Frederick Douglass -- At the Fair

 

Douglass would not be rewarded for his work in Haiti by his own government; ironically, by the Haitian government he was.  In February 1892 President Hyppolite appointed Douglass his country’s commissioner at the World’s Columbian Exposition (the first World’s Fair) in Chicago, and in April of the following year Douglass and his wife took up their residence there.  Douglass’s duties were minimal.  His function would be advisory, he had been assured.  Someone else would deal with clerical duties.  Douglass hoped that the fair would express something positive about the accomplishments of black people both in Haiti and in the United States.  At the dedication of the Haitian Pavilion, Douglass spoke dutifully about the beauty of the setting of the fair, at the shoreline of Lake Michigan, and invited visitors to enjoy “a generous taste of our Haitian coffee, made in the best manner by Haitian hands” (Bontemps 296).  He was there to draw visitors and publicize Haitian commerce and culture; but, because he was there and because of who he still was, he was drawn into the strong discontent that young black leaders felt about the Fair’s exclusion of Negro American achievements.

 

All classes and conditions of the world’s people were represented, blacks stated, except that of the American Negro.  They petitioned Congress to rectify their lack of representation, and their petition was essentially ignored.  Subsequently, Ida B. Wells, Douglass’s young black associate, wrote an eighty-one page pamphlet entitled “The Reason Why the Colored Man Is Not Represented in the World’s Columbian Exposition.”  To defuse the growing discontent fostered by the pamphlet and the fact that few blacks had been employed at the Fair and none had been included in its planning, managers of the Fair designated August 25, 1893, as “Colored American Day.”  Black contributions to American life and culture would be displayed on this day, they promised.  Most black Americans suspected that the day would be used by whites instead for ridicule.  Ida Wells wanted Douglass not to participate.

 

Douglass first became aware of the thirty-year-old Miss Wells from a newspaper article she wrote about a triple lynching that had occurred in Memphis, Tennessee.

 

This daughter of slaves, who had been an eager student at Rust University, wrote fearlessly of the killing of three male friends; they had been lynched, she asserted categorically, not for raping white women, as alleged, but for competing with white storekeepers.  While she was in Philadelphia in May, speaking at protest meetings, her neighbors destroyed the office and plant of the newspaper [the Memphis Free Speech], in which she owned a one-third interest.

 

Even before the Memphis paper was silenced, the editor of the North American Review asked Douglass to write on the subject, and “Lynch Law in the South” appeared in the July 1892 issue.  …

 

“… there is good reason to question these lynch-law reports.  … The crime imputed to the negro is one most easily imputed and most difficult to disprove, and yet it is the one the negro is least likely to commit.”  There had been, he pointed out, not rapes reported during the Civil War, when white women were often alone with their slaves.  Turning to the case about which Wells had written, he noted that just as the “Jew is hated in Russia, because he is thrifty,” so the “negro meets no resistance when on a downward course.  It is only when he rises in wealth, intelligence, and manly character that he brings upon himself the heavy hand of persecution.  The men lynched at Memphis were murdered because they were prosperous.”  Inquiring into what lay behind the summary killings, Douglass shrewdly observed that “responsibility for the lynch law … is not entirely with the ignorant mob … they simply obey … sentiment created by wealth and respectability.”

 

…

 

While Douglass was writing, Wells had a fiery piece in the June press, a seven-column article in the New York Age “giving names, dates, and places.”  Douglass, in New York, came to call on the brash new editor and writer to tell her “what a revelation of existing conditions” her writing had been for him.  Distanced as he was, he “had begun to believe it true that there was increased lasciviousness on the part of Negroes.”  Now he wrote her a letter-which appeared as a preface to her 1892 pamphlet Southern Horrors. “Brave Woman!  You have done your people and mine a service which can neither be weighed nor measured.  If the American conscience were only half alive … a scream of horror, shame and indignation would rise to Heaven. …” (McFeely 360-362)

 

Shortly afterward, Wells visited Cedar Hill.  By the time she and Douglass settled down to work together in Chicago, he was ready spiritually and emotionally to speak out again in behalf of his people.

 

Wells and Douglass both wanted the world to know how black people were fairing in American.  With his help, she wrote a pamphlet that described both the accomplishments of their race and their condition, plagued by lynchings.

 

As August 25^th neared, comments from whites that there might not be enough watermelons available to feed the duskies that would pass through the Fair’s gates foretold how the white press viewed the significance of black culture.  Despite Wells’s objections, Douglass eventually agreed to be the concluding speaker of the day’s celebration, but only after several black musicians pleaded with him to help dignify the proceedings.  They, and Douglass’s own grandson, James Douglass, a concert violinist, wished to display their accomplished skills.

 

When Douglass arrived on the grounds August 25, he saw immediately that the day was indeed intended to be a joke.  Watermelon vendors were in abundance. Puck Magazine’s cartoon entitled “Darkies’ Day at the Fair” had “fat-bellied, barefoot spear carriers in grass skirts and thick-lipped, ornately uniformed soldiers lined up to buy their watermelon from a checked-pants sharpster with his top hat atilt” (McFeely 370).

