I Speak to You as an American Citizen: An Address Delivered in Washington, D.C., on October 15, 1870
I SPEAK TO YOU AS AN AMERICAN CITIZEN: AN ADDRESS
DELIVERED IN WASHINGTON, D.C., ON 15 OCTOBER 1870
New National Era, 20 October 1870.
The New York Republican Association, a political club in Washington, D.C.,
elected Douglass to its membership and invited him to speak at their meeting
on 15 October 1870 at Liberty Hall on Seventh and L streets. The Washington
National Republican observed that the large audience “listened with marked
attention” to Douglass and “frequently applauded.” Prior to Douglass’s re-
marks the Republicans had voted to provide special train fares to send at least
five hundred New York residents home to cast Republican ballots in the
upcoming election. Confident of a statewide victory, the Association ad-
journed after passing a vote of thanks to Douglass for his comments. Wash-
ington National Republican, 17, 21 October 1870; Washington Daily Morn-
ing Chronicle, 17 October 1870.
Mr. President and Gentlemen of the New York Republican Association: I
am deeply sensible of the high honor you have conferred upon me, at this
our first meeting, by calling upon me to address you. It is not every man
who could reasonably aspire to such distinction. I certainly had no such
expectation when I applied for membership in your political association. I
am not at all sure, however, that this proceeding on your part will not
involve you in serious trouble. A body like yours is usually thought to be
composed of law-abiding men; but in calling me to speak to you to-night
you will probably be charged with violating the spirit of the Civil Rights
Bill, which strictly enjoined that no distinction shall be made on account of
race, color, or previous condition of servitude.1Douglass alludes to the terms of the Civil Rights Act of 1866. (Laughter and applause.)
Gentlemen, there is another difficulty here at the outset, and I might as
well confess it at once—and that is, I do not know what to say to you.
Individually you are the centres of political knowledge, and know much
more than I do of party politics. I have had large experience in public
speaking, but all my experience in that line fails me on the present occa-
sion. It is a great thing for a man to find out just what place he is best fitted
for in this world, and when he has found it out it is a much greater thing to
stick to it. To-night I am in the condition of one who does not really know
what he is fit for. Some of my partial friends (you know all men have such)
tell me what I might have been, and their disclosures at this point have been
exceedingly assuring and gratifying. You know all men derive their im-
pressions of their abilities and possibilities in some measure from the
opinions of those who stand about them. I was once told by a friend of
mine, with a long string of qualifying conditions, not one of which had I
ever been so fortunate as to enjoy, that I might have been an excellent
auctioneer or a Methodist preacher (loud laughter and merriment); but, I
am sorry to say, that nobody has yet ventured to tell me that, under any
circumstances, I could be made a successful political stump speaker.
Gentlemen, I am profoundly impressed by the new and beneficent
conditions under which I meet you here to-night. I have appeared before
the American people in very different circumstances from those which
meet me here; sometimes I have spoken as a slave, sometimes as a fugitive
slave, but to-night I meet you as a member of a highly respectable political
organization, no longer a piece of property, but a man among men. Thanks
to the irresistible logic of events, and to the sagacity and magnanimity of
the great Republican party, which now controls the destinies of this nation,
I am permitted to address you as an American citizen, completely enfran-
chised. The change is vast, wonderful, and bewildering, and I seem to
myself to be living in a new world, breathing new air, and beholding myself
and all my surroundings in a new light.
The faces of men, wear a new and more attractive appearance, than
formerly. Ten years ago, I went abroad among men with all my quills erect,
expecting insult and outrage on every hand, and seldom disappointed in
finding them. I now meet kindness where I met scorn, civility where I met
insult, and accommodation where I met outrage.
Gentlemen, I hold it to be a great privilege—a fortunate circumstance
to be a citizen of the United States. The people of foreign governments are
subjects, to appreciate our advantage over such we have only to look
abroad to Prussia and France, where two potent individuals, possessing
despotic power, at their own caprice and ambition, have reddened the earth
with the warm blood of two hundred thousand souls, and planted desola-
tion at uncounted hearths and homes.2Fears of a unified Germany and of a Hohenzollern ascension to the Spanish throne led France to declare war against Prussia in July 1870. The ensuing Franco-Prussian War, which lasted until the signing of an armistice on 28 January 1871, resulted in the total defeat of the French armies, the encirclement of Paris by the Prussians, and the replacement of the imperial govemment of Napoleon III by the Third Republic. Michael Howard, The Franco-Prussian War: The German Invasion of France, 1870-1871 (London, 1961).
