We Must Not Abandon the Observance of Decoration Day: An Address Delivered in Rochester, New York, on May 30,1882
WE MUST NOT ABANDON THE OBSERVANCE OF
DECORATION DAY: AN ADDRESS DELIVERED IN
ROCHESTER, NEW YORK, ON 30 MAY 1882
Rochester Daily Union and Advertiser, 30 May 1882. Other texts in Rochester Daily Union
and Advertiser, 31 May 1882; Speech File, reel 17, frames 324–44, Miscellany File, reel
34, frames 633–36, FD Papers, DLC.
Rochester, New York, took on a festive air for Decoration Day in 1882,
featuring a bevy of flags, floral wreaths on soldiers’ graves, and brightly
uniformed marchers in a large parade in the afternoon. Douglass had arrived
in the city on 29 May and visited the site where his house had formerly stood.
The next day, he rode through the parade to the speaker’s platform in Franklin
Square in a carriage with Mayor Cornelius R. Parsons and President Martin B.
Anderson of the University of Rochester. The oratorical exercises began with
a prayer by the Reverend Israel Foote. The mayor then introduced Anderson
who informed the audience that the legislature had authorized Monroe County
to levy a special tax to build a monument for Union soldiers. The mayor next
introduced Douglass as a former “honored and valued citizen” of Rochester.
According to the Rochester Union and Advertiser, “the applause was fre-
quent throughout the delivery of this spirited address, which lacked none of
the ardor of Mr. Douglass’s public efforts of former years.”
FRIENDS AND FELLOW CITIZENS: If anything like pride or self-gratulation
were permissible or pardonable in any man, on an occasion like this, I
might be excused for entertaining some such feeling in view of the invita-
tion to appear here as your orator to-day. In your estimation and in mine,
and in the estimation of loyal men generally, especially in the loyal north,
the annual memorial occasions have a deep and sacred significance. They
stand as a sign of something real, valuable and important. He who is
deemed worthy to participate in them, be he ever so humble and his part
ever so limited, may well enough feel himself exalted. It is more than
ribbons, or stars, or garters. It makes a man as one of the American people,
a man among men, a full partaker in the rights, duties, privileges and
immunities of American citizenship—a citizenship having a grander future
than any bestowed by any other country in the world.
While the prominent position you have assigned me to-day confers
higher honor and greater distinction than any promised by the circum-
stances of my early life, and while I consented to come here, only after a
severe controversy with my distrust and my sense of inability to bring
forward anything outside the beaten track of memorial addresses, and
while to gather up in due form the noble sentiments, thoughts and aspira-
tions suggested and inspired by this memorial anniversary, and to give
them appropriate voice and expression, is a task to which men far abler than
myself might feel unequal, I am nevertheless, for many reasons, very glad
to be here, and to bear the honorable part to which you have been pleased to
call me.
With all the drawbacks which oppress me at this moment, I neverthe-
less feel that l have a decided and manifest advantage. Though not to the
manor born,1Hamlet, act 1, sc. 4, line 15. I am, happily for me, no stranger in the city of Rochester. My
acquaintance with the people of this city is not recent. It dates back full
forty years.2Douglass moved to Rochester, New York, in the autumn of 1847 to commence publication of the North Star. Douglass, Life and Times, 289–94. I came here quite a young man, and, like many other young
men, was more confident of my knowledge, wisdom, and ability then than
I am to-day.
Though at that time only a few years from the hard school of Southern
bondage, I came among you to plead the cause of enslaved millions, and to
teach the rights and duties of human brotherhood and American cit-
izenship.
