Lessons of the Hour: An Address Delivered in Washington, D.C., on January 9, 1894

LESSONS OF THE HOUR: AN ADDRESS DELIVERED IN
WASHINGTON, D.C., ON 9 JANUARY 1894

(Baltimore,
1894). Other texts in Washington , 10 January 1894; Washington , 10
January 1894; Indianapolis (Ind) , 17 February 1894; , 2:
101-46 (July 1894);
(Bridgewater, Eng., 1895), 1-38; , 3: 31-36 (March 1895); Speech File,
reel 17, frames 21-49, 50-81, 144-60, FD Papers, DLC; , 5: 95-108
(April 1894); , 13: 298-306 (July-August 1894); Foner, , 4: 491-523.

A large audience gathered in Washington’s Metropolitan A.M.E. Church on 9
January 1894 to listen to a long address by Douglass. On the platform were
Jeremiah E. Rankin, president of Howard University, and former Virginia

congressman John M. Langston. Former U.S. senator Blanche K. Bruce of
Mississippi presided and introduced Douglass. Describing Douglass as the
“Nestor of freedmen,” the Washington observed that he “carefully
weighed his words, and at times spoke with a fire which showed that the vigor
of his youth had not forsaken him. He was mild and equitable in his charac-
terizations, but powerful in sarcasm.” He “took the audience by storm.”
Douglass had first delivered the “Lessons of the Hour” lecture in the fall of
1893 in Detroit and elsewhere while still in the Midwest attending to his duties
at the World’s Columbian Exposition. After the Washington, D.C., delivery
reproduced here, Douglass read the address to audiences in Boston and
Lowell, Massachusetts, Providence, and elsewhere, sometimes using the
alternate title “The Negro Problem.” See Appendix A, text 6, for a precis of
an alternate text. Atchison (Kans.) , 7 October 1893; Boston , 11,
12 May, 25 October 1894; Providence (R.I.) , 10
November 1894.

FRIENDS AND FELLOW CITIZENS:—N0 man should come before an au-
dience like the one by whose presence I am now honored, without a noble
object and a fixed and earnest purpose. I think that, in whatever else I may
be deficient, l have the qualifications indicated, to speak to you this eve-
ning. I am here to speak for, and to defend, so far as I can do so within the
bounds of truth, a long-suffering people, and onejust now subject to much
misrepresentation and persecution. Charges are at this time preferred
against them, more damaging and distressing than any which they have
been called upon to meet since their emancipation.

I propose to give you a colored man’s view of the unhappy relations at
present existing between the white and colored people of the Southern
States of our union. We have had the Southern white man’s view of the
subject. It has been presented with abundant repetition and with startling
emphasis, colored by his peculiar environments. We have also had the
Northern white man’s view tempered by time, distance from the scene, and
his higher civilization.

This kind of evidence may be considered by some as all-sufficient upon
which to found an intelligent judgment of the whole matter in controversy,
and that therefore my testimony is not needed. But experience has taught us
that it is sometimes wise and necessary to have more than the testimony of
two witnesses to bring out the whole truth, especially in this the case where
one of the witnesses has a powerful motive for concealing or distorting the
facts in any given case. You must not, therefore, be surprised if my version
of the Southern question shall widely differ from both the North and the

South, and yet I shall fearlessly submit my testimony to the candid judg-
ment of all who hear me. I shall do so in the ﬁrm belief that my testimony is
true.

There is one thing, however, in which I think we shall all agree at the
start. It is that the so-called, but mis-called, negro problem is one of the
most important and urgent subjects that can now engage public attention. It
is worthy of the most earnest consideration of every patriotic American
citizen. Its solution involves the honor or dishonor, glory or shame, hap-
piness or misery of the whole American people. It involves more. It touch-
es deeply not only the good name and fame of the Republic, but its highest
moral welfare and its permanent safety. Plainly enough the peril it involves
is great, obvious and increasing, and should be removed without delay.

The presence of eight millions of people in any section of this country
constituting an aggrieved class, smarting under terrible wrongs, denied the
exercise of the commonest rights of humanity, and regarded by the ruling
class in that section, as outside of the government, outside of the law, and
outside of society; having nothing in common with the people with whom
they live, the sport of mob violence and murder is not only a disgrace and
scandal to that particular section but a menace to the peace and security of
the people of the whole country.

I have waited patiently but anxiously to see the end of the epidemic of
mob law and persecution now prevailing at the South. But the indications
are not hopeful, great and terrible as have been its ravages in the past, it
now seems to be increasing not only in the number of its victims, but in its
frantic rage and savage extravagance. Lawless vengeance is beginning to
be visted upon white men as well as black. Our newspapers are daily
disfigured by its ghastly horrors. It is no longer local, but national; no
longer confined to the South, but has invaded the North. The contagion is
spreading, extending and over-leaping geographical lines and state bound-
aries, and if permitted to go on it threatens to destroy all respect for law and
order not only in the South, but in all parts of our country—North as well as
South. For certain it is, that crime allowed to go on unresisted and unar-
rested will breed crime. When the poison of anarchy is once in the air, like
the pestilence that walketh in the darkness,¹Ps. 91: 6. the winds of heaven will take it
up and favor its diffusion. Though it may strike down the weak to-day, it
will strike down the strong to-morrow.

Not a breeze comes to us now from the late rebellious States that is not

tainted and freighted with negro blood. In its thirst for blood and its rage for
vengeance, the mob has blindly, boldly and defiantly supplanted sheriffs,
constables and police. It has assumed all the functions of civil authority. It
laughs at legal processes, courts and juries, and its red-handed murderers
range abroad unchecked and unchallenged by law or by public opinion.
Prison walls and iron bars are no protection to the innocent or guilty, if the
mob is in pursuit of negroes accused of crime. Jail doors are battered down
in the presence of unresisting jailors, and the accused, awaiting trial in the
courts of law are dragged out and hanged, shot, stabbed or burned to death
as the blind and irresponsible mob may elect.

We claim to be a Christian country and a highly civilized nation, yet, I
fearlessly affirm that there is nothing in the history of savages to surpass the
blood chilling horrors and fiendish excesses perpetrated against the colored
people by the so-called enlightened and Christian people of the South. It is
commonly thought that only the lowest and most disgusting birds and
beasts, such as buzzards, vultures and hyenas, will gloat over and prey
upon dead bodies, but the Southern mob in its rage feeds its vengeance by
shooting, stabbing and burning when their victims are dead.

Now the special charge against the negro by which this ferocity is
justified, and by which mob law is defended by good men North and South,
is alleged to be assaults by negroes upon white women. This charge once
fairly started, no matter by whom or in what manner, whether well or ill-
founded, whether true or false, is certain to subject the accused to immedi-
ate death. It is nothing, that in the case there may be a mistake as to identity.
It is nothing that the victim pleads “not guilty.” It is nothing that he only
asks for time to establish his innocence. It is nothing that the accused is of
fair reputation and his accuser is of an abandoned character. It is nothing
that the majesty of the law is defied and insulted; no time is allowed for
defence or explanation; he is bound with cords, hurried off amid the frantic
yells and cursing of the mob to the scaffold and under its shadow he is
tortured till by pain or promises, he is made to think he can possibly gain
time or save his life by confession, and then whether innocent or guilty, he
is shot, hanged, stabbed or burned to death amid the wild shouts of the
mob. When the will of the mob has been accomplished, when its thirst for
blood has been quenched, when its victim is speechless, silent and dead,
his mobocratic accusers and murderers of course have the ear of the world
all to themselves, and the world generally approves their verdict.

Such then is the state of Southern civilization in its relation to the
colored citizens of that section and though the picture is dark and terrible I

venture to affirm that no man North or South can deny the essential truth of
the picture.

Now it is important to know how this state of affairs is viewed by the
better classes of the Southern States. I will tell you, and I venture to say if
our hearts were not already hardened by familiarity with such crimes
against the negro, we should be shocked and astonished by the attitude of
these so-called better classes of the Southern people and their lawmakers.
With a few noble exceptions the upper classes of the South are in full
sympathy with the mob and its deeds. There are few earnest words uttered
against the mob or its deeds. Press, platform and pulpit are either generally
silent or they openly apologize for the mob. The mobocratic murderers are
not only permitted to go free, untried and unpunished, but are lauded and
applauded as honorable men and good citizens. the guardians of Southern
women. If lynch law is in any case condemned, it is only condemned in one
breath, and excused in another.

The great trouble with the negro in the South is, that all presumptions
are against him. A white man has but to blacken his face and commit a
crime, to have some negro lynched in his stead. An abandoned woman has
only to start the cry that she has been insulted by a black man, to have him
arrested and summarily murdered by the mob. Frightened and tortured by
his captors, confused into telling crooked stories about his whereabouts at
the time when the alleged crime was committed and the death penalty is at
once inflicted, though his story may be but the incoherency of ignorance or
distraction caused by terror.