Gentlemen, no two men, under Republican institutions, can ever ac-
quire powers so dangerous and destructive, as that illustrated in NAPO-
LEON3Louis Napoleon, who ruled France from 1852 to 1870 as Emperor Napoleon III. and WILLIAM.4Christened Wilhelm Friedrich Ludwig at birth, William I (1797-1888) was born in Berlin, the second son of King Frederick William II of Prussia. He ascended the throne of Prussia as king in 1861 and a decade later, after successfully leading his country to victory in the Franco-Prussian War, assumed the title of German emperor upon the final unification of the German states. A proponent of the divine right of kings, William I found his conservatism tempered by the diplomacy of Otto von Bismarck, chancellor of Prussia. Wilfried Fest, Dictionary of German History, 1806-1945 (New York, 1978), 176-77; Howard, Franco-Prussian War, 19-21. Where the people are consulted, there can be no
such thing as a causeless war. The people who are to fight and pay the
expenses of such a war, may be depended upon, to demand a reason, a good
and sufficient reason for plunging themselves and others into the unuttera-
ble woes inseparable from war.
I have said that we are among the most fortunate of nations. We are
great in all the elements of national greatness, in wealth, in territory, in
population, in educational institutions, and in the spirit of impartial liberty
which now gives law and dignity to the whole nation.
Gentlemen, what we are to-day in respect to liberty, equality, and
social order, we are indebted largely to the action of the Republican
party. It is that party, which wrested the Government from the destroying
hand of treason and rebellion, saved the Union of these States, abolished
slavery, enfranchised the colored man, reconstructed the South, unified the
institutions of the country, made a common nationality possible, and pre-
sented to the world a national example of consistent freedom and civiliza-
tion. The heavy reproach brought upon us by slavery blunted our rebukes
of tyranny abroad. Our flag today, however, has a new meaning. The red,
white and blue, the stars and stripes, the whole flag, in color, folds, and
fibre, proclaims liberty not only to ourselves, but to the people of all
nations.
Gentlemen, I am a Republican; a radical Republican, a Black Re-
publican, a Republican dyed in the wool, and for one I want the Republican
party to live as long as I do. Few greater calamities could befall the country,
in my judgment, at any time within the next dozen years, than the defeat
and disbandment of the Republican party. To its courage in war, and to its
wisdom in peace, we are indebted for whatever light that now illumines our
national future. It is the party of law and order, of liberty and of progress, of
honor and honesty, as against disloyalty, moral stagnation, dishonest vot-
ing, and repudiation. While that party is in power nobody doubts that the
national integrity will be maintained, that personal liberty will be secure,
that the national progress will be steady, that the national debt will be duly
acknowledged and paid, and that our country will be a country of peace and
prosperity.
This is no time for experimenting. We have just come out of a sea of
troubles,5Douglass adapts Hamlet, act 3, sc. 1, line 59. and the tried and approved leaders who brought us to dry land,
have by their wisdom and daring entitled themselves to our unqualified
support. We find such men as these in the Republican party, and we look in
vain elsewhere for them. To me it seems that patriotism has no higher duty
at this hour than to perfect and perpetuate this party in power. Gentlemen,
there is a good deal of loose political talk going on about the Republican
party.
I have heard, you have heard, perhaps all present have heard, for
certain weak-kneed Republicans have been whispering it, while our Demo-
cratic friends have been thundering it into our ears, that no party can live
upon “dead issues,” that the Republican party has outlived the “issues”
that called it into being, and that having now fulfilled its mission, it ought
to die.
Gentlemen, there is some truth in the doctrine thus laid down. A party
must be alive and wide awake. It must have living issues, or it cannot go
before the people with any claim to be heard or heeded. Whether the
Republican party has any such issues or not, is a question easily settled.