Your grand University, with its learned President and professors, had
not then shed its lustre upon the name of Rochester.3A denominational dispute led a faction of the faculty and student body at the Baptists’ Madison (now Colgate) University in Hamilton, New York, to found the University of Rochester in 1850. Its first president, Martin Brewer Anderson, served until 1889. Jesse Leonard Rosenberger, Rochester: The Making of a University (Rochester, 1927), 1–24, 91–107; The University of Rochester: Its Honored Past and Expanding Present (Rochester, 1929), 7–9. Like myself, your
splendid city was in its youth. The fine, umbrageous trees in Washington
Square were then small, and then your population was less than one-half its
present number.4Between 1840 and 1880, the population of Rochester increased from 20,191 to 89,366. Edward R. Foreman, ed, Centennial History of Rochester, New York, 4 vols. (Rochester, 1931–34), 1: 262. Chicken Row, with its dilapidated wooden shanties,
was still a marked feature of one of your finest streets. Architecture had not
then given you the magnificent edifices which have since risen so grandly
around you. The old Court House, grandfather to the present one, was still
standing. The Eagle Hotel had not given place to that admirable and
striking structure known as the Powers Building.5Washington Square, Rochester's first village green, originated with a property donation to the village of Rochesterville in 1817 by Elisha Johnson. Douglass errs about the courthouse. The city's first courthouse was built in 1821–22 and replaced in 1852. It was not until 1894–96 that the city replaced this building with another structure at the same site. Previous to the completion of the first building, the county court held its sessions in the old Ensworth Tavern, which became the site for the Eagle Hotel built in 1831. Banker and broker Daniel W. Powers demolished the Eagle Hotel in 1870 to make way for the construction of the Main Street extension of the massive Powers Building. Horner's Rochester City Guide and Encyclopedia of Useful Knowledge (Rochester, 1874), 7, 29; Paul Malo, Rochester and Monroe County: A Guide to Neighborhoods and Villages (Syracuse, NY., 1974), 125; Federal Writers’ Project, Rochester and Monroe County, American Guide Series (Rochester, 1937), 57; William Mill Butler and George S. Crittenden, The Semi-Centennial Souvenir: An Account of the Great Celebration, June 9th and Mill, 1884 (Rochester, 1884), 63; Foreman, Centennial History of Rochester, 2: 365–67. In a word, your now
splendid city was then only rising to the possession of that wealth, culture,
beauty and power which now give it rank among the most desirable elites
on the American continent.
Fellow-citizens, I congratulate myself, and I congratulate you, upon
the fact, that amid all the prosperity and glory in which you stand, and
notwithstanding all the changes wrought in the externals of your city, I find
here in Rochester to-day the same enlightened, liberal and independent
spirit by which it was distinguished forty years ago.
While indulging in reminiscences, and while I am, perhaps, speaking
to many of a new generation, I may say that the best twenty-five years of
my life were spent in Rochester.6Douglass resided in Rochester from 1847 until his move to Washington, D.C. in 1870. Douglass, Life and Times, 440. Friendships were formed during that
residence among you which not even the iron hand of Time can break.
Common pleasures have their bonds of union, and they are strong, but
common pain and suffering have bonds of fellowship even stronger and
more lasting. Those that bind me here are of this latter class. I was with
you, and suffered with you, in the hour of danger and profound anxiety, and
a common suffering has made us friends. I was with you when a great
national affliction and the stern logic of events made your cause mine and
my cause yours, and it was here for the first time I had the happiness to feel
myself under the protection of the national flag.
Fellow-citizens—Though l have not participated with you personally,
upon occasions like this, my peculiar experience, together with that com-
mon interest and common memory which makes this day sacred to all of
us, I have in spirit united with you in its observance.
No people in the United States, so far as I know, perform the rites and
ceremonies which belong to this day, more scrupulously, appropriately,
and impressively, than do the people of Rochester; and from my recollec-
tion of your experience of the clouds, darkness and blood attending the
war, when gloom filled your homes, and sorrow sat at your hearthstones,
no people have better reason so to perform these rites and ceremonies.