Now in confirmation of what I have said of the better classes of the
South, I have before me the utterances of some of the best people of that
section, and also the testimony of one from the North, a lady, from whom,
considering her antecedents, we should have expected a more considerate,
just and humane utterance.

In a late number of the “Forum” Bishop Haygood,² Son of a Watkinsville, Georgia, lawyer and housewife, Atticus Green Haygood (1839-96) graduated from Emory University in 1859 and soon after joined the ministry of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South. After serving as a chaplain in the Confederate army, Haygood held progressively more responsible positions in his church: secretary of the Sunday school program (1870-75); president of Emory University (1875-84); editor of the (1878-82); and bishop (1890-96). Haygood advocated federal aid to black education and opposed the convict lease system, causing him to be regarded as a southern progressive on race issues. His position was best stated in his 1881 book . , 3: 143; , 8: 452-53. author of the
“Brother in Black,” says that “The most alarming fact is, that execution by
lynching has ceased to surprise us. The burning of a human being for any

crime, it is thought, is a horror that does not occur outside of the Southern
States of the American Union, yet unless assaults by negroes come to an
end, there will most probably be still further display of vengeance that will
shock the world, and men who are just will consider the provocation.”³Douglass extracts and combines two sentences from the article, “The Black Shadow in the South," by Atticus G. Haygood, in the October 1893 issue of . , 16: 167-75 (October 1893).

In an open letter addressed to me by ex-Governor Chamberlain,⁴Son of a farmer from West Brookfield, Massachusetts, Daniel Henry Chamberlain (1837-1907) graduated from Yale University in 1862. He rose to the rank of captain in the Fifth Massachusetts Cavalry Regiment, the black unit in which Douglass's son Charles served as a sergeant. After the war, Chamberlain settled in South Carolina where he proved unsuccessful as a planter. In 1868, he was a delegate at the state constitutional convention and then was elected attorney general by the newly formed Republican party. Elected governor by the Republicans in 1872, Chamberlain courted the support of moderate elements of the Democratic party through his control of state patronage. Chamberlain's policies were unable to prevent the Democrats from nominating Wade Hampton to oppose his reelection as governor in 1876. After a campaign punctuated by much violence against freedmen, both sides disputed the results until President Rutherford B. Hayes withdrew federal troops. No longer able to resist the paramilitary power of the Democrats, Chamberlain resigned as governor and left the state. In later years, he practiced law in New York City and served as a non-resident professor of constitutional law at Cornell University. Walter Allen, (1888; New York, 1969); Sobel and Raimo, , 4: 1418; , 6: 564; , 12: 176-77; , 3: 595. of
South Carolina, and published in the “Charleston News and Courier,” a
letter which I have but lately seen, in reply to an article of mine on the
subject published in the “North American Review,”⁵Douglass, “Lynch Law in the South," , 155: 17-24 (July 1892). the ex-Governor
says: “Your denunciation of the South on this point is directed exclusively,
or nearly so, against the application of lynch law for the punishment of one
crime, or one sort of crime, the existence, I suppose, I might say the
prevalence of this crime at the South is undeniable. But I read your (my)
article in vain for any special denunciation of the crime itself. As you say
your people are lynched, tortured and burned for assault on white women.
As you value your own good fame and safety as a race, stamp out the
infamous crime.” He further says, the way to stop lynching is to stamp out
the crime.

And now comes the sweet voice of a Northern woman, of Southern
principles, in the same tone and the same accusation, the good Miss
Frances Willard, of the W. C. T. U. She says in a letter now before me, “I
pity the Southerner. The problem on their hands is immeasurable. The
colored race,” she says, “multiplies like the locusts of Egypt. The safety of

woman, of childhood, of the home, is menaced in a thousand localities at
this moment, so that men dare not go beyond the sight of their own roof
tree.” Such then is the crushing indictment drawn up against the Southern
negroes, drawn up, too, by persons who are perhaps the fairest and most
humane of the negro’s accusers. But even they paint him as a moral
monster ferociously invading the sacred rights of women and endangering
the homes of the whites.

The crime they allege against the negro, is the most revolting which
men can commit. It is a crime that awakens the intensest abhorrence and
invites mankind to kill the criminal on sight. This charge thus brought
against the negro, and as constantly reiterated by his enemies, is not merely
against the individual culprit, as would be in the case with an individual
culprit of any other race, but it is in a large measure a charge against the
colored race as such. It throws over every colored man a mantle of odium
and sets upon him a mark for popular hate, more distressing than the mark
set upon the first murderer. It points him out as an object of suspicion and
avoidance. Now it is in this form that you and I, and all of us, are required to
meet it and refute it, if that can be done. In the opinion of some of us, it is
thought that it were well to say nothing about it, that the least said about it
the better. In this opinion I do not concur. Taking this charge in its broad
and comprehensive sense in which it is presented, and as now stated, I feel
that it ought to be met, and as a colored man, I am grateful for the
opportunity now afforded me to meet it. For I believe it can be met and
successfully met. I am of opinion that a people too spiritless to defend
themselves are not worth defending.

Without boasting, on this broad issue as now presented, I am ready to
confront ex-Governor Chamberlain, Bishop Fitzgerald,⁶Methodist Episcopal Church bishop Oscar Penn Fitzgerald (1829-1911) was born in Caswell County, North Carolina. He worked for a number of newspapers in the Southeast and taught in rural schools as a young man before entering the Methodist ministry in 1853. His religious superiors soon sent him to California where he preached and edited church newspapers. While in California, Fitzgerald also held the posts of state superintendent of schools (1867-71) and president of the Paciﬁc Methodist College (1872-78). He resettled in Nashville, Tennessee, to edit the Methodist organ, the , from 1878 until his elevation to the episcopate in 1890. In addition to his editorial work, Fitzgerald was well-known as an author of biographical and meditational articles and books. , 13: 483; , 6: 436-37. Bishop Haygood,
and Miss Frances Willard and all others, singly or altogether, without any
doubt of the result.

But I want to be understood at the outset. I do not pretend that negroes
are saints or angels. I do not deny that they are capable of committing the

crime imputed to them, but I utterly deny that they are any more addicted to
the commission of that crime than is true of any other variety of the human
family. In entering upon my argument, I may be allowed to say, that I
appear here this evening not as the defender of any man guilty of this
atrocious crime, but as the defender of the colored people as a class.

In answer to the terrible indictment, thus read, and speaking for the
colored people as a class, I, in their stead, here and now plead not guilty
and shall submit my case with confidence of acquittal by good men and
women North and South.

It is the misfortune of the colored people in this country that the sins of
the few are visited upon the many, and I am here to speak for the many
whose reputation is put in peril by the sweeping charge in question. With
General Grant and every other honest man, my motto is, “Let no guilty man
escape.”⁷On 29 July 1875 President Ulysses S. Grant used this phrase in an endorsement to a letter containing evidence regarding the “Whisky Ring" conspiracy in the Treasury Department. , 44th Cong, 1st sess., House Miscellaneous Document 186 (serial set 1706), 357, 484-86. But while I am here to say this, I am here also to say, let no
innocent man be condemned and killed by the mob, or crushed under the
weight of a charge of which he is not guilty.

You will readily see that the cause I have undertaken to support, is not
to be maintained by any mere confident assertions or general denials. If I
had no better ground to stand upon than this I would leave the field of
controversy and give up the colored man’s cause at once to his able ac-
cusers. I am aware, however, that I am here to do in some measure what the
masters of logic say cannot be done—prove a negative.

Of course, I shall not be able to succeed in doing the impossible, but
this one thing I can and will do. I can and will show that there are sound
reasons for doubting and denying this horrible and hell-black charge of
rape as the peculiar crime of the colored people of the South. My doubt and
denial are based upon two fundamental and invincible grounds.

The first is, the well established and well tested character of the negro
on the very point upon which he is now violently and persistently accused.
The second ground for my doubt and denial is based upon what I know of
the character and antecedents of the men and women who bring this charge
against him. I undertake to say that the strength of this position will become
more manifest as I proceed with my argument.

At the outset I deny that a fierce and frenzied mob is or ought to be
deemed a competent witness against any man accused of any crime whatever.

The ease with which a mob can be collected and the slight causes by
which it may be set in motion, and the elements of which it is composed,
deprives its testimony of the qualities that should inspire confidence and
command belief. It is moved by impulses utterly unfavorable to an impar-
tial statement of the truth. At the outset, therefore, I challenge the credibili-
ty of the mob. and as the mob is the main witness in the case against the
negro, I appeal to the common sense of mankind in support of my chal-
lenge. It is the mob that brings this charge, and it is the mob that arraigns,
condemns and executes, and it is the mob that the country has accepted as
its witness.