 

At two-thirty at Festival Hall, before a throng of respectable black citizens, Frederick Douglass rose to speak.  He held before him a paper, “The Race Problem in America,” which he intended to read.  The black poet, Paul Laurence Dunbar, later described what happened.

 

 

Works cited:

 

Bontemps, 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.



Frederick Douglass -- Serving in Haiti

 

The Republican Party won back the Presidency in 1888.  Douglass had campaigned for Benjamin Harrison and now wanted another government job.  A cabinet position was something that Douglass could dream about but he was willing to settle for his old job, recorder of deeds.  The position, ironically, went to Blanche K. Bruce, former black senator from Mississippi and a witness to Douglass’s marriage.  Douglass waited three months for a government appointment, all the while ignoring the advice of friends not to antagonize the new President by urging Harrison to bring back federal protection of the lives of Negroes in the South and of their right to vote.  In June 1889 Douglass was offered the ministry to Haiti.  Despite advice from friends, he accepted.

 

Two black generals, Francois D. Legitime and Florvil Hyppolite, had directed a revolution in 1888 that had removed Haiti’s president.  With naval and military aid provided by the American navy, Hyppolite then removed Legitime and his supporters from the island, and, as the new Haiti president, it was Hyppolite who received Douglass’s credentials in November of 1889.

 

The Harrison administration wanted something back for the helpfulness.  They wanted Mole St. Nicholas, an excellent harbor on the extreme northwestern tip of Haiti.  The location would then become the primary United States naval station in the Caribbean.

 

Always vulnerable, independent Haiti was now under the particularly avaricious eyes of white powers seeking bases for their growing navies-bases that in the Caribbean would support them in their rivalry to build a canal across the Central American isthmus.  Other Caribbean islands, among them Spain’s Cuba and the British West Indies, already belonged to competing European empires.  … They [the Haitians] knew that as a black republic their nation was viewed with much contempt and that it was judged fair prey by those wishing to annex part or all of it (McFeely 336).

 

Likely, Douglass had received his assignment to mollify the suspicions of Haitians, who were well familiar with his past history.  Douglass, himself, revered Haiti.  He believed that its people were a singular example of what all black people could accomplish, unhindered by white persecution.  Douglass, although in favor of acquiring the Haitian harbor for the navy’s use, well understood Haitian cynicism and performed his tasks openly and honestly, despite the arrogant words and threatening manner of an American admiral, who was assigned to work with Douglass in their negotiations to obtain a lease of the harbor.  Their efforts failed, and the administration abandoned the project in the late summer of 1891.  The expansionists of the administration had now focused their desire upon Hawaii, Cuba, and Puerto Rico.  President Harrison had never been more than luke warm about acquiring a Haitian harbor.

 

Critics in the press inaccurately accused Douglass ob being the main reason for his administration’s failure to obtain the harbor.  New York newspapers demanded and predicted that he would be fired.  On June 30 Douglass submitted his resignation, but not because of the criticism.  Both his own health and that of Helen had suffered from the climate.

 

Douglass defended himself six months later in the North American Review.  “A man must defend himself,” he wrote, “if only to demonstrate his fitness to defend anything else.”

 

… To be sure, he had had enough of Haiti, but his pride had been hurt, and, worse, his loyalty to his country had been challenged.  … He contended … that he had had no orders to try to secure it [the harbor] during his first year in Haiti and therefore could not be charged with delay in the months immediately following Hyppolite”s assumption of power.  Discussing the negotiations that did take place, Douglass was candid in suggesting that Admiral Gherardi had been condescending and hence insulting to Antenor Firmin, Haiti’s secretary of state.  [After the article appeared, Firmin, from exile in Paris, wrote Douglass that his resignation was a great loss to both Haiti and the United States] McFeely 356-357).

 

This was Douglass’s last government position.

 

 

Work cited:

 

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



Frederick Douglass -- Second Marriage

 

On August 4, 1882, Anna Murray Douglass died, following a month’s struggle to survive a severe stroke, her left side useless, but her mind and her speech clear.  She was buried in Rochester, by the graves of two children.

 

Douglass’s grief was deep.  For quite some time he was absent from Washington, at the homes of supporting friends in New York and in Maine.  When he returned to his duties, he began to speak in lecture halls again and at convention lecterns, with moderation, but also with pointed criticism.

 

Negroes lived “among a people whose laws, traditions, and prejudices have been against us for centuries, and from these they are not yet free.  … Though the colored man is no longer subject to be caught and sold, he is still surrounded by an adverse sentiment which fetters all his movements.  … He is rejected by trade unions … and refused work where he lives, and burial where he dies.”  Douglass still clung to the notion that the Republican Party, chastened, could be counted upon.  He opposed the desire of many of his race to support a third political party, for doing so, Douglass insisted, would only help the hated Southern Democrats.  On October 15, 1883, the Supreme Court, including eight of nine Republican judges, in a decision that, in Douglass’s words, “came upon the country like a clap of thunder,” removed “the rights of colored citizens as those rights are defined by the fourteenth amendment of the Constitution.”  According to the Court, only the state legislatures, not the United States Congress, had jurisdiction over a person’s rights.  “Seven millions of the people of this country,” Douglass would say in a speech soon afterward, were “naked and defenceless” against “malignant, vulgar, and pitiless prejudice.”  He predicted that “far down the ages” the Court’s decision would be reversed (McFeely 315, 317, 318).  [Federal legislation reversed the discriminatory policies of the Southern states eighty-one years later with the adoption of the Civil Rights Act of 1964]