The patriotism this day honors found not its birth but its expression in
that momentous struggle. It was seen that the accumulation of wealth, and
the ease and luxury which such accumulation brought, had not destroyed
the heroic spirit of the days that tried men’s souls.7A close paraphrase of the opening line of Thomas Paine's Crisis paper, 23 December 1776. , 2 vols. (Boston, 1859), 1: 75. I seem even now to feel
the effects of the sights and the sounds of that dreadful period. I see the
flags from windows and housetops fluttering in the breeze. I see and hear
the steady tramp of armed men in blue uniforms through all your streets. I
see the recruiting sergeant with drum and fife, with banner and badge,
calling for men, young men and strong, to go to the front and fill up the
gaps made by rebel powder and by pestilence. I hear the piercing sound of
trumpets that told us plainly [that] peace had taken its flight from our
borders; that our country was divided and involved in the turmoils of a
terrible war.
Fellow citizens, I am not here to flatter, unless truth itself be flattery,
but I do like to say pleasant things when I can say them truthfully, and this I
can say of you, your patriotism during all that great trial was, according to
my observation, equal to the occasion. Though you felt the common gloom
you were not cowed by defeat nor made careless or over confident by
victory. Your zeal and your courage burned with steady flame alike amidst
the gusts and calms of the war.
What Rochester was at the beginning of the war, that Rochester was
during the war and at the end of the war. As an eyewitness I am here to say
that though there were croakers here as elsewhere during all that mo-
mentous struggle her courage never quailed, her mind never doubted, her
enthusiasm never cooled, her purse never closed, her arm never wearied.
Fellow citizens: In the name of your country, and in behalf of emanci-
pated millions, and in my own behalf, I am here to thank you, and to thank
your brave soldiers, and to thank your able statesmen, to thank the living
and the dead, for their fidelity to principle, their patriotic fervor, and for
what they attempted, suffered and accomplished.
The fact to which we to-day invite the attention of loyal and patriotic
men, in every part of our common country, is that we are still upon duty,
and that we do not forget our patriotic dead.
We call attention to the fact that within the sacred inclosure of Mt.
Hope,8Douglass refers to Mount Hope Cemetery which was owned by the city of Rochester and dedicated on 3 October 1838. Edward Angevine, A Guide or Hand-book for Mount Hope Cemetery (Rochester, 1885). a place well named, and well suited to the solemn purpose to which
it is devoted, a ground hallowed by affection, adorned by art, beautified by
wealth, skill and industry, coupled with holiest memories, where strong
men go to meditate and widows and orphans go to weep, we have met to
strew choice flowers, with lavish, loyal, loving hands, upon the green
graves of our brave young men, who, in the hour of national peril, went
forth and nobly gave their lives, all that men can give, to save their country
from dismemberment and ruin.
Does any man question the right or the propriety of this annual cere-
mony? Can any man who loves his country advise its discontinuance? Is
there anywhere another altar better than this, around which the nation can
meet one day in each year to renew its national vows and manifest its loyal
devotion to the principles of our free government? Is there any eminence
from which we can better survey the past, the present, the future? For my
part I know of no other such day. There is none other so abundant in
suggestions and themes of immediate national interests as this day.
In saying this I am not unaware that the world is full of anachronisms,
empty form and superstitions, kept above ground and upon exhibition by
hollow, heartless and unthinking custom; things that wear the appearance
of life while destitute of its power and have little or no relation to the
generations now living.
I am not only aware of this fact, but I am also aware that the time may
come when this national Decoration Day, which means so much to us, shall
share the fate of other great days. Having answered the end of its ordination
it will fade and vanish, and it will be given to some other day more nearly
allied with the wants and events of another age. So let it be. Everything is
beautiful in its season.9Probably a paraphrase of a proverb from William Stepney, (1591; Menston, Eng., 1971), 150. Let not the smoke survive the candle.
When an institution has answered the end for which it was created, it
should follow the order of nature and disappear. Here as elsewhere there is
no pause, no stopping place. There have been many plans and policies
proposed in the interests of what is called conservation, but the combined
wisdom of all the ages has not yet devised any means to guard and guaran-
tee the world against mutations to human society, or revolutions in the
structure of human government.