Again, I impeach and discredit the veracity of southern men generally,
whether mobocrats or otherwise, who now openly and deliberately nullify
and violate the provisions of the constitution of their country, a constitu-
tion, which they have solemnly sworn to support and execute. I apply to
them the legal maxim, “False in one, false in all.”⁸Douglass quotes the legal maxim: “Falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus." Mencken, , 382.

Again I arraign the negro’s accuser on another ground, I have no
confidence in the truthfulness of men who justify themselves in cheating
the negro out of his constitutional right to vote. The men, who either by
false returns, or by taking advantage of his illiteracy or surrounding the
ballot-box with obstacles and sinuosities intended to bewilder him and
defeat his rightful exercise of the elective franchise, are men who are not to
be believed on oath. That this is done in the Southern States is not only
admitted, but openly defended and justified by so-called honorable men
inside and outside of Congress.

Just this kind of fraud in the South is notorious. l have met it face to
face. It was boldly defended and advocated a few weeks ago in a solemn
paper by Prof. Weeks, a learned North Carolinian, in my hearing. His
paper was one of the able papers read before one of the World’s Auxiliary
Congresses at Chicago.⁹Born in Pasquotank County, North Carolina, Stephen Beauregard Weeks (1865-1918) received a bachelor's degree (1886) and a Ph.D. degree (1888) from the University of North Carolina and another Ph.D. degree (1891) from Johns Hopkins University. He taught history and political science at Trinity College in North Carolina (1891-93) and then held a research position with the U.S. Bureau of Education in Washington, D.C. (1894-99). Health problems forced him to take teaching and superintendent positions in a number of Indian reservation schools in Arizona and New Mexico (1899-1907). Weeks later recovered sufficiently to return to work for the U.S. Bureau of Education. One of the founders of the Southern Historical Association, he produced numerous scholarly works, principally on his home state. On 9 August 1893 Weeks delivered a paper on the history of black suffrage in the South to a session of the Auxiliary Congress on Jurisprudence and Law Reform at the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago. Douglass attended that session and responded to a call by the audience to deliver an impromptu rebuttal to Weeks's defence of efforts by southern states to disenfranchise blacks. Chicago , 10 August 1893; Stephen B. Weeks, “The History of Negro Suffrage in the South," , 9: 671-703 (December 1894); Samuel A. Ashe, , 8 vols. (Greensboro, N.C., 1905-17), 5: 433-41; NCAB, 10: 89; , 19: 603-04.

Now men who openly defraud the negro by all manner of artiﬁce and
boast of it in the face of the world’s civilization, as was done at Chicago, I
affirm that they are not to be depended upon for truth in any case whatever,
where the rights of the negro are involved. Their testimony in the case of
any other people than the negro, against whom they should thus commit
fraud would be instantly and utterly discredited, and why not the same in
this case? Every honest man will see that this point is well taken, and I defy
any argument that would drive me from this just contention. It has for its
support common sense, common justice, common honesty, and the best
sentiment of mankind, and has nothing to oppose it but a vulgar popular
prejudice against the colored people of our country, which prejudice strikes
men with moral blindness and renders them incapable of seeing any dis-
tinction between right and wrong.

But I come to a stronger position. I rest my conclusion not merely upon
general principles, but upon well known facts. I reject the charge brought
against the negro as a class, because all through the late war, while the slave
masters of the South were absent from their homes in the field of rebellion,
with bullets in their pockets, treason in their hearts, broad blades in their
blood stained hands, seeking the life of the nation, with the vile purpose of
perpetuating the enslavement of the negro, their wives, their daughters,
their sisters and their mothers were left in the absolute custody of these
same negroes, and during all those long four years of terrible conﬂict,
when the negro had every opportunity to commit the abominable crime
now alleged against him, there was never a single instance of such crime
reported or charged against him. He was never accused of assault, insult, or
an attempt to commit an assault upon any white woman in the whole South.
A fact like this, although negative, speaks volumes and ought to have some
weight with the American people.

Then, again on general principles, I do not believe the charge because
it implies an improbable, if not impossible, change in the mental and moral
character and composition of the negro. It implies a change wholly incon-
sistent with well known facts of human nature. It is a contradiction to well
known human experience. History does not present an example of such a

transformation in the character of any class of men so extreme, so unnatural
and so complete as is implied in this charge. The change is too great and the
period too brief. Instances may be cited where men fall like stars from
heaven, but such is not the usual experience. Decline in the moral character
of a people is not sudden. but gradual. The downward steps are marked at
first by degrees and by increasing momentum from bad to worse. Time is
an element in such changes, and I contend that the negroes of the South
have not had time to experience this great change and reach this lower
depth of infamy. On the contrary, in point of fact, they have been and still
are, improving and ascending to higher levels of moral and social worth.

Again, I do not believe it and utterly deny it, because those who bring
the charge do not, and dare not, give the negro a chance to be heard in his
own defence. He is not allowed to explain any part of his alleged offense.
He is not allowed to vindicate his own character or to criminate the char-
acter and motives of his accusers. Even the mobocrats themselves admit
that it would be fatal to their purpose to have the character of his accusers
brought into court. They pretend to a delicate regard for the feelings of the
parties assaulted, and therefore object to giving a fair trial to the accused.
The excuse in this case is contemptible. It is not only mock modesty but
mob modesty. Men who can collect hundreds and thousands, if we may
believe them, and can spread before them in the tempest and whirlwind of
vulgar passion, the most disgusting details of crime with the names of
women, with the alleged offense, should not be allowed to shelter them-
selves under any pretense of modesty. Such a pretense is absurd and shame-
less. Who does not know that the modesty of womanhood is always an
object for protection in a court of law? Who does not know that a lawless
mob composed in part of the basest of men can have no such respect for the
modesty of women as a court of law. No woman need be ashamed to
confront one who has insulted or assaulted her in a court of law. Besides
innocence does not hesitate to come to the rescue of justice.

Again, I do not believe it. and deny it because if the evidence were
deemed sufficient to bring the accused to the scaffold, through the action of
an impartial jury, there could be, and would be, no objection to having the
alleged offender tried in conformity to due process of law.

Any pretence that a guilty negro, especially one guilty of the crime
now charged, would in any case be permitted to escape condign punish-
ment, is an insult to common sense. Nobody believes or can believe such a
thing as escape possible. in a country like the South, where public opinion,
the laws, the courts, the juries, and the advocates are all known to be

against him, he could hardly escape if innocent. I repeat, therefore, I do not
believe it, because I know, and you know, that a passionate and violent mob
bent upon taking life, from the nature of the case, is not a more competent
and trustworthy body to determine the guilt or innocence of a negro ac-
cused in such a case, than is a court of law. I would not, and you would not,
convict a dog on such testimony.

But I come to another fact, and an all-important fact, bearing upon this
case. You will remember that during all the first years of re-construction
and long after the war when the Southern press and people found it neces-
sary to invent, adopt, and propagate almost every species of falsehood to
create sympathy for themselves and to formulate an excuse for gratifying
their brutal instincts, there was never a charge then made against a negro
involving an assault upon any white woman or upon any little white child.
During all this time the white women and children were absolutely safe.
During all this time there was no call for Miss Willard’s pity, or Bishop
Haygood’s defense of burning negroes to death.

You will remember also that during this time the justification for the
murder of negroes was said to be negro conspiracies, insurrections,
schemes to murder all the white people, to burn the town, and commit
violence generally. These were the excuses then depended upon, but never
a word was then said or whispered about negro outrages upon white women
and children. So far as the history of that time is concerned, white women
and children were absolutely safe, and husbands and fathers could leave
home without the slightest anxiety on account of their families.

But when events proved that no such conspiracies; no such insurrec-
tions as were then pretended to exist and were paraded before the world in
glaring head-lines. had ever existed or were even meditated; when these
excuses had run their course and served their wicked purpose; when the
huts of negroes had been searched, and searched in vain, for guns and
ammunition to prove these charges, and no evidence was found, when
there was no way open thereafter to prove these charges against the negro
and no way to make the North believe in these excuses for murder, they did
not even then bring forward the present allegation against the negro. They,
however, went on harassing and killing just the same. But this time they
based the right thus to kill on the ground that it was necessary to check the
domination and supremacy of the negro and to secure the absolute rule of
the Anglo-Saxon race.

It is important to notice that there has been three distinct periods of
persecution of negroes in the South, and three distinct sets of excuses for

persecution. They have come along precisely in the order in which they
were most needed. First you remember it was insurrection. When that was
worn out, negro supremacy became the excuse. When that is worn out,
now it is assault upon defenseless women. I undertake to say, that this order
and periodicity is significant and means something and should not be
overlooked. And now that negro supremacy and negro domination are no
longer defensible as an excuse for negro persecutions, there has come in
due course, this heart-rending cry about the white women and little white
children of the South.