 

Less than a year and a half after Anna’s death, on a cold January evening [the 24^th] in 1884, Douglass and his secretary, driving in Douglass’s carriage behind magnificent while horses, were joined by the Senator from Mississippi, Blanche K. Bruce, and Mrs. Bruce.  Douglass directed his coachman to the home of a prominent Negro clergyman.  A personal friend of Douglass’s, the minister was nevertheless surprised by his late callers.  He sent word downstairs for them to wait.  A few moments later, upon request of those concerned, the Reverend Mr. Francis J. Grimke joined Frederick Douglass and Helen Pitts in marriage, the Bruces witnessing.

 

… A hurricane of outraged letters hit Cedar Hill.  Negroes and whites seemed equally offended.  The venerable Douglass, white-haired and sixty-two, should not have married again at all, some thought.  Others shouted that Negro womanhood had been disparaged by the implications of his choice.  Could he not find … a colored woman good enough for him?  In the South, of course, criticism found its most picturesque expression.  Douglass was a “lecherous old African Solomon” in the eyes of the Franklin, Virginia, Gazette.

 

Douglass’s own children joined in the howl.  How could he do this to them—and without consultation?  … Douglass watched the whole demonstration with a twinkle in his eye.

 

He showed his amusement by keeping a scrapbook of the opprobrium heaped upon him and his white wife.  When confronting interviewers, he slyly observed that in his first marriage he had paid his respects to his black mother, in his second to his white father.  “Love came to me,” Helen crooned when questioned, “and I was not afraid to marry the man I loved because of his color.”  For the resentment of his children Douglass was prepared, and his retort was neither witty nor pleasant.  There wasn’t one of them who wasn’t at least partially dependent on him for support.  They swallowed hard and crept away.

 

Douglass and Helen began playing croquet on the lawns of Cedar Hill.  The place was quieter now.  His health was wonderful.  Douglass actually began to feel young again.  … None of his close friends, he discovered, had actually turned their back on him and Helen (Bontemps 175-177).

 

A Democrat President, Grover Cleveland, took occupancy of the White House in 1885.  Douglass presumed that his office, recorder of deeds, would be immediately given to a Democrat supporter; however, it was not until January of 1886 that Cleveland requested that Douglass resign.  Additionally, Cleveland, during the tenure of his office, unlike his Republican predecessors, extended to Douglass, and the ladies of his family, invitations to his large, official receptions.  Douglass and his new wife attended, without embarrassment.

 

Free from governmental responsibility, Douglass took his wife to Europe and leisurely toured the continent as far east as Greece; and, with aid, the seventy-year-old man climbed atop the great pyramid of Cheops in Egypt.  While in England, he and Helen had enjoyed the hospitality of the widowed Julia Griffiths-Crofts, whom Douglass had not seen for thirty-two years.  They did not, they could not visit Ottilia Assing.

 

On August 21, 1884, [almost seven months after Frederick and Helen’s marriage] Ottilia Assing dressed carefully in a monogrammed blouse and skirt, put on her hat, dropped her key, a brooch with a picture inside, and a bit of money into her red leather wallet, and left her Paris hotel.  Walking in the Bois de Boulogne, she stopped to pick a leaf from an oak tree and carefully put it into her purse; shortly, from that same purse, she took out a container of poison and swallowed its contents (McFeely 322).

 

 

Works cited:

 

Bontemps, 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.



Frederick Douglass -- Marking Time

 

As before, in 1880 Frederick Douglass urged black voters to elect the Republican Presidential candidate, James A. Garfield, another Civil War general from Ohio.  Douglass’s last duty as Marshall was to lead the newly elected President’s inaugural procession through the rotunda of the Capitol.  Afterward, as before, Douglass’s services were largely ignored.

 

He had let the president-elect know that he was willing to serve in a more important capacity.  He had written Garfield that “colored people of this country want office not as the price of their votes … but for their recognition as a part of the American people” (McFeely 305).  Samuel Clemons, the Mark Twain of soon-to-be-published The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, wrote Garfield that Douglass was a friend of his and deserved such recognition.  However, Garfield appointed a personal friend to Douglass’s former position and offered Douglass a position not more but less important, recorder of deeds for the District of Columbia.  Again, Douglass accepted, and minimized the slight, saying that the job more suited his tastes.

 

The job did permit him to fill clerical jobs with black civil servants, including two of his sons, Frederick, Jr. and Lewis, and his daughter Rosetta. After Garfield’s death in the fall of 1881, Douglass’s authority to fill positions was severely curtailed by the new President, Chester A. Arthur.  Douglass could not help, for instance, Amanda Auld Sear’s widower, John Sears, who had for “the first time since the War of the Rebellion” been forced to seek help getting “a place where I can earn a living for myself and family.”  Douglass knew that if he approached the President to ask a favor for a friend, he would be with absolute certainty “snubbed at the White House” (McFeely 306).