The law of change is everywhere vindicated. What has happened once
may happen again. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof,10Matt. 6: 34. and we may
console ourselves in the thought that whatever may [be] the immediate or
distant future, whatever may hallow another day, and make it great in the
eyes of the American people, for the present at least, there is no national
holiday which contains so much for the head and heart of our day and
generation as this Decoration Day. We may say of it, as Daniel Webster
once said of Bunker Hill Monument: “It looks, it speaks, it acts.”11Douglass accurately quotes Daniel Webster’s address delivered on 17 June 1843 at the celebration commemorating the completion of the Bunker Hill Monument. The Writings and Speeches of Daniel Webster, 18 vols., National ed. (Boston, 1903), 1: 262. It
recalls to us with the emphasis of the roar of a thousand cannon, the scenes
and incidents of a tremendous war. It is full of lessons of wisdom, courage.
and patriotism. It may, as I have said, lose its hold on the attention of the
people and cease to be observed, but the broad and manly sentiment of
which it is born, and by which it is sustained, will live, flourish and bear
similar fruit forever.
While good and evil, loyalty and treason, liberty and slavery remain
opposites and irreconcilable, while they retain their fighting qualities, and
shall contend, as they must contend, for ascendency in the world, their
respective forces will adopt opposite emblems and tokens.
Fellow citizens: Two very conflicting sentiments and policies have
been expressed and espoused in respect to our duty towards the people
lately in rebellion.
One of these would regard and treat the Southern people precisely as
they would regard and treat them had they been always loyal and true to the
government. It is said that this cruel war is over, that the late rebels have
repented their folly and have accepted in good faith the results of the late
war, and that now, we should forget and forgive the past, and turn our
attention entirely to the future. Even that moral and intellectual giant in the
councils of the nation, the late Charles Sumner, would have had all our
battle flags banished from view, and nothing left to tell that there had ever
been trouble to our national family.12In December 1872 Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts introduced a resolution in Congress to prohibit the inscription of the names of Civil War battles on Union army regimental colors. Sumner argued that such symbols of victories over fellow American citizens served to perpetuate sectional ill-feelings. Northern army veterans and most Republican politicians reacted with considerable hostility toward Sumner's resolutions and the Massachusetts legislature voted to condemn the proposal as an insult to former Union soldiers. Sumner‘s Massachusetts friends got the legislature to repeal its censure only days before the senator's death in March 1874. , Statesman ed., 20 vols. (Boston, 1900), 20: 255; David Donald, (New York, 1970), 563-64, 568-71, 584-85. Much in the same line were the views
and sentiments of the late Horace Greeley, Gerrit Smith, Chief Justice
Chase13As the presidential nominee of a coalition of Democrats and Liberal Republicans in 1872. Horace Greeley called for magnanimity toward the defeated Confederates and reconciliation between the sections. Four years earlier, Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase garnered a significant amount of support in an unsuccessful attempt to win the Democratic presidential nomination by repudiating much of the Radical Republican Reconstruction program. Douglass's long-time friend Gerrit Smith supported the Chase movement in 1868 but ultimately endorsed Republican candidate Ulysses S. Grant. ln September 1867, Smith and Greeley along with Cornelius Vanderbilt posted the bond to have ex-Confederate President Jefferson Davis released from prison on the grounds that such generosity from Northerners would help restore cordial feelings between the sections. Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., ed., , 3 vols. (New York, 1971), 2: 1251, 1254-56, 1322, 1326; Ralph Volney Harlow, (New York, 1939), 444-46, 450. and other eminent men.
Opposed to this view of our national duty it is held that the rebellion is
suppressed but not conquered: that its spirit is still abroad and only waits to
reassert itself in flagrant disloyalty.
Though the doctrine of forgiveness and forgetfulness has been adopted
by many of the noblest and most intelligent men of our country, men for
whom I have the highest respect, I am wholly unable to accept it, to the
extent to which it is asserted. I certainly cannot accept it to the extent of
abandoning the observance of Decoration Day. If rebellion was wrong and
loyalty right, if slavery was wrong and emancipation right, we are right-
fully here today.