Now, my friends, I ask what is the rational explanation of this singular
omission of this charge in the two periods preceding the present? Why was
not the charge made at that time as now? The negro was the same then as to-
day. White women and children were the same then as to-day. Temptations
to wrong doing were the same then as to-day. Why then was not this
dreadful charge brought forward against the negro in war times and why
was it not brought forward in reconstruction times?

I will tell you; or you, yourselves, have already answered the question.
The only rational answer is that there was no foundation for such a charge
or that the charge itself was either not thought of or was not deemed
necessary to excuse the lawless violence with which the negro was then
pursued and killed. The old charges already enumerated were deemed all
sufficient. This new charge has now swallowed up all the old ones and the
reason is obvious.

Things have changed since then, old excuses were not available and the
negro’s accusers have found it necessary to change with them. The old
charges are no longer valid. Upon them the good opinion of the North and
of mankind cannot be secured. Honest men no longer believe in the worn-
out stories of insurrection. They no longer believe that there is just ground
to apprehend negro supremacy. Time and events have swept away these old
refuges of lies. They did their work in their day, and did it with terrible
energy and effect, but they are now cast aside as useless. The altered times
and circumstances have made necessary a sterner, stronger, and more
effective justification of Southern barbarism. and hence, according to my
theory, we now have to look into the face of a more shocking and blasting
charge than either negro supremacy or insurrection or that of murder itself.

This new charge has come at the call of new conditions, and nothing
could have been hit upon better calculated to accomplish its purpose. It
clouds the character of the negro with a crime the most revolting, and is
fitted to drive from him all sympathy and all fair play and all mercy. It is a

crime that places him outside of the pale of the law, and settles upon his
shoulders a mantle of wrath and ﬁre that blisters and burns into his very
soul.

It is for this purpose, as I believe, that this new charge unthought of in
the times to which I have referred, has been largely invited, if not entirely
trumped up. It is for this purpose that it has been constantly reiterated and
adopted. It was to blast and ruin the negro’s character as a man and a
citizen.

I need not tell you how thoroughly it has already done its wonted work.
You may feel its malign influence in the very air. You may read it in the
faces of men. It has cooled our friends. It has heated our enemies, and
arrested in some measure the efforts that good men were wont to make for
the colored man’s improvement and elevation. It has deceived our friends
at the North and many good friends at the South, for nearly all have in some
measure accepted the charge as true. Its perpetual reiteration in our news-
papers and magazines has led men and women to regard us with averted
eyes, increasing hate and dark suspicion.

Some of the Southern papers have denounced me for my unbelief, in
their new departure, but I repeat I do not believe it and ﬁrmly deny it. I
reject it because I see in it, evidence of an invention, called into being by a
well deﬁned motive, a motive sufﬁcient to stamp it as a gross expedient to
justify murderous assault upon a long enslaved and hence a hated people.

I do not believe it because it bears on its face, the marks of being a
makeshift for a malignant purpose. I reject it not only because it was sprung
upon the country simultaneously with well-known efforts now being indus-
triously made to degrade the negro by legislative enactments, and by
repealing all laws for the protection of the ballot, and by drawing the color
line in all railroad cars and stations and in all other public places in the
South; but because I see in it a means of paving the way for our entire
disfranchisement.

Again, I do not believe it, and deny it, because the charge is not so
much against the crime itself, as against the color of the man alleged to be
guilty of it. Slavery itself, you will remember, was a system of legalized
outrage upon the black women of the South, and no white man was ever
shot, burned, or hanged for availing himself of all the power that slavery
gave him at this point.

Upon these grounds then—grounds which I believe to be solid and
immovable—I dare here and now in the capital of the nation and in the
presence of Congress to reject it, and ask you and all just men to reject this

horrible charge so frequently made and construed against the negro as a
class.

To sum up my argument on this lynching business. It remains to be said
that l have shown that the negro’s accusers in this case have violated their
oaths and have cheated the negro out of his vote; that they have robbed and
defrauded the negro systematically and persistently, and have boasted of it.
I have shown that when the negro had every opportunity to commit the
crime now charged against him he was never accused of it by his bitterest
enemies. I have shown that during all the years of reconstruction, when he
was being murdered at Hamburg, Yazoo,¹⁰During the fall of 1875 Democratic political leaders undertook a program of carefully coordinated violence and intimidation to topple the Republican-controlled state government of Mississippi. One nationally reported incident in that campaign occurred at Yazoo City in the heavily black Yazoo County in northern central Mississippi on 1 September 1875. Armed Democrats broke up a Republican rally, killing one and wounding three participants. The Republican sheriff of the county, A. T. Morgan, fled to the state capital and a white "militia" seized de jure control and lynched several politically active blacks. Mississippi Govemor Adelbert Ames used this and similar incidents as grounds for an unsuccessful appeal to President Grant for federal military aid to restore order. Morgan declined Ames's offer of the state's sole black militia company to use to reinstate legally elected authority to Yazoo County. No more signiﬁcant acts of political violence occurred in the county that fall but only seven residents cast votes for the Republican party in the November election while that party had typically won majorities of over two thousand votes. , 515- 16; Vernon Lane Wharton, (1947; New York. 1965), 155, 171, 191, 197; James Wilford Gamer, (1901; Baton Rouge, 1968), 375-76; Gillette, , 154-55, 162-63. New Orleans, Copiah and
elsewhere, he was never accused of the crime now charged against him. I
have shown that in the nature of things no such change in the character and
composition of a people as this charge implies could have taken place in the
limited period allowed for it. I have shown that those who accuse him dare
not confront him in a court of law and have their witnesses subjected to
proper legal inquiry. And in showing all this, and more, I have shown that
they who charge him with this foul crime may be justly doubted and
deemed unworthy of belief.

But I shall be told by many of my Northern friends that my argument,
though plausible, is not conclusive. It will be said that the charges against
the negro are specific and positive, and that there must be some foundation
for them, because as they allege men in their normal condition do not shoot
and hang their fellowmen who are guiltless of crime. Well! This assump-
tion is very just, very charitable. I only ask something like the same justice
and charity could be shown to the negro as well as to the mob. It is
creditable to the justice and humanity of the good people of the North by
whom it is entertained. They rightly assume that men do not shoot and hang

their fellowmen without just cause. But the vice of their argument is in their
assumption that the lynchers are like other men. The answer to that argu-
ment is what may be truly predicated of human nature under one condition
is not what may be true of human nature under another. Uncorrupted
human nature may shudder at the commission of such crimes as those of
which the Southern mob is guilty.

But human nature uncorrupted is one thing and human nature corrupted
and perverted by long abuse of irresponsible power, is quite another and
different thing. No man can reason correctly on this question who reasons
on the assumption that the lynchers are like ordinary men.

We are not, in this case, dealing with men in their natural condition, but
with men brought up in the exercise of arbitrary power. We are dealing with
men whose ideas, habits and customs are entirely different from those of
ordinary men. It is, therefore, quite gratuitous to assume that the principles
that apply to other men apply to the Southern murderers of the negro, and
just here is the mistake of the Northern people. They do not see that the
rules resting upon the justice and benevolence of human nature do not apply
to the mobocrats, or to those who were educated in the habits and customs
of a slave-holding community. What these habits are I have a right to know,
both in theory and in practice.

I repeat: The mistake made by those who on this ground object to my
theory of the charge against the negro, is that they overlook the natural
effect and inﬂuence of the life, education and habits of the lynchers. We
must remember that these people have not now and have never had any
such respect for human life as is common to other men. They have had
among them for centuries a peculiar institution, and that peculiar institution
has stamped them as a peculiar people. They were not before the war, they
were not during the war and have not been since the war in their spirit or in
their civilization, a people in common with the people of the North. I will
not here harrow up your feelings by detailing their treatment of Northern
prisoners during the war. Their institutions have taught them no respect for
human life and especially the life of the negro. It has in fact taught them
absolute contempt for his life. The sacredness of life which ordinary men
feel does not touch them anywhere. A dead negro is with them a common
jest.

They care no more for a negro’s right to live than they care for his rights
to liberty, or his rights to the ballot. Chief Justice Taney told the exact truth
about these people when he said: “They did not consider that the black man

had any rights which the white men were bound to respect.”¹¹An allusion to Roger B. Taney's opinion on the Dred Scott decision of 1857. Dred Scott v. John F. A. Sandford, 19 Howard 393 (1857), 407. No man of
the South ever called in question that statement and they never will. They
could always shoot, stab and burn the negro without any such remorse or
shame as other men would feel after committing such a crime. Any South-
ern man who is honest and is frank enough to talk on the subject, will tell
you that he has no such idea as we have of the sacredness of human life and
especially, as l have said, of the life of the negro. Hence it is absurd to meet
my arguments with the facts predicated on our common human nature.