 

He was not snubbed, however, by the grandchildren of Colonel Edward Lloyd when he traveled again to Talbot County to revive his boyhood memories of Wye House.  They greeted him graciously, perhaps with genuine affection, and he felt none of the bitterness that had caused him many times in the past to condemn the plantation slave master.  With nostalgia he observed what still remained and what had changed.

 

Aaron Anthony’s square, sturdy brick house was still there, on Long Green; the closet Frederic had slept in had been incorporated into the kitchen, and its dirt floor “had disappeared under plank.”  Gone too was the memory of Hester being whipped in that kitchen; similarly, all he said now about the brutal overseer Austin Gore was that his house still stood.  So did “old Barney’s stable, and the wonderful carriage house ….”  And there was the great barn where a little child had once watched swallows ceaselessly sweeping the air.

 

The poplars that the red-winged blackbirds had favored were gone, but not the oaks and elms whose shade had cloaked Daniel Lloyd and Frederick Bailey, eating the food the young lord had brought from his kitchen to compensate for the meagerness of Aunt Katy’s fare.  And in the graveyard, crowded now with two hundred years of Lloyds, lay “Mr. Page, a teacher in the family, whom I had often seen and wondered what he could be thinking about as he silently paced up and down the garden walks” (McFeely 308).

 

In 1882 he hired a new clerk, Helen Pitts, the niece of Hiram Pitts, whose house was adjacent to Douglass’s Cedar Hill house.  Helen had been born in 1838 in a farming community about forty miles south of Rochester, New York.  Her father and mother had been abolitionists, the father having met Douglass once during his lecture tours in the 1840’s.  Helen was well educated and active in the women’s rights movement in Washington, a collaborator in the publication of a radical feminist newspaper.  Positions for women had been made available in the expanded government agencies after the Civil War; and Helen, a former teacher, unlikely to find a post equal to her ability and being single, having to support herself, had taken work in the pension office.  Later, when a position in the recorder’s office became available, she applied for it and was accepted.  Douglass and Helen met as neighbors, and continued to meet with greater frequently as she worked for him in the capitol, so well that he could trust her to run things while he was frequently absent.  Also, she and other women would meet a Cedar Hill, in the cause of women’s suffrage, which Douglass had always supported.  Helen Pitts would soon become his second wife.

 

 

Work cited:

 

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



Frederick Douglass -- Old, Changing Relationships

 

Financially secure for at least the next three years, Douglass returned to Baltimore and Fells Point in June 1877 and then to Talbot County, Maryland, to revisit the land and people of his childhood and early adolescence.

 

The proudest people standing in the confused crowd [at St. Michael’s] must have been the nine children of Frederick’s older sister Eliza Mitchell, who had recently died.  … In 1877, the old Bailey clan was still very much a presence in Talbot County.  … Whether the reunion … was an occasion too emotional to record, or whether he and his sister’s family were now so different in the way they lived and talked that they found nothing that was satisfying to say to each other, Douglass never revealed.

 

But there was another reunion that Douglass could describe.  Walking into a brick house on Cherry Street, Douglass was taken straight to the room of his old master, Thomas Auld, now a dying man.  “Captain Auld,” he said; “Marshall Douglass,” Auld replied.  “Not Marshall, but Frederick to you as formerly,” Douglass corrected.  Auld, shaken with palsy, wept; Douglass was so choked up that he could not speak.  Then, regaining their composure, the two old adversaries talked.  Auld, his mind clear and any bitterness gone, corrected Douglass; he had not inherited Douglass’s grandmother Betsy Bailey; his brother-in-law had, but he had brought her in her old age to St. Michaels to be cared for until she died.  Douglass apologized for having accused Auld … of having “turned out [my dear old grandmother] like an old horse to die in the woods.”  Then he resumed his lifelong quest for information about his birth.  Douglass had calculated that he had been born in 1817; Auld, his memory firm, said it had been in February 1818; this fact was only verified a century late.  …

 

The conversation lasted just twenty minutes, for Douglass could see that the old man was exceedingly weak.  He noticed too that there had, after all, been something genuine to Thomas Auld’s conversion at that revival more than four decades earlier; “he felt himself about to depart in peace.”  … He and Auld had had a relationship of vast extremes; it closed with quiet satisfaction (McFeely 294).

 

Because he knew the Washington real estate market and because he could afford to – his salary as Marshall was a respectable one – in September 1878 he moved his family out of the A Street house to a newer house atop a hill across the Anacosta River.

 

The ample, white frame house, all the more handsome for being unpretentious, had been built in the 1850s.  …

 

… Whatever Douglass’s frustrations with the job he held in that city, including the unacknowledgeable fact that the position was not equal to the pride he felt duty-bound to express in holding it, Cedar Hill [his name for the place] was his.  Walking the long way home in the afternoon, across the bridge and up the hill, Douglass could know that when he gained its crest, no one had a finer prospect of Washington than he (McFeely 297-298).