We are not here to fan the flames of sectional animosity, not to revive
the malign sentiments which naturally sprung up in the heat and fire of a
bloody conflict. We are not here to visit upon the children the sins of the
fathers,14Variations of this phrase appear in Exod. 20: 5, Num. 14: 18, and Deut. 5: 9. but we are here to remember the causes, the incidents, and the
results of the late rebellion. We come around this national family altar, one
day in each year, to pay our grateful homage to the memory of brave men—
to express and emphasize by speech and pageantry our reverence for those
great qualities of enlightened and exalted human nature, which in every
land are the stay and salvation of the race; the qualities without which states
would perish, society dissolve, progress become impossible and mankind
sink back into a howling wilderness of barbarism.15Douglass paraphrases Deut. 32: 10.
In a word, we are here to reassert and reproclaim our admiration for the
patriotic zeal, the stern fortitude. the noble self-sacrifice, the unflinching
determination, the quenchless enthusiasm, the high and measureless cour-
age with which loyal men, true to the Republic in the hour of supreme peril,
dashed themselves against a wanton, wicked and gigantic rebellion, and
suppressed it beyond the power to rise again.
I base my views of the propriety of this occasion not upon partisan,
partial and temporary considerations, but upon the broad foundations of
human nature itself. Man is neither wood nor stone. He is described by the
great poet, as a being looking before and after.16, act 4, sc. 4, line 37. He has a past, present and
future. To eliminate either is a violation of his nature and an infringement
upon his dignity. He is a progressive being, and memory, reason, and
reflection are the resources of his improvement. With these perfections
everything in the world, every great event has an alphabet, a picture, a
voice to instruct. He
“Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,
Sermons in stones and good in everything.”17, act 2, sc. 1, lines 16-17.
For him every foot of bird or beast leaves its imprint upon the earth,
every wheel of cart or carriage leaves its track upon the road, every keel of
ship or schooner leaves its wake in the seamless ocean, to tell the mariner
where he has deviated from his true course. If these may be consulted for
the purposes of knowledge and wisdom, how much more the course of our
rebellion—tossed ship of state, freighted with all that is precious in human
hope and human existence.
I am, then, for remembering the past, for only out of the mists and
shadows of the past may the thoughtful statesman read, with some degree
of certainty, the probable events of the future.
But even here in this broad domain of memory, reason, experience and
reflection, upon which man moves so grandly and so like a god, he is still a
circumscribed and limited being. He can only travel so far. The ocean is
large, but it has its bounds beyond which it may not pass. The same is the
case with man. The strongest memory gives him at last only a vague,
confused, and imperfect impression of the facts and experiences of the
past. He at last sees men in that direction only as trees walking.18An allusion to Mark 8: 22-26, the story of the blind man whose sight Christ restored.
In the fierce battle for existence, little time is left to most of us for
events long gone by. We live and must live in the hurry and tumult of the
passing hour.
Now when, to these considerations, we add the natural weakness of all
human powers, the dullness of observation, the imperfection of memory,
the fading effect produced by time and distance, upon all that happens in
the world, it is easily seen that man is followed and must be followed by a
cloud of oblivion almost as dark and impenetrable as to the things of the
past as that dark curtain or cloud which conceals from the present the
mighty events which are awaiting the world in the distant future.
Hence, from natural causes, we are likely to take along with us, too
little, rather than too much of the past, and may forget too soon, rather than
remember too long, the tremendous facts of the late war. At any rate no
special effort is needed to efface from memory the record of the past, or to
conceal from our children the bitter experiences of their fathers. They are a
part of our national history and worthy of special observation, thought and
study.
The motto that tells us not to speak naught but good of the dead,19A maxim found in Diogenes Laertius's sketch of Chilon. Diogenes Laertius, , 2 vols., R.D. Hicks. trans. (1925; Cambridge, Mass., 1950), 1: 71. does
not apply here. Death has no power to change moral qualities. What was
bad before the war and during the war, has not been made good since the
war. Besides, though the rebellion is dead, though slavery is dead, both the
rebellion and slavery have left behind influences which will remain with
us, it may be, for generations to come.