I know I shall be charged with apologizing for criminals. Ex-Governor
Chamberlain has already virtually done as much. But there is no founda-
tion for any such charge. I affirm that neither I nor any other colored man of
like standing with myself, has ever raised a finger or uttered a word in
defense of any one really guilty of the dreadful crime now in question.

But, what I contend for, and what every honest man, black or white
should contend for, is that when any man is accused of this or any other
crime, of whatever name, nature, or extent, he shall have the benefit of a
legal investigation; that he shall be confronted by his accusers; and that he
shall through proper counsel, be able to question his accusers in open court
and in open day-light so that his guilt or his innocence may be duly proved
and established.

If this is to make me liable to the charge of apologizing for crime, I am
not ashamed to be so charged. I dare to contend for the colored people of
the United States that they are a law-abiding people, and I dare to insist
upon it that they or any man, black or white, accused of crime, shall have a
fair trial before he is punished.

Again. I cannot dwell too much upon the fact that colored people are
much damaged by this charge. As an injured class we have a right to appeal
from the judgment of the mob to the judgment of the law and the American
people. Our enemies have known well where to strike and how to stab us
most fatally. Owing to popular prejudice it has become the misfortune of
the colored people of the South and of the North as well, to have as I have
said, the sins of the few visited upon the many. When a white man steals,
robs or murders, his crime is visited upon his own head alone. But not so
with the black man. When he commits a crime the whole race is made to

suffer. The cause before us is an example. This unfairness confronts us not
only here, but it confronts us everywhere else.

Even when American art undertakes to picture the types of the two
races it invariably places in comparison not the best of both races as
common fairness would dictate, but it puts side by side in glaring contrast
the lowest type of the negro with the highest type of the white man and calls
upon you to “look upon this picture then upon that.”

When a black man’s language is quoted, in order to belittle and degrade
him, his ideas are put into the most grotesque and unreadable English,
while the utterances of negro scholars and authors are ignored. A hundred
white men will attend a concert of white negro minstrels with faces black-
ened with burnt cork, to one who will attend a lecture by an intelligent
negro.

On this ground I have a criticism to make, even of the late World’s
Columbian Exposition. While I join with all other men in pronouncing the
Exposition itself one of the grandest demonstrations of civilization that the
world has ever seen, yet great and glorious as it was, it was made to show
just this kind of unfairness and discrimination against the negro.¹²Douglass elaborated on this criticism of the racial discrimination at the World's Columbian Exposition in two essays: “Inauguration of the World's Columbian Exposition," , 3: 300 (March 1893), and the introduction to (Chicago, 1893), 2-12.

As nowhere else in the world it was hoped that here the idea of human
brotherhood would have been fully recognized and most gloriously illus-
trated. It should have been, and would have been, had it been what it
professed to be, a World’s Exposition. It was, however, in a marked degree
an American Exposition. The spirit of American caste made itself conspic-
uously felt against the educated American negro, and to this extent, the
Exposition was made simply an American Exposition and that in one of
America’s most illiberal features.

Since the day of Pentecost, there has never assembled in any one place
or on any one occasion, a larger variety of peoples of all forms, features
and colors, and all degrees of civilization, than was assembled at this
World’s Exposition. It was a grand ethnological lesson, a chance to study all
likenesses and differences. Here were Japanese, Soudanese, Chinese,
Cingalese, Syrians, Persians, Tunisians, Algerians, Egyptians, East Indi-
ans, Laplanders, Esquimaux, and as if to shame the educated negro of
America, the Dahomeyans were there to exhibit their barbarism, and in-
crease American contempt for the negro intellect. All classes and conditions

were there save the educated American negro. He ought to have been
there if only to show what American slavery and freedom have done for
him. The fact that all other nations were there and there at their best, made
his exclusion the more marked, and the more signiﬁcant. People from
abroad noticed the fact that while we have eight millions of colored people
in the United States, many of them gentlemen and scholars, not one of
them was deemed worthy to be appointed a Commissioner, or a member of
an important committee, or a guide, or a guard on the Exposition grounds.
What a commentary is this upon our boasted American liberty and Ameri-
can equality! It is a silence to be sure, but it is a silence that speaks louder
than words. It says to the world that the colored people of America are
deemed by Americans not within the compass of American law and of
American civilization. It says to the lynchers and mobocrats of the South,
go on in your hellish work of negro persecution. What you do to their
bodies, we do to their souls.

I come now to the question of negro suffrage. It has come to be
fashionable of late to ascribe much of the trouble at the South to ignorant
negro suffrage. The great measure according suffrage to the negro recom-
mended by General Grant and adopted by the loyal nation¹³Douglass alludes to the Fifteenth Amendment. is now de-
nounced as a blunder and a failure. They would, therefore, in some way
abridge and limit this right by imposing upon it an educational or some
other qualification. Among those who take this view are Mr. John J.
Ingalls, and Mr. John M. Langston. They are both eloquent, both able, and
both wrong. Though they are both Johns neither of them is to my mind a
“St. John” and not even a “John the Baptist.” They have taken up an idea
which they seem to think quite new, but which in reality is as old as
despotism and about as narrow and selfish. It has been heard and answered
a thousand times over. It is the argument of the crowned heads and privi-
leged classes of the world. It is as good against our Republican form of
government as it [is] against the negro. The wonder is that its votaries do
not see its consequences. It does away with that noble and just idea of
Abraham Lincoln, that our government should be a government of the
people, by the people, and for the people, and for all the people.¹⁴A paraphrase of the concluding line of Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address on 19 November 1863, Basler, , 7: 22-23.

These gentlemen are very learned, very eloquent and very able, but I
cannot follow them. Much learning has made them mad. Education is
great, but manhood is greater. The one is the principle, the other is the

accident. Man was not made as an attribute to education, but education is
an attribute to man. I say to these gentlemen, first protect the man and you
will thereby protect education. I would not make illiteracy a bar to the
ballot, but would make the ballot a bar to illiteracy. Take the ballot from the
negro and you take from him the means and motives that make for educa-
tion. Those who are already educated and are vested with political power
and have thereby an advantage, will have a strong motive for refusing to
divide that advantage with others, and least of all will they divide it with the
negro to whom they would deny all right to participate in the government.

I, therefore, cannot follow these gentlemen in their proposition to limit
suffrage to the educated alone. I would not make suffrage more exclusive,
but more inclusive. I would not have it embrace merely the elite, but would
include the lowly. I would not only include the men. I would gladly include
the women, and make our government in reality as in name a government
of the people and of the whole people.

But manifestly suffrage to the colored people is not the cause of the
failure of good government, or the cause of trouble in the Southern States,
but it is the lawless limitations of suffrage that makes the trouble.

Much thoughtless speech is heard about the ignorance of the negro in
the South. But plainly enough it is not the ignorance of the negro, but the
malevolence of his accusers, which is the real cause of Southern disorder.
The illiteracy of the negro has no part or lot in the disturbances there. They
who contend for disfranchisement on this ground know, and know very
well, that there is no truth whatever in their contention. To make out their
case they must show that some oppressive and hurtful measure has been
imposed upon the country by negro voters. But they cannot show any such
thing.

The negro has never set up a separate party, never adopted a negro
platform, never proclaimed or adopted a separate policy for himself or for
the country. His assailants know that he has never acted apart from the
whole American people. They know that he has never sought to lead, but
has always been content to follow. They know that he has not made his
ignorance the rule of his political conduct, but the intelligence of white
people has always been his guide. They know that he has simply kept pace
with the average intelligence of his age and country. They know that he has
gone steadily along in the line of his politics with the most enlightened
citizens of the country. They know that he has always voted with one or the
other of the two great political parties. They know that if the votes of these
parties have been guided by intelligence and patriotism, the same may be

said for the vote of the negro. They ought to know, therefore, that it is a
shame and an outrage upon common sense and common fairness to make
the negro responsible, or his ignorance responsible, for any disorder and
confusion that may reign in the Southern States. Yet, while any lie may be
safely told against the negro and be credited, this lie will find eloquent
mouths bold enough to tell it, and pride themselves upon their superior
wisdom in denouncing the ignorant negro voter.

It is true that the negro once voted solidly for the candidates of the
Republican party, but what if he did? He then only voted with John Mercer
Langston, John J. Ingalls, John Sherman, General Harrison, Senator
Hoar,¹⁵Benjamin Harrison and George Frisbie Hoar. Henry Cabot Lodge, and Governor McKinley,¹⁶William McKinley (1843-1901), twenty-fifth president of the United States, held the Ohio gubernatorial office from 1891 to 1895. H. Wayne Morgan, (Syracuse, 1963); , 12: 105-09. and many of the
most intelligent statesmen and patriots of whom this country can boast.
The charge against him at this point is, therefore, utterly groundless. It is a
mere pretense, a sham, an excuse for fraud and violence. for persecution
and a cloak for popular prejudice.