 

The winter before he moved to Cedar Hill he had received a letter from John Sears, Amanda Auld Sears’s husband.  Amanda was gravely ill.  Would Douglass come visit her?  Immediately he took the train to Baltimore.  “On January 10, John reported her still alive and thanked Frederick for his visit; on February 1, Thomas (named for his grandfather, Thomas Auld), wrote that his mother hand died.”

 

In February 1878, Douglass was sixty, and laurels were on his brow.  … All seemed to be well, but appearances deceived.  These first years after Reconstruction, which saw the dashing of so many of Douglass’s public dreams, were also a time of great and unsettling confusion in his private life.  Old friends, most of them speaking with a good deal less acidity than Ottila Assing, repeatedly urged him to cut loose from his children and allow them to have lives of their own.  But by now, they were irrevocably dependent on him.

 

He was damned if he did and damned if he didn’t.  Not to help them when they were indeed in trouble seemed cruel; his assistance, on the other hand, only made more pronounced the sense that he could accomplish anything, and they, nothing.  In 1879, Douglass, who had lost, he claimed, ten thousand dollars on his failed newspaper…, had three families to support, in addition to his own: Rosetta and her children (Nathan was in Omaha, briefly, trying once again for a start in life); Charles and his children (his wife, Libbie, had died and he needed help in caring for them); and Douglass’s brother Perry was dying; Douglass told … [a friend], “He is a dear old fellow, and I am glad to have a shelter for him.”

 

Anna’s health too was deteriorating, and as it did, her smoldering resentment of her husband grew.  At the same time, Ottilla Assing was making greater and greater emotional demands.  The remarkable balance that she and Douglass had maintained for so many years-with the summer visits and the occasional times together in Hoboken and New York-had broken down.  Having failed to persuade him to leave Anna and go to Europe with her, Assing had gone alone in 1877.  On her return, she attempted to pick up where she and Douglass had left off.  A visit to Cedar Hill in the fall of 1878 for a moment recaptured the times on the hill overlooking Rochester, but once she had left, her letters were filled with rancorous remarks about old friends.  For Douglass, responding to her fully would have meant becoming engulfed by her overpowering distress.  Instead, he increasingly withdrew, which only made her the more eager to have him respond.

 

…

 

In the summer of 1881, Otilla Assing returned to Germany.  … But her restlessness did not cease; she challenged in the courts her exclusion from her sister’s will and wandered about the continent so aimlessly that her newspaper once tried advertising to find out where she was.  She and Douglass were still in correspondence as late as June 1884, but after 1879 he no longer saved her letters as he had done in closer days.  In 1881, and again in 1882, she had a friend in New York send him large boxes of his favorite cigars, the ones whose lingering aroma had reminded her of him when he had left after a visit.  (McFeely 297).

 

 

Work cited:

 

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



Frederick Douglass -- Used Politically

 

The two years leading to the Presidential election of 1876 were depressing years for Frederick Douglass.  His sorry participation in the demise of the Freedman’s Bank weighed upon him.  President Grant did not reward him with a government job.  His newspaper, which he had at first undertaken with partners, had been insolvent, and he stopped its publication.  Two white abolitionists from the old days died.  Charles Sumner, long time senator from Massachusetts, had been, next to Abraham Lincoln, most esteemed in the hearts of Negroes.  Douglass respected him immensely.  Soon afterwards the Vice President, Henry Wilson, died.  As a senator from Massachusetts Wilson had urged Lincoln to proclaim emancipation and had introduced many anti-slavery measures in the Senate.  And now the evil forces of racism had gathered strength in the South and seemed to be winning again, despite the legal rights afforded to his race by the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments.

 

The Ku Klux Klan had begun its guerilla warfare against the black man.  Douglass, lecturing in Philadelphia, spoke of Lucy Haydon, in Tennessee, who was “called from an inner-room at midnight and shot down because she teaches colored children to read.”  In Louisiana and Alabama “the black man scarcely dares to deposit the votes which you gave him for fear of his life” (Bontemps 267).  And for a time, the newly elected black senator from Louisiana, P. B. S. Pinchback, dined with Douglass in Washington while the Senate’s Committee on Privileges and Elections decided whether or not they would recommend his acceptance as a member of the Senate.  Democrat opponents had charged corruption in his election.  The Senate eventually denied him his office, by a 32 to 29 vote.  Several Republican senators sided with the opposition party.  It was an ominous sign that the party that had been the protector of the Negro had tired of the task.  Douglass did not know yet, although he was cognizant of the symptoms, that the Election of 1876 would signal white political abandonment of his race.

 

Douglass’s family life added to his depression.  Ottila Assing’s continued presence at his home in Washington had, as Julia Griffith’s years before in Rochester, stirred Anna Douglass’s jealous emotions.