What is an issue? I can tell you. There is nothing mysterious about it. It is as
plain as yes and no, pro and con, for and against. It has two sides, sup-
ported by opposite parties. If there is life in one side of an issue there must
be life in the other. What is a dead issue? A dead political issue is a political
principle, or measure, which has got itself organized into law, and to which
there is no longer any active political opposition. I admit that this sounds
somewhat elementary to a political body so well instructed as that I have
the honor to address. You know all that I have said, and more than all that I
have said; but as Sojourner Truth6Sojourner Truth (1797-1883) was born a slave in Ulster County, New York. Named Isabella at birth, she passed through a number of owners before achieving freedom in 1827 and acquiring the surname Van Wagener from Quaker friends. A deeply religious woman, she claimed to see visions and hear the voice of God, renaming herself Sojourner Truth after receiving a vision to evangelize in the eastern states. Her involvement with the Northampton Association of Education and Industry, a communal farm in Massachusetts run by George W. Benson, William Lloyd Garrison's brother-in-law, first brought her into contact with Frederick Douglass. Over the years the two frequently shared the speaker’s platform at antislavery and women's rights meetings. With the aid of Olive Gilbert, Truth produced an autobiography in 1850. That book, her association with such prominent people as Harriet Beecher Stowe, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Abraham Lincoln, and her sometimes flamboyant speeches and behavior gave rise to many apocryphal stories about her. From 1850 until her death she lived in Battle Creek, Michigan. Olive Gilbert, The Narrative of Sojourner Truth, a Northern Slave (Boston, 1850); Arthur Huff Fauset, Sojourner Truth: God's Faithful Pilgrim (Chapel Hill, 1938); Hertha Pauli, Her Name was Sojourner Truth (New York, 1962); James et al., Notable American Women, 3: 2. once said, I want you to see that I know
it too.
Now, I think it will be admitted that the Democratic party is a live party.
It has shown itself a little more alive in the State of Indiana, than some of us
hoped it would. It has disputed every inch of the ground in Ohio, and
struggled with tremendous energy for victory in Pennsylvania, and, though
defeated in this contest, it is booked for the great contest of ’72.7In the elections for state offices in October 1870 the Democratic party made significant gains in a number of states. In Indiana the Democrats won control of both branches of the legislature and swept the minor state offices. Ohio Republicans retained their legislative majorities but defeated Democratic challengers for similar state offices by only fifteen thousand votes. In Pennsylvania the fall election produced a Democratic-controlled senate and a Republican-controlled lower house. AAC, 1870, 403-05, 600-02, 614. We must
look at this matter as practical men. To know whether the Republican party
has any living political issues, we must know whether the Democratic
party has been opposing anything or proposing anything as against the
spirit and the action of the Republican party. Have the two parties, like the
Old and New School Presbyterians, been united,8The Presbyterian denomination had divided in 1837 into two bodies, informally designated the “Old School" and the “New School," as a result of a combination of disputes over evangelical theology, missionary policy, and slavery. By 1861, differences on the theological and organizational issues had narrowed considerably. The secession of southern members from the New School in 1857 and from the Old School at the start of the Civil War and both denominations’ support for the Northern military effort produced widespread desire for a reconciliation between the two wings of northern Presbyterianism. In 1863 the Old School and the New School each welcomed observers from the other body to their annual general assemblies. Such cordial relations led to the establishment three years later of a joint committee to remove any remaining obstacles to reunion. In 1869 the General Assembly and the constituent presbyteries of each body approved a plan of reunion that formally merged the New School and Old School into a unified Presbyterian church of more than 430,000 members. AAC, 1869, 573-76; Lewis G. Vander Velde, The Presbyterian Churches and the Federal Union, 1861-1869 (Cambridge, Mass, 1932), 479-522. or is there yet a Demo-
cratic party, with candidates and political sentiments peculiar to itself? You
know there is such a party, and that it is in every sense of the word a living
party, and is a party to living issues. But let this elementary idea pass.
What called this Republican party into existence? I will tell you. We
had in our country a system by which four million of people were by law,
force, and opinion held in slavery. This system had so entwined itself about
all the institutions of the country that, from being a very insignificant thing
at the beginning, it finally reached proportions so tremendous that it under-
took either to get possession of the Government and wield it for its own
perpetuation and aggrandisement, or to destroy it. Slavery lost its power
over the Government, and for that reason sought to break it up. With
slavery stood the power of the Democratic party, and to-day that party is
essentially unchanged. Its vital and animating spirit is still hatred of the
negro. It is still determined to do what it can to serve the cause of the
defeated rebels, and to undo what you have done in the cause of order,
union, liberty, and civilization. Gentlemen, while the Democratic party
has life and power in it, while it is the recognized ally of a defeated
rebellion against the United States Government, the Republican party will
have living issues enough to justify its continuance. In conclusion, let me
say I heartily concur in the resolutions just adopted. I shall for one go home
and vote, and will persuade all other patriotic men to do the same.