The proposition to disfranchise the colored voter of the South in order
to solve the race problem I hereby denounce as a mean and cowardly
proposition, utterly unworthy of an honest, truthful and grateful nation. It
is a proposition to sacrifice friends in order to conciliate enemies; to sur-
render the constitution to the late rebels for the lack of moral courage to
execute its provisions. It says to the negro citizens, “The Southern nul-
lifiers have robbed you of a part of your rights, and as we are powerless and
cannot help you, and wish to live on good terms with our Southern
brethren, we propose to join your oppressors so that our practice shall be
consistent with their theories. Your suffrage has been practically rendered a
failure by violence, we now propose to make it a failure by law. Instead of
conforming our practice to the theory of our government and the genius of
our institutions, we now propose, as means of conciliation, to conform our
practice to the theory of your oppressors.”

Than this, was there ever a surrender more complete, more cowardly or
more base? Upon the statesmen, black or white, who could dare to hint
such a scheme of national debasement as a means of settling the race
problem, I should inflict no punishment more severe than to keep him at
home, and deprived of all legislative trusts forever.

Do not ask me what will be the final result of the so-called negro

problem. I cannot tell you. I have sometimes thought that the American
people are too great to be small, too just and magnanimous to oppress the
weak, too brave to yield up the right to the strong, and too grateful for
public services ever to forget them or fail to reward them. I have fondly
hoped that this estimate of American character would soon cease to be
contradicted or put in doubt. But the favor with which this cowardly
proposition of disfranchisement has been received by public men, white
and black, by Republicans as well as Democrats, has shaken my faith in the
nobility of the nation. I hope and trust all will come out right in the end, but
the immediate future looks dark and troubled. I cannot shut my eyes to the
ugly facts before me.

Strange things have happened of late and are still happening. Some of
these tend to dim the lustre of the American name, and chill the hopes once
entertained for the cause of American liberty. He is a wiser man than I am,
who can tell how low the moral sentiment of this republic may yet fall.
When the moral sense of a nation begins to decline and the wheel of
progress to roll backward, there is no telling how low the one will fall or
where the other may stop. The downward tendency already manifest has
swept away some of the most important safeguards. The Supreme Court
has surrendered. State sovereignty is restored. It has destroyed the civil
rights Bill, and converted the Republican party into a party of money rather
than a party of morals, a party of things rather than a party of humanity and
justice. We may well ask what next?

The pit of hell is said to be bottomless.¹⁷Possibly drawn from the images in Rev. 9: 2 and 20: 3. Principles which we all
thought to have been firmly and permanently settled by the late war, have
been boldly assaulted and overthrown by the defeated party. Rebel rule is
now nearly complete in many States and it is gradually capturing the
nation’s Congress. The cause lost in the war, is the cause regained in peace,
and the cause gained in war, is the cause lost in peace.

There was a threat made long ago by an American statesman, that the
whole body of legislation enacted for the protection of American liberty
and to secure the results of the war for the Union, should be blotted from the
national statute book. That threat is now being sternly pursued, and may
yet be fully realized. The repeal of the laws intended to protect the elective
franchise has heightened the suspicion that Southern rule may yet become
complete, though I trust, not permanent. There is no denying that the trend
is in the wrong way at present. The late election, however, gives us hope
that the loyal Republican party may return to its first born.

But I come now to another proposition held up just now as a solution of
the race problem, and this 1 consider equally unworthy with the one just
disposed of. The two belong to the same low-bred family of ideas.

This proposition is to colonize the colored people of America in Af-
rica, or somewhere else. Happily this scheme will be defeated, both by its
impolicy and its impracticability. It is all nonsense to talk about the re-
moval of eight millions of the American people from their homes in Amer-
ica to Africa. The expense and hardships, to say nothing of the cruelty of
such a measure, would make success to such a measure impossible. The
American people are wicked, but they are not fools, they will hardly be
disposed to incur the expense, to say nothing of the injustice which this
measure demands. Nevertheless, this colonizing scheme, unworthy as it is,
of American statesmanship and American honor, and though full of mis-
chief to the colored people, seems to have a strong hold on the public mind
and at times has shown much life and vigor.

The bad thing about it is that it has now begun to be advocated by
colored men of acknowledged ability and learning, and every little while
some white statesman becomes its advocate. Those gentlemen will doubt-
less have their opinion of me; I certainly have mine of them. My opinion of
them is that if they are sensible, they are insincere, and if they are sincere
they are not sensible. They know, or they ought to know, that it would take
more money than the cost of the late war, to transport even one-half of the
colored people of the United States to Africa. Whether intentionally or not
they are, as I think, simply trifling with an afﬂicted people. They urge them
to look for relief, where they ought to know that relief is impossible. The
only excuse they can make is that there is no hope for the negro here and
that the colored people in America owe something to Africa.

This last sentimental idea makes colonization very fascinating to
dreamers of both colors. But there is really for it no foundation.

They tell us that we owe something to our native land. But when the
fact is brought to view, which should never be forgotten, that a man can
only have one native land, and that is the land in which he was born, the
bottom falls entirely out of this sentimental argument.

Africa, according to her advocates, is by no means modest in her
demand upon us. She calls upon us to send her only our best men. She does
not want our riff raff, but our best men. But these are just the men we want
at home. It is true we have a few preachers and laymen with a missionary
turn of mind who might be easily spared. Some who would possibly do as
much good by going there as by staying here. But this is not the only
colonization idea. Its advocates want not only the best, but millions of the

best. They want the money to be voted by the United States Government to
send them there.

Now I hold that the American negro owes no more to the negroes in
Africa than he owes to the negroes in America. There are millions of needy
people over there, but there are also millions of needy people over here as
well, and the millions here need intelligent men of their numbers to help
them, as much as intelligent men are needed in Africa. We have a fight on
our hands right here, a fight for the whole race, and a blow struck for the
negro in America is a blow struck for the negro in Africa. For until the
negro is respected in America, he need not expect consideration elsewhere.
All this native land talk is nonsense. The native land of the American negro
is America. His bones, his muscles, his sinews, are all American. His
ancestors for two hundred and seventy years have lived, and labored, and
died on American soil, and millions of his posterity have inherited Cauca-
sian blood.

It is competent, therefore, to ask, in view of this admixture, as well as
in view of other facts, where the people of this mixed race are to go, for
their ancestors are white and black, and it will be difficult to find their
native land anywhere outside of the United States.

But the worse thing. perhaps, about this colonization nonsense is, that
it tends to throw over the negro a mantle of despair. It leads him to doubt the
possibility of his progress as an American citizen. It also encourages
popular prejudice with the hope that by persecution or persuasion the negro
can finally be driven from his natural home, while in the nature of the case,
he must stay here, and will stay here and cannot well get away.

It tends to weaken his hold on one country while it can give him no
rational hope of another. Its tendency is to make him dispondent and
doubtful, where he should be made to feel assured and confident. It forces
upon him the idea that he is forever doomed to be a stranger and sojourner
in the land of his birth, and that he has no permanent abiding place here.

All this is hurtful, with such ideas constantly ﬂaunted before him he
cannot easily set himself to work to better his condition in such ways as are
open to him here. It sets him to groping everlasting after the impossible.

Every man who thinks at all must know that home is the fountain head,
the inspiration, the foundation and main support not only of all social
virtue, but of all motives to human progress and that no people can prosper
or amount to much without a home. To have a home, the negro must have a
country. and he is an enemy to the moral progress of the negro, whether he
knows it or not, who calls upon him to break up his home in this country for
an uncertain home in Africa.

But the agitation of this subject has a darker side still. It has already
been given out that we may be forced to go at the point of the bayonet. I
cannot say we shall not, but badly as I think of the tendency of our times, I
do not think that American sentiment will ever reach a condition which will
make the expulsion of the negro from the United States by such means
possible.

Colonization is no solution of the race problem. It is an evasion. It is
not repenting of wrong but putting out of sight the people upon whom
wrong has been inflicted. Its reiteration and agitation only serve to fan the
ﬂame of popular prejudice and encourage the hope that in some way or
other, in time or in eternity, those who hate the negro will get rid of him.

If the American people could endure the negro’s presence while a
slave, they certainly can and ought to endure his presence as a free-man. If
they could tolerate him when he was a heathen, they might bear with him
when he is a Christian, a gentleman and a scholar.

But woe to the South when it no longer has the strong arm of the negro
to till its soil! And woe to the nation if it shall ever employ the sword to
drive the negro from his native land!

