask for “equality before the law,” and to be
“fully enfranchised throughout the land.” “Extend us the ballot,”
Douglass pleaded, “with which to save ourselves.”
Johnson interrupted and for the next 40 minutes harangued and insulted
his guests. He was willing to be their “Moses,” he declared. His
“feelings” had always been with blacks. “I have owned slaves, and bought
slaves, but I never sold one,” he assured the delegation. He did not
like being “arraigned” by one — Douglass — “who could get up handsomely
rounded periods and deal in rhetoric.” If his guests pursued their goals
of equality it would cause “race war,” and he insisted that the only
good solution was for blacks to leave the country. As Douglass looked at
him in disgust, Johnson asserted that in his relationship with blacks,
“I have been their slave instead of their being mine.”
Johnson then made a fierce defense of states’ rights. The federal
government could not force a state to follow its dictates, the president
claimed. The “law” and majorities must be obeyed. As if he had not
offended Douglass and his colleagues enough, Johnson then maintained
that the truest victim of slavery and the war was the poor,
non-slaveholding Southern white: “The colored man and his master
combined to keep him in slavery.”
As this disastrous meeting came to an end, Douglass did manage one
direct claim to Johnson’s face. “The very thing Your Excellency would
avoid” — a race war — “in the Southern states can only be avoided by the
very measure that we propose,” i.e., black suffrage, Douglass said. As
the delegation walked out, the president was overheard saying: “Those
damned sons of bitches thought they had me in a trap. I know that damned
Douglass; he’s just like any nigger, and would sooner cut a white man’s
throat than not.”
In the wake of this worst-ever meeting between black leaders and an
American president, Douglass did what he so frequently did in the middle
of crises — he went to his desk, wrote a remarkable speech and took it
out on the road. From Brooklyn to St. Louis, Douglass, who called his
speech “Sources of Danger to the Republic,” skewered Johnson as an
“unmitigated calamity” of a president under whom, for now, the nation
“must stagger.” A constant refrain in this and other postwar speeches
was his claim that “slavery is not abolished until the black man has the
ballot.”
Douglass left a timeless maxim for republics in times of crisis: “Our
government may at some time be in the hands of a bad man. When in the
hands of a good man it is all well enough.” But “we ought to have our
government so shaped that even when in the hands of a bad man we shall
be safe.” Politics, he insisted, mattered as much as the air he breathed.
Douglass’s words echo on today. Are our institutions adequate to the
challenges presented by a president animated by a combination of
authoritarianism and ignorance? Is the right to vote really safe and
free? Are our political parties disintegrating? Is our free press robust
enough to withstand the attacks upon it and the technology
revolutionizing the dissemination of information?
At this moment in our history we too are tested by the same question
Douglass posed about bad men and government. And the only weapons most
of us have in this historical moment are those Douglass named: our
voice, our pen and our vote.
David W. Blight is a professor of history at Yale and the author, most
recently, of “Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom.”
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