Rapid indeed is the march of time. We are already fast getting far away
from the days of rebellion and slavery. Men are already losing adequate
comprehension of the stupendous wickedness of both. The generations
coming after us who shall look only into our Declaration of Independence
and our Constitution for a knowledge of our character as a nation, will find
it hard to believe that a part of the people professing to believe in the
principles of those great charters of liberty could fall from their high estate,
reject the creed of their fathers, become traitors to their country and wage
cruel and unrelenting war upon their loyal brothers during four long years,
for no other purpose in the world than to propagate, maintain and perpetu-
ate a system of slavery the most cruel and savage and debasing upon which
the sun ever looked down.
Many disguises have been assumed by the South in regard to that war.
It has been said that it was fighting for independence, but the South was
already a sharer in the national independence. It has been said that the
South was fighting for liberty, but the South was already a sharer in the
national liberty. It has been said that the South was fighting for the right to
govern itself, but the South had already the ballot and the right to govern
itself. What more could it want? What more did it want?
If we would know the answer to these inquiries we have only to read the
utterances of Alexander H. Stephens, the Vice President of the Southern
Confederacy, the clearest headed statesman on that side of the question.
From him we shall learn that the great and all-commanding object for
which the South withdrew from the Senate to the field, appealed from the
deliberations of reason to the arbitrament of the sword, from debate to
bayonets, from the ballot to the battle field, was to found and erect a
government based upon the idea of a privileged class, of inequality of
natural rights, and of the rightfulness of slavery.20Douglass probably alludes to Alexander H. Stephens’s intensively reasoned, two-volume apologia for Southern secession, published several years after the Civil War. Although Stephens defended the institution of slavery in this work, he mainly emphasized constitutional arguments justifying the creation of the Confederacy. Alexander H. Stephens, , 2 vols. (Philadelphia, 1868-70); Rudolph von Abele, (New York, 1946), 270-76.
Most of the rebellions and uprisings in the history of nations have been
for freedom, and not for slavery. They have found their mainspring and
power among the lowly. But here was a rebellion, not for freedom, but for
slavery, not to break fetters, but to forge them, not to secure the blessings of
liberty, but to bind with chains millions of the human race. It was not from
the low, but from the high, not from the plebeian, but from the patrician,
not from the oppressed, but from the oppressor.
For this, and only for this, we lost millions of treasure and rivers of
blood. For this, and only for this, the beautiful South was made desolate;
the nation weighed down under a debt heavier than a mountain of gold, and
half a million of our sons and brothers swept into bloody graves.
Fellow citizens: I am not indifferent to the claims of a generous forgetfulness,
but whatever else I may forget, I shall never forget the difference
between those who fought for liberty and those who fought for slavery;
those who fought to save the Republic and those who fought to destroy it.
We are sometimes asked “What was gained by the suppression of this
slave-holding rebellion?” and whether it is worth what it cost? It had
perhaps better be asked, what we should have lost had we failed to suppress
the rebellion? In what condition would this country be with the lower half
of the Mississippi in the hands of a foreign and hostile power? Who can
paint the horrors of wars and incursions which would have reddened the
line running east and west, separating two governments, one based upon
Liberty and Equality, and the other upon Slavery and race inferiority?
Would not the raw edges of such a line be always chafing and bleeding?
Heavy as has been the cost of the war would not a heavier one have fallen
upon the country had the war failed?
Fellow Citizens: You lament, I lament, and we all lament the war
forced upon us by the propagandists of slavery and caste. Your hearts ache
in the contemplation of its dreadful hardships and horrors, for war here, as
elsewhere, was a vast and terrible calamity.
But to estimate properly what was lost and what was gained, a more
comprehensive generalization than present space will permit is required.