Such a crime against justice, such a crime against gratitude, should it
ever be attempted, would certainly bring a national punishment which
would cause the earth to shudder. It would bring a stain upon the nation’s
honor, like the blood on Lady Macbeth’s hand.¹⁸An allusion to the famous sleep-walking scene in , act 5, sc. 1. The waters of all the
oceans would not suffice to wash out the infamy that such an act of in-
gratitude and cruelty would leave on the character of the American people.

Another mode of impeaching the wisdom of emancipation, and one
that seems to give pleasure to our enemies, is, as they say, that the condition
of the colored people of the South has been made worse; that freedom has
made their condition worse.

The champions of this idea are the men who glory in the good old times
when the slaves were under the lash and were bought and sold in the market
with horses, sheep and swine. It is another way of saying that slavery is
better than freedom; that darkness is better than light and that wrong is
better than right. It is the American method of reasoning in all matters
concerning the negro. It inverts everything; turns truth upside down and
puts the case of the unfortunate negro wrong end foremost every time.
There is, however, always some truth on their side.

When these false reasoners assert that the condition of the emancipated
is wretched and deplorable, they tell in part the truth, and I agree with

them. I even concur with them that the negro is in some respects, and in
some localities, in a worse condition to-day than in the time of slavery, but 1
part with these gentlemen when they ascribe this condition to emancipa-
tion.

To my mind, the blame for this condition does not rest upon emancipa-
tion, but upon slavery. It is not the result of emancipation, but the defeat of
emancipation. It is not the work of the spirit of liberty. but the work of the
spirit of bondage, and of the determination of slavery to perpetuate itself, if
not under one form, then under another. It is due to the folly of endeavoring
to retain the new wine of liberty in the old bottles of slavery.¹⁹Douglass adapts Matt. 9: 17, Mark 2: 22, and Luke 5: 37. I concede the
evil but deny the alleged cause.

The land owners of the South want the labor of the negro on the hardest
possible terms. They once had it for nothing. They now want it for next to
nothing and they have contrived three ways of thus obtaining it. The ﬁrst is
to rent their land to the negro at an exorbitant price per annum, and compel
him to mortgage his crop in advance. The laws under which this is done are
entirely in the interest of the landlord. He has a first claim upon everything
produced on the land. The negro can have nothing, can keep nothing, can
sell nothing, without the consent of the landlord. As the negro is at the start
poor and empty handed, he has to draw on the landlord for meat and bread
to feed himself and family while his crop is growing. The landlord keeps
books; the negro does not; hence, no matter how hard he may work or how
saving he may be, he is, in most cases, brought in debt at the end of the
year, and once in debt, he is fastened to the land as by hooks of steel. If he
attempts to leave he may be arrested under the law.

Another way, which is still more effective, is the payment of the labor
with orders on stores instead of in lawful money. By this means money is
kept entirely out of the hands of the negro. He cannot save money because
he has no money to save. He cannot seek a better market for his labor
because he has no money with which to pay his fare and because he is, by
that vicious order system, already in debt, and therefore already in bond-
age. Thus he is riveted to one place and is, in some sense, a slave; for a man
to whom it can be said, “You shall work for me for what I shall choose to
pay you and how I shall choose to pay you,” is in fact a slave though he may
be called a free man.

We denounce the landlord and tenant system of England, but it can be
said of England as cannot be said of our free country, that by law no laborer

can be paid for labor in any other than lawful money. England holds any
other payment to be a penal offense and punishment by fine and imprison-
ments. The same should be the case in every State in the Union.

Under the mortgage system, no matter how industrious or economical
the negro may be, he finds himself at the end of the year in debt to the
landlord, and from year to year he toils on and is tempted to try again and
again, seldom with any better result.

With this power over the negro, this possession of his labor, you may
easily see why the South sometimes brags that it does not want slavery
back. It had the negro’s labor heretofore for nothing, and now it has it for
next to nothing, and at the same time is freed from the obligation to take
care of the young and the aged, the sick and the decrepit.

I now come to the so—called, but mis-called “Negro Problem,” as a
characterization of the relations existing in the Southern States.

I say at once, I do not like or admit the justice or propriety of this
formula. Words are things.²⁰Douglass quotes a line from Lord Byron, , Canto III, Stanza 88. Coleridge, , 6: 172. They certainly are such in this case, and I may
say they are a very bad thing in this case, since they give us a misnomer and
one that is misleading. It is a formula of Southern origin, and has a strong
bias against the negro. It handicaps his cause with all the prejudice known
to exist against him. It has been accepted by the good people of the North,
as I think, without investigation. It is a crafty invention and is in every way,
worthy of its inventors.

The natural effect and purpose on its face of this formula is to divert
attention from the true issue now before the American people. It does this
by holding up and preoccupying the public mind with an issue entirely
different from the real one in question. That which really is a great national
problem and which ought to be so considered, dwarfs into a “negro prob-
lem.”

The device is not new. It is an old trick. It has been oft repeated, and
with a similar purpose and effect. For truth, it gives us falsehood. For
innocence, it gives us guilt. It removes the burden of proof from the old
master class, and imposes it upon the negro. It puts upon a race a work
which belongs to the nation. It belongs to that craftiness often displayed by
disputants, who aim to make the worse appear the better reason. It gives
bad names to good things, and good names to bad things.

The negro has often been the victim of this kind of low cunning. You

may remember that during the late war, when the South fought for the
perpetuity of slavery, it called the slaves “domestic servants,” and slavery
“a domestic institution.” Harmless names. indeed. but the things they
stood for were far from harmless.

The South has always known how to have a dog hanged by giving him a
bad name. When it prefixed “negro” to the national problem, it knew that
the device would awaken and increase a deep-seated prejudice at once, and
that it would repel fair and candid investigation. As it stands, it implies that
the negro is the cause of whatever trouble there is in the South. In old slave
times, when a little white child lost his temper, he was given a little whip
and told to go and whip “Jim” or “Sal” and thus regained his temper. The
same is true, to-day on a larger scale.

I repeat, and my contention is, that this negro problem formula lays the
fault at the door of the negro, and removes it from the door of the white
man, shields the guilty, and blames the innocent. Makes the negro respon-
sible and not the nation.

Now the real problem is, and ought to be regarded by the American
people, a great national problem. It involves the question, whether, after
all, with our Declaration of Independence, with our glorious free constitu-
tion, whether with our sublime Christianity, there is enough of national
virtue in this great nation to solve this problem, in accordance with wisdom
and justice.

The marvel is that this old trick of misnaming things, so often played
by Southern politicians, should have worked so well for the bad cause in
which it is now employed—for the Northern people have fallen in with it.
It is still more surprising that the colored press of the country, and some of
the colored orators of the country. insist upon calling it a “negro problem,”
or a Race problem, for by it they mean the negro Race. Now—there is
nothing the matter with the negro. He is all right. Learned or ignorant, he is
all right. He is neither a Lyncher, a Mobocrat, or an Anarchist. He is now,
what he has ever been, a loyal, law-abiding, hard working, and peaceable
man; so much so, that men have thought him cowardly and spiritless. They
say that any other people would have found some violent way in which to
resent their wrongs. If this problem depended upon his character and
conduct, there would be no problem to solve; there would be no menace to
the peace and good order of Southern society. He makes no unlawful fight
between labor and capital. That problem which often makes the American
people thoughtful, is not of his bringing—though he may some day be
compelled to talk, and on this tremendous problem.

He has as little to do with the cause of Southern trouble as he has with
its cure. There is no reason, therefore, in the world, why he should give a
name to this problem, and this lie, like all other lies, must eventually come
to naught. A lie is worth nothing when it has lost its ability to deceive, and
if it is at all in my power, this lie shall lose its power to deceive.

I well remember that this same old falsehood was employed and used
against the negro, during the late war. He was then charged and stigmatized
with being the cause of the war, on the principle that there would be no
highway robbers if there were nobody on the road to be robbed. But as
absurd as this pretense was, the color prejudice of the country was stimu-
lated by it and joined in the accusation, and the negro has to bear the brunt
of it.

Even at the North, he was hated and hunted on account of it. In the
great city of New York. his houses were burned, his children were hunted
down like wild beasts, and his people were murdered in the streets.²¹Douglass alludes to the race riot of 13-16 July 1863 that accompanied the beginning of military conscription in New York City.
because “they were the cause of the war.” Even the noble and good Mr.
Lincoln, one of the best men that ever lived, told a committee of negroes
who waited upon him at Washington, that “they were the cause of the
war.”²²This incident occurred, as Douglass describes it, on 14 August 1862. Basler, , 5: 372. Many were the men who accepted this theory, and wished the
negro in Africa, or in a hotter climate, as some do now.

There is nothing to which prejudice is not equal in the way of pervert-
ing the truth and inflaming the passions of men.

But call this problem what you may, or will, the all important question
is: How can it be solved? How can the peace and tranquility of the South.
and of the country, be secured and established?

