Frederick Douglass -- Andrew Johnson's Resistance

 

In his speeches Douglass “contended that all loyal Unionists, white and black, needed the black vote to protect the nation.  He and other radicals … held that leaving the freed men without the ballot would leave them in the absolute power of the old master class.  … Douglass was persuaded that his people, with the vote, could not only protect themselves but rise to a new level.  And in granting the vote to their black brothers, white Americans too would rise” (McFeely 24246).  “Without the elective franchise,” Douglass warned, “the Negro will still be practically a slave.  Individual ownership has been abolished, but if we restore the Southern States without this measure, we shall establish an ownership of the blacks by the community among whom they live” (McFeely 246).  The next one hundred years demonstrated how prophetic these words would be.

 

In February 1866 Douglass was the spokesman of a delegation of prominent black citizens that made a call upon the President.  They wanted to know specifically how Andrew Johnson stood on the Freedman’s Bureau Bill, the Civil Rights Bill, and the proposed Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, all measures in Congress that would shape dramatically the reconstruction of the South and the future of the Negro.

 

The President was prepared for the little group.  Douglass and his companions had scarcely indicated the burden of their visit when Johnson began making a speech to them.  According to Douglass it lasted more than three quarters of an hour, and when it was finished, the President announced that the interview was over.  He would hear no replies (Bontemps 248).

 

To Douglass’s suggestion that black people should be given the vote “with which to save ourselves,” Johnson, with “suppressed anger,” had replied that he had already risked too much politically for black people and that the would not now be “arraigned by some who can get up handsomely-rounded periods.”  He supposed that he would play the part of Moses, with the Thirteenth Amendment, in leading slaves out of bondage, but poor whites and poor blacks had always been enemies.  If they were “thrown together at the ballot box” a race war would result.  Johnson favored black emigration, a concept that Douglass had fought all his life.

 

A representative of the Radical Republicans in Congress caught up with the delegation as it left the White House and invited the colored men to meet some Congressmen in the anteroom of the House of Representatives.  But Douglass discovered that he and his Negro friends were not precisely in step with the men in Congress who seemed to favor their cause.  The Radical Republicans, the Negroes felt, pushed Negro suffrage as a way of punishing the South and of retaining for themselves the control of government.  Their attempts to keep whites from voting in the South were similarly motivated, but these sentiments were not shared by Negroes, who are on record as favoring the enfranchisement of former Confederates at this time (Bontemps 249).

 

The delegates decided to put in print a rebuttal of what the President had said to them.  Douglass was chosen to do the writing.  He, and they, made three points with their critical remarks.

 

One, the hostility that existed between poor whites and blacks was indeed real, but had been caused during slavery by the master class’s manipulation of poor whites.  “Those masters secured their ascendency over both the poor whites and blacks by putting enmity between them.  They divided both to conquer each” (Bontemps 250).  Poor whites had always been employed as slave catchers, slave drivers and overseers.  Now that slavery was abolished, why should legislation be adopted that supported the slavemaster viewpoint?

 

Two, it was unjust to give the power of the vote to one class and deny it to the other class.  To do so would be to perpetuate the hostility.  Without the vote, the black man was powerless.  “Men are whipped oftenest who are whipped easiest” (Bontemps 250), Douglass wrote.

 

Three, Negroes had labored to help develop the nation and had died to defend it.  They were not strangers or aliens to be sent away on ships.  They were Americans as deserving as any white man of full citizenship.

 

Andrew Johnson vetoed the Civil Rights Bill and Congress overrode the veto to make it law.  Three months later Congress passed a second Freemen’s Bureau Bill and continued thereafter to direct the reconstruction of the South, repeatedly overriding Johnson’s vetoes.  During 1867 Douglass remained busy lecturing for fees of from fifty to one hundred dollars a night, traveling as far west at Pittsburgh, Louisville, and St. Louis, stating his support of Negro enfranchisement and his opposition to the President’s policies.  To his great surprise, in July he received a letter from his son Charles, in Washington, that the Johnson Administration was considering Douglass as Commissioner of the Freedman’s Bureau!  Would he be interested in taking the position?

 

 

Works cited:

 

Bontempts, Arna, Free at Last, the Life of Frederick Douglass, New York, Dodd, Mead & Company, 1971.  Print

 

McFeely, William S.  Frederick Douglass.  New York, W. W. Norton & Company, 1991.  Print.