 

… In her letter to her sister, Assing reported that Douglass was adding a wing to the A Street house and wanted her to move in permanently: “You can imagine how happy that would make me, but I must consider if it is advisable to be in the constant companionship of his amiable wife.  Until now I have managed through diplomacy and the giving of many gifts to maintain the best of relationships with her, but one can never know what can come into the head of such an unknowledgeable and illiterate creature.  What should one say, for instance, if one were charged with having bewitched a person?”

 

Assing was implying that Anna Douglass, lashing out at the bewitcher, had reached back to savage African superstitions in her fight to hold her man … who had led her into a world she could compete in only with her own primal tenacity.

 

… Assing commented sarcastically, “He would be doing all right if he did not have his dear family worrying him to death and consuming everything he manages to earn.”  Her nasty charge had some justification.  Charles, Frederick Jr., and Rosetta were constantly asking their father for financial help.  He had pressed them to live according to a standard of dignity that was hard to maintain for a clerk in government office, a printer who had a sure job only as long as his father’s newspaper employed him, and a son-in-law (for whom Douglass showed true affection and understanding) who had trouble holding any kind of job (McFeely 288).

 

Ottilla Assing, in April 1876, wrote to her sister that Douglass would not accompany her to Europe that summer as she had wished, “for he is completely taken up in the service of the Republican party during the campaign” (McFeely 289).

 

For the first and only time in American history the outcome of a Presidential election was decided by a commission of political office holders, rather than the American people.

 

The winning candidate would have been the candidate that carried the states of Louisiana, Florida, and South Carolina, where the voting was very close, and very irregular.  Each of these states submitted two different sets of returns.  One set had the Republican candidate winning the election, the other set elected the Democrat candidate.  An electoral commission of congressmen, senators and Supreme Court justices was appointed, seven Democrats and eight Republicans, to decide the matter.  By a vote of eight to seven, the Republican Rutherford B. Hayes was deemed President, but not without a singular compromise.  Federal troops were to be withdrawn from South Carolina and Louisiana (soon the entire South).  And white supremacists had what they wanted, control of their own states, and their inhabitants.

 

After the election Frederick Douglass finally received a governmental appointment.  Assing wrote,

 

He had been named marshal of the District of Columbus.  … He has served the Republican party for the past twenty years so well that such an acknowledgment could hardly have been put off any longer.  Since he will now be in the immediate vicinity of the president, one might hope that he will win his way to a beneficent influence (McFeely pp. 289-290).

 

What she had not realized yet, what some in Washington had but not Douglass, was that the appointment was a political scheme not to reward Douglass personally for his past service but to appease Negroes generally for the abandonment of their brethren in the South.

 

Assing did not know what the duties of the marshal were.  In the two previous administrations, the marshal attended formal receptions in the White House, stool beside the President, and presented each guest to him, by name.  President Hayes selected a white man to perform these duties.  Douglass was permitted instead to appoint bailiffs, messengers and jurors for the D. C. courts, and in doing so he strengthened the grasp of black civil servants on minor government positions.  Nonetheless, in accepting the appointment, Frederick Douglass betrayed what he had fought for and stood for most of his life.  Douglass permitted himself to be used politically to obscure the fact that Negroes were no longer permitted to be what Douglass had always insisted they had to be, undiscriminated upon American citizens.

 

His need to be rewarded obscured his vision.  Perhaps he rationalized that he could do more for his race directly by appointing blacks to minor government positions than he could by speaking out against hypocrisy and injustice.  Perhaps he still believed that the Republican ship, however misbegotten it had become, was still the only ship that could carry his people to their destination.  In any event, he did not concur with friends who thought he should resign his office.  In Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, his third autobiography, he wrote,

 

“I should have presented … a most foolish and ridiculous figure had I, as absurdly counseled by some of my colored friends, resigned the office … because President … Hayes, for reasons that must have been satisfactory to his judgment, preferred some person other than myself to attend upon him at the Executive Mansion.”

 

… On a personal level, Douglass was to find the mild Civil War general from Ohio, who consulted him on the reliability of black petitioners [for political office], the most comfortable to deal with of the eight presidents he came to know.  And yet, one of his observant friends detected “something in your way of speaking of Pres. Hayes which suggests you do not feel quite at ease in regard to him.”  Whether knowledge that he was part of a cover-up of the administration’s anti-black policies caused Douglass discomfort, he never said … (McFeely pp. 291-292; 292-293).

 

 

Works cited:

 

Bontemps, 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.



Frederick Douglass -- Getting the Vote

 

The Freedman’s Bureau was created in the United States war department by an act of Congress March 3, 1865, to last one year, but was continued until 1872 by later acts.  It was established partly to prevent Southerners from re-establishing some form of slavery, partly to provide relief to needy blacks and whites in the conquered South, and partly to take charge of lands confiscated in the South during the war.  “At the head of the bureau was a commissioner, Gen. O. O. Howard, and under him in each southern state was an assistant commissioner with a corps of local superintendents, agents and inspectors.  The officials had the broadest possible authority in all matters that concerned the Negroes” (Britannica 731).