If the existence of society is more than the lives of individual men: if all
history proves that no great addition has ever been made to the liberties of
mankind, except through war; if the progress of the human race has been
disputed by force and it has only succeeded by opposing force with force; if
nations are most effectively taught righteousness by affliction and suffering;
if the eternal laws of rectitude are essential to the preservation, happiness
and perfection of the human race; if there is anything in the world
worth living for, fighting for and dying for, the suppression of our rebellion
by force was not only a thing right and proper in itself but an immense and
immeasurable gain to our country and the world. Had that rebellion suc-
ceeded with all its malign purposes, what then would have become of our
grand example of free institutions, of what value then would have been our
government of the people by the people and for the people?21Douglass adapts the final sentence of Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address. Basler, , 7: 21. What ray of
light would have been left above the horizon, to kindle the first hope of the
toiling millions in Europe? Every despot in the Old World would have seen
in our manifest instability of government, a new and powerful argument in
favor of despotic power.
A failure to suppress this rebellion would not only have lost us prestige
abroad, but it would have entailed upon us innumerable and intolerable
troubles at home. Successful wickedness is contagious and repeats itself.
Jefferson Davis and his rebellion successful, would have prepared the way
for other rebels and traitors. Instead of our rival and hostile confederacy, in
that case, this great country would have in time become divided, torn and
rent into numerous petty states, each warring upon and devouring the
substance of the other. So this great war of ours may have saved us many
wars.
It is said that we might have lived in peace with the so-called Confederate
States of America.
To my mind such peace would have been impossible. If we could have
lived in peace in separation, as contended, separation itself would have
been impossible. If we could not live in peace when we were citizens of the
same country, under the same flag, participating in the same government,
with the same powerful national motives for cultivating friendly and fraternal
relations, it is not reasonable to suppose that peace and amity would
spring up between us under separate governments, based upon diametri-
cally opposite principles.
To us the suppression of the rebellion means peace, nationality, liberty,
and progress. It means the everlasting exclusion from the entire borders of
the Republic of that system of barbarism which gave birth to the rebellion,
a system which branded our Declaration of Independence as a lie, our
civilization as a sham, our religion as a mockery, and made our name a
byword and a hissing among all the nations of the earth.22A rough paraphrase of Deut. 28: 37.
In a speech delivered recently in the city of New Orleans Mr. Jefferson
Davis made the following statement:
“As for me—I speak only for myself—our course was so just, so
sacred, that, had I known all that has come to pass, had I known what was
to be inflicted upon me, all that my country was to suffer, all that our
posterity was to endure, I would do it over and over again.”23Douglass quotes an address by Jefferson Davis, delivered at a meeting “in aid" of the Southern Historical Society, at the French Opera House in New Orleans, Louisiana, on 25 April 1882. New Orleans (La.) , 26 April 1882; New York , 30 April 1882. (Great
applause).
When we see sentiments like these emanating from Southern men and
rapturously applauded by admiring assemblies of the people we may well
enough keep in mind the principles and benefits which we sought to sustain,
and did sustain, in our contest with that slaveholding rebellion.
But what of the emancipated class? How stands the case with them today?
Has liberty been a blessing or a curse? Has their freedom been a credit
or a calamity to them? I admit that on the surface there are some reasons for
asking these questions; but plainly enough they are superficial reasons and
are derived from shallow and imperfect reflection.
Unquestionably the condition of the freedman is not what it ought to
be, but the cause of their affliction is not to be found in their present
freedom, but in their former slavery. It does not belong to the present, but to
the past. They were emancipated under unfavorable conditions. They were
literally turned loose, hungry and naked, to the open sky. They had neither
home, friends nor money. Such was their destitution at the start that their
enemies consoled themselves with the thought that hunger and exposure
would soon thin them out, and possibly destroy them altogether. Those
who now carp at their destitution, and speak of them with contempt, should
judge them leniently, and measure their progress, not from the heights to
which they may in time attain, but from the depths from which they have
come. They have perished neither from cold nor hunger, and from the last
United States census we learn that their increase is ten per cent; greater than
that of the native white population of the South.24The U.S. Census of 1880 reported a national differential in rates of population growth over the previous decade of 29 and 34 percent for whites and blacks, respectively. U.S. Bureau of the Census, (Washington, D.C., 1883), 333.