There is nothing occult or mysterious about the answer to this question.
Some things are to be kept in mind when dealing with this subject and never
be forgotten. It should be remembered that in the order of Divine Provi-
dence the man who puts one end of a chain around the ankle of his fellow
man will find the other end around his own neck. And it is the same with a
nation. Conﬁrmation of this truth is as strong as thunder. “As we sow, we
shall reap,”²³Gal. 6: 7. is a lesson to be learned here as elsewhere. We tolerated
slavery, and it cost us a million graves, and it may be that lawless murder, if
permitted to go on, may yet bring vengeance, not only on the reverend head

of age and upon the heads of helpless women, but upon the innocent babe
in the cradle.

But how can this problem be solved? I will tell you how it can not be
solved. It cannot be solved by keeping the negro poor, degraded, ignorant,
and half-starved, as I have shown is now being done in the Southern States.

It cannot be solved by keeping the wages of the laborer back by fraud,
as is now being done by the landlords of the South.

It cannot be done by ballot-box stuffing, by falsifying election returns,
or by confusing the negro voter by cunning devices.

It cannot be done by repealing all federal laws enacted to secure honest
elections.

It can, however, be done, and very easily done, for where there’s a
will, there’s a way!²⁴An old English proverb that appeared in literature in Michael Scott, , 2 vols. (Philadelphia, 1834), Chap. 1.

Let the white people of the North and South conquer their prejudices.

Let the great Northern press and pulpit proclaim the gospel of truth and
justice against war now being made upon the negro.

Let the American people cultivate kindness and humanity.

Let the South abandon the system of “mortgage” labor, and cease to
make the negro a pauper, by paying him scrip for his labor.

Let them give up the idea that they can be free, while making the negro
a slave. Let them give up the idea that to degrade the colored man, is to
elevate the white man.

Let them cease putting new wine into old bottles, and mending old
garments with new cloth.²⁵Douglass paraphrases Matt. 9: 16-17, Mark 2: 21-22, and Luke 5: 36-37.

They are not required to do much. They are only required to undo the
evil that they have done, in order to solve this problem.

In old times when it was asked, “How can we abolish slavery?” the
answer was “Quit stealing.”

The same is the solution of the Race problem to-day. The whole thing
can be done by simply no longer violating the amendments of the Constitu-
tion of the United States, and no longer evading the claims of justice. If this
were done, there would be no negro problem to vex the South, or to vex the
nation.

Let the organic law of the land be honestly sustained and obeyed.

Let the political parties cease to palter in a double sense and live up to
the noble declarations we find in their platforms.

Let the statesmen of the country live up to their convictions.

In the language of Senator Ingalls: “Let the nation try justice and the
problem will be solved.”²⁶A paraphrase of the conclusion of John J. Ingalls's speech “Fiat Justitia," delivered in the U.S. Senate on 23 January 1890. , 51st Cong, 1st sess., 807.

Two hundred and twenty years ago, the negro was made the subject of a
religious problem, one which gave our white forefathers much perplexity
and annoyance. At that time the problem was in respect of what relation a
negro would sustain to the Christian Church, whether he was a fit subject
for baptism, and Dr. Godwin, a celebrated divine of his time, and one far in
advance of his brethren, was at the pains of writing a book of two hundred
pages, or more, containing an elaborate argument to prove that it was not a
sin in the sight of God to baptize a negro.²⁷Morgan Godwyn, (London, 1680).

His argument was very able, very learned, very long. Plain as the truth
may now seem, there were at that time very strong arguments against the
position of the learned divine.

As usual, it was not merely the baptism of the negro that gave trouble,
but it was what might follow his baptism. The sprinkling him with water
was a very simple thing, but the slave holders of that day saw in the
innovation something more dangerous than water. They said that to baptize
the negro and make him a member of the Church of Christ, was to make
him an important person—in fact, to make him an heir of God and a joint
heir of Jesus Christ. It was to give him a place at the Lord’s supper. It was to
take him out the category of heathenism, and make it inconsistent to hold
him as a slave; for the Bible made only the heathen a proper subject for
slavery.

These were formidable consequences, certainly, and it is not strange
that the Christian slave holders of that day viewed these consequences with
immeasurable horror. It was something more terrible and dangerous than
the fourteenth and fifteenth amendments to our Constitution. It was a
difficult thing, therefore, at that day to get the negro in the water.

Nevertheless, our learned Doctor of Divinity, like many of the same
class in our day, was quite equal to the emergency. He was able to satisfy all
the important parties to the problem, except the negro, and him it did not
seem necessary to satisfy.

The Doctor was [a] skilled dialectician. He did not only divide the
word with skill, but he could divide the negro in two parts. He argued that

the negro had a soul as well as a body, and insisted that while his body
rightfully belonged to his master on earth, his soul belonged to his Master
in heaven. By this convenient arrangement, somewhat metaphysical, to be
sure, but entirely evangelical and logical, the problem of negro baptism
was solved.

But with the negro in the case, as I have said, the argument was not
entirely satisfactory. The operation was much like that by which the white
man got the turkey and the Indian got the crow. When the negro looked
around for his body, that belonged to his earthly master. When he looked
around for his soul, that had been appropriated by his Heavenly Master.
And when he looked around for something that really belonged to himself,
he found nothing but his shadow, and that vanished in the shade.

One thing, however, is to be noticed with satisfaction, it is this: Some-
thing was gained to the cause of righteousness by this argument. It was a
contribution to the cause of liberty. It was largely in favor of the negro. It
was recognition of his manhood, and was calculated to set men to thinking
that the negro might have some other important rights, no less than the
religious right to baptism.

Thus with all its faults, we are compelled to give the pulpit the credit of
furnishing the ﬁrst important argument in favor of the religious character
and manhood rights of the negro. Dr. Godwin was undoubtedly a good
man. He wrote at a time of much moral darkness, and property in man was
nearly everywhere recognized as a rightful institution. He saw only a part
of the truth. He saw that the negro had a right to be baptized, but he could
not all at once see that he had a paramount right to himself.

But this was not the only problem slavery had in store for the negro.
Time and events brought another and it was this very important one:

Can the negro sustain the legal relation of a husband to a wife? Can he
make a valid marriage contract in this Christian country.

This problem was solved by the same slave holding authority, entirely
against the negro. Such a contract, it was argued, could only be binding
upon men providentially enjoying the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit
of happiness, and, since the negro is a slave, and slavery a divine institu-
tion, legal marriage was wholly inconsistent with the institution of slavery.

When some of us at the North questioned the ethics of this conclusion,
we were told to mind our business, and our Southern brethren asserted, as
they assert now, that they alone are competent to manage this, and all other
questions relating to the negro.

In fact, there has been no end to the problems of some sort or other,
involving the negro in difficulty.

Can the negro be a citizen? was the question of the Dred Scott decision.

Can the negro be educated? Can the negro be induced to work for
himself, without a master? Can the negro be a soldier? Time and events
have answered these and all other like questions. We have amongst us,
those who have taken the first prizes as scholars; those who have won
distinction for courage and skill on the battlefield; those who have taken
rank as lawyers, doctors and ministers of the gospel; those who shine
among men in every useful calling; and yet we are called “a problem;” “a
tremendous problem;” a mountain of difﬁculty; a constant source of ap-
prehension; a disturbing force, threatening destruction to the holiest and
best interests of society. I declare this statement concerning the negro,
whether by Miss Willard, Bishop Haygood, Bishop Fitzgerald, Ex-Gover-
nor Chamberlain or by any and all others as false and deeply injurious to the
colored citizen of the United States.

But, my friends, I must stop. Time and strength are not equal to the task
before me. But could I be heard by this great nation, I would call to mind
the sublime and glorious truths with which, at its birth, it saluted a listening
world. Its voice then, was as the trump of an archangel, summoning hoary
forms of oppression and time honored tyranny, to judgement. Crowned
heads heard it and shrieked. Toiling millions heard it and clapped their
hands for joy. It announced the advent of a nation, based upon human
brotherhood and the self-evident truths of liberty and equality. Its mission
was the redemption of the world from the bondage of ages. Apply these
sublime and glorious truths to the situation now before you. Put away your
race prejudice. Banish the idea that one class must rule over another.
Recognize the fact that the rights of the humblest citizen are as worthy of
protection as are those of the highest, and your problem will be solved; and,
whatever may be in store for it in the future, whether prosperity, or adver-
sity; whether it shall have foes without, or foes within, whether there shall
be peace, or war; based upon the eternal principles of truth, justice and
humanity, and with no class having any cause of complaint or grievance,
your Republic will stand and ﬂourish forever.

Creator

Douglass, Frederick, 1818-1895

Date

1894-01-09

Publisher

Yale University Press 1992

Type

Speeches

Publication Status

Published