 

Douglass’s son Charles had sent Douglass a letter in July 1867 that informed him that the Johnson Administration was considering naming Douglass Commissioner of the Freedom’s Bureau.  Would he be interested in taking the position?  Yes, he would!  A black man at the head of such a powerful government agency created, presumably, to benefit the Negro in the South-what a giant symbolic stride toward racial equality that would be!  Then there was the salary of $3,000 a year.  But Douglass felt uneasy about the offer.  He replied that he would take time to consider it before deciding.

 

What immediately disturbed him about the offer was the unfavorable reference to the incumbent.  Douglass happened to know something about General Oliver Otis Howard.  He knew as did every other informed Negro that the General’s record and reputation were unblemished.  Negroes as well as whites held him in the highest esteem.  Even his enemies in government acknowledged that he was a “very good sort of man.”  Why would Andrew Johnson want to removed the blameless General Howard and replace him with a Negro?  Certainly not for any good reason, Douglass thought.  He had never been convinced by any of Johnson’s assertions that he meant well toward Negroes (Bontemps 252).

 

Two weeks later Douglass rejected the offer, stating that he “could not accept office with my present views of duty.”  In a letter to a newspaper he said that he did not want to be a part of any attempt to remove the General and he did not wish to “place himself under any obligation to keep the peace with Andrew Johnson” (Bontemps 253).

 

Andrew Johnson “was clever enough to see the advantages of putting a gullible or flatterable black man in charge-nominally-while he undermined a government program designed to assist black people.  Douglass was flatterable, but not always gullible.  In his tough mind, he knew that Johnson would not give him, or any other black man, the job if doing so meant giving him also the power that should go with it” (McFeely 261).

 

Soon the main reason for Johnson’s job offer became known to all.  “The plan to replace Howard by a prominent Negro was part of a larger scheme to get rid of (Radical Republican) Secretary of War Stanton.  Radicals could not safely oppose the highest appointment ever offered a Negro in government, and this circumstance was counted on to muffle their protests against the Stanton ouster’ (Bontemps 253), which Johnson soon after attempted.  Subsequently, the House of Representatives began impeachment proceedings against the President.

 

Ottilia Assing (See “Ottilia Assing and Slavery in the Territories” post, May 28, 2017) watched the impeachment trial of Andrew Johnson during the spring of 1868 and savored every moment of it, until the Senate’s vote to remove the President from office fell one vote short.  She knew, however, that the Republican Party would nominate Ulysses S. Grant as their Presidential candidate and that he would most certainly win the election in November.  Her friends, “real radicals,” had persuaded her that Grant could be trusted to work diligently for the cause of racial equality.

 

Douglass campaigned rigorously for the former general and against his Democratic opponent, Horatio Seymour.  He argued simply that the Democrats had favored the rebellion and now opposed suffrage for the Negro.  The Republicans had opposed the rebellion and favored the latter.  Grant, in the election, received 450,000 Negro votes.  He received only 300,000 more votes than Seymour in the entire election.  Douglass believed that the Republican Party owed his race a commitment to Negro suffrage.  In 1869 Congress “proposed a constitution amendment to the effect that neither the national government nor any state should be permitted to deny the ballot to a man because of his race or color” (Bontemps 254).  Douglass, of course, urged its adoption during his unrelenting lecture tours.  On March 30, 1870, the Fifteenth Amendment received the number of state ratifications required to put it into the Constitution, and many in the nation rejoiced.  The President wrote of its passage as “The most important ever that has occurred since the nation came into life” (Bontemps 255).  Its work done, the American Anti-Slavery Society called its final meeting.  All that had been fought for for so many years now seemed won.

 

 

Works cited:

 

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

 

Encyclopedia Britannica, Vol. 9, Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc., Chicago, 1960. Print.

 

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



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.



Frederick Douglass -- Lincoln's Respect

 

In February 1864 before Douglass would pen his request [that his son Charles be discharged from the army], he delivered an address at Cooper Union in Philadelphia that stated his view of the mission of a war, which had “filled our land with mere stumps of men, ridged our soil with 200,000 rudely-formed graves, and mantled it all over with the shadow of death.”  Growing support of the Democratic Party’s desire to reach a compromise with the Confederacy to end the war had caused Douglass to reaffirm his position.

 

I end where I began. No war but an Abolition war; no peace but an Abolition peace; liberty for all, chains for none; the black man a soldier in war, a laborer in peace, a voter at the South as well as at the North, America his permanent home, and all Americans his fellow countrymen.  Such, fellow-citizens, is my idea for the mission of this war (McFeely 231).

 

Many Republicans during the early months of 1864 favored nominating a different man as their Presidential candidate for the upcoming election.  Former senator Salmon P. Chase and former candidate John C. Fremont were two possibilities.  Douglass liked the President personally, but another man less concerned about the prejudiced sentiment of the populace might accomplish more.  He would not oppose Lincoln’s abandonment.  In June, however, the Party did nominate Lincoln; now the nation would choose between the cautious, well-intentioned incumbent and former General George B. McClellan, whom abolitionists feared would negotiate away Negro emancipation.

 

During the fall months the war continued to go badly for the President.  General Grant’s campaign towards Richmond was halted at Petersburg, and General Sherman’s invasion of Georgia had apparently been nothing more than a campaign of skirmish and maneuver.  Now the President himself seemed certain that he would be defeated in the November election.  On August 19 he met for the second time with Douglass, to discuss and formulate a desperate plan.