Twenty-five years ago no child of these people was permitted to attend
school and learn to read; now there are two hundred thousand of these
children attending school.25The U.S. Census of 1880 reported an average daily attendance of 470,191 black pupils in the former Confederate states while the United States commissioner of education, also in 1880, accounted for a black school enrollment of 784,709 in what were formerly slave states. U.S. Bureau of the Census, , 1641; (Washington, D.C. 1882), lvii. The time would fail me to tell of the various
efforts now being made to improve the condition of the emancipated class,
and to place them within the range of an equal chance in the race of life, and
to tell you how the opportunities now afforded them are embraced, appreciated
and improved.
While, as most of you know, my whole life has been devoted to the
work of abolishing slavery and to the further work of making a favorable
impression for the colored race, on the minds of the American people,
when freedom came to the enslaved in the sudden and startling manner in
which it did come, I was oppressed with serious doubts and fears that they
might in some way in the intoxication of their new freedom, damage their
cause and invite destruction. The transition from slavery to freedom, from
political degradation to political equality, from abject dependence to personal
responsibility and self reliance, is seldom made without suffering.
What has happened in the West Indies, what has happened in Russia was
naturally expected to happen here. But happily for us, the trouble here has
not been so great as in either of the countries named.
For one, I am not so much surprised by the short-comings of the
emancipated race, as by their successes; I do not despair, no man should
despair of a people whom neither slavery nor freedom can kill. No man
should despair of a race that, in the face of a prejudice and a hate, more
active, intense and bitter, than ever assailed California Chinamen, border
Indians, or Russian Jew, has risen from the ashes of utter destitution, and
increased the numbers ten per cent; beyond that of people in the most
favored conditions.
On an occasion like this, it should not be forgotten that these emancipated
people, who are often so harshly criticized were the only friends the
loyal nation had in the South during the war.
They were eyes to our blind, legs to our lame, guides to our wounded
and escaping prisoners, and often supplied information to our generals,
which prevented the slaughter of thousands. It should also not be forgotten
that, when permitted to do so, they enrolled themselves as soldiers of the
Republic, and did their duty like brave men. They did not suppress your
rebellion, but they did help you to suppress it.
Fellow citizens; My sympathies are not limited by my relation to any
race. I can take no part in oppressing and persecuting any variety of the
human family. Whether in Russia, Germany or California, my sympathy is
with the oppressed, be he Chinaman or Hebrew.
I have no sympathy with the narrow, selfish notion of economy which
assumes that every crumb of bread which goes into the mouths of one class
is so much taken from the mouths of another class; and hence, I can not join
with those who would drive the Chinaman from our borders.
Fellow citizens, in conclusion, I would bring you back to what I
consider grand and sacred local duty, and that is, the erection here in
Rochester of some monument of bronze, marble or granite, which shall
commemorate to after-coming generations, the unfaltering courage, the
unswerving fidelity, the heroic self-sacrifice, of your sons and brothers,
during the late war.26A monument to the Civil War dead was dedicated on 30 May 1892 at Washington Square. Douglass attended the ceremonies at which President Benjamin Harrison was also present. Blake McKelvey, (Cambridge, Mass., 1956). 9-10; New York , 31 May 1892. Rochester is a luminous point in Western New York,
and is seen alike by the lakes and by the ocean. It is fit and proper that she
should have a monument to the virtues developed in her in the momentous
crisis wherein was involved the life and death, the salvation and destruction
of the Republic. This monument, symmetrical and beautiful, would be a
just tribute to the dead, and a noble inspiration to the living. It would stand
before your people mute but eloquent—a sacred object around which your
children and your children’s children could rally, and draw high inspiration
of patriotism and self-sacrifice by studying the deeds of their fathers,
which saved their country to peace, to union and to liberty.