 

The President wanted to make a strong effort to persuade slaves within the Confederacy to escape to freedom.  Such a mass exodus might help win the war before McClellan’s inauguration in 1865. The war had to end before McClellan had Presidential power.  Otherwise, Lincoln was certain that McClellan, to end the war, would give the South back its slaves.  Lincoln wanted Douglass to devise a plan and be the “general agent” to carry it out.

 

Douglass proposed in a letter dated August 29 that local agents be recruited at points along the front “most accessible to large bodies of slaves.”  They should be people who knew the territory.  Whether they would go behind the rebel lines themselves to encourage slaves to run away or advise such action from a place of safety, Douglass did not mention.

 

Douglass’s suggestions were never acted upon.  In early September General Sherman’s forces captured Atlanta, and the nation’s resulting jubilation seemed to foretell that Abraham Lincoln would serve a second term.

 

After Lincoln’s re-election Douglass resumed his lecture schedule, but he managed to be in Washington for the second inaugural.  In fact he was in the crowd waiting for the opening of the ceremonies when he saw Lincoln touch the Vice-President at his side, say something and direct the other’s eyes toward Douglass.  It would have been cause for a moment of pride had not Andrew Johnson frowned.  Douglass turned to the colored woman who stood beside him and whispered, “Whatever Andrew Johnson may be, he certainly is no friend of our race” (Bontemps 244-245).

 

Douglass decided that he would attend Lincoln’s reception at the White House later that day and persuaded the woman standing next to him, Mrs. Thomas J. Dorsey, to accompany him. No black man had ever before presented himself at such a function.  Douglass felt he had every right to, considering what the war had been fought for, what black soldiers had died for, and what he had done personally in behalf of the nation and his race.  His appearance would be a test of the sincerity of the administration not only to bring about emancipation of all slaves but equality of citizenship.

 

Together they joined the procession moving toward the entrance.  At the door two outraged policemen pounced upon Douglass.  His arms clamped firmly in their hands, he heard them explain, with obvious insincerity, that they had been ordered to admit no Negroes.

 

… Douglass calmly told the guards he did not believe they had any such orders.  Mr. Lincoln would certainly not approve, he ventured.  When the policemen attempted to rush him and Mrs. Dorsey into the exit, he decided to be as willful as they were.  He was there to congratulate the President, not to be tricked and insulted.  Seeing a familiar face in the line, he asked the individual going in if he would kindly inform Mr. Lincoln that Frederick Douglass was at the door-detained.

 

The response came quickly, and Douglass and Mrs. Dorsey were ushered into the East Room.  Towering over the crowd, Lincoln saw and greeted the highly visible Douglass from a distance.  “Here comes my friend Douglass.  I am glad to see you.  I saw you in the crowd today, listening to my inaugural address.  How did you like it?”

 

Douglass hedged.  He was reluctant to hold up the line.  “There are thousands waiting,” he said.

 

“No.  No.  You must stop a little,” Lincoln insisted.  “I want to know what you think of it.”

 

Douglass’s voice trembled.  “Mr. Lincoln, that was a sacred effort.”

 

“I’m glad you liked it,” Lincoln murmured.

 

By then Douglass and Mrs. Dorsey were moving along again, but the brief incident had not escaped notice.  The nest day it was widely discussed.  Frederick Douglass at the Presidential reception.  … Lincoln chatting with him while others waited.  But to Douglass it was simply confirmation of the opinion he had already formed of the Emancipator’s attitude (Bontemps 245-246).

 

One month later the President was dead, assassinated by the half-mad actor, John Wilkes Booth.  Douglass was in Rochester when news of Lincoln’s death reached him.  He spoke at what may have been the first memorial service for Lincoln in any American city.  Douglass’s grief was genuine.  One observer, seeing him walk along Main Street, observed, “He had no word of greeting, only a hand pressure for his nearest friends.”   When Mrs. Lincoln sent Douglass the President’s walking stick, with a note explaining that Lincoln had spoken to her about sending Douglass some token of his respect, Douglass was doubly grieved (Bontemps 246-247).

 

It seemed no one who had championed the cause of the black man could fill the void left by the Emancipator’s death.  Certainly not the new President, Andrew Johnson.  But then Douglass’s despair was diverted by events that brought a swift end of the war.  General Lee surrendered his army to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox, Virginia.  Remnants of Confederate forces elsewhere gave up their arms.

 

Douglass quickly perceived that the immediate future of his race would be determined by how the seceded Southern states were readmitted into the Union.  Radical Congressmen demanded that stern penalties be levied against those who had served the Confederacy.  One condition for readmitting the states would be the enfranchisement of the Negro.  President Johnson, however, favored lenient terms of readmission, and, Douglass suspected, continued domination of former slaves.  Because it would protect his people and permit them to vote, Douglass was determined that Radical Republican Congressional reconstruction be enacted.

 

The war between the states had ended.  The struggle to establish equality had not.

 

 

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.