Let No One Be Excluded From the Ballot Box: An Address Delivered in Albany, New York, on November 20, 1866
LET NO ONE BE EXCLUDED FROM THE BALLOT BOX:
AN ADDRESS DELIVERED IN ALBANY, NEW YORK,
ON 20 NOVEMBER 1866
New York Tribune, 21 November 1866. Another text in Philip S. Foner, ed., Frederick
Douglass on Woman’s Rights (Westport, Conn., 1976), 78-80.
On 20-21 November 1866, the American Equal Rights Association spon-
sored a convention at Tweddle Hall in Albany, New York. The meeting was
directed at persuading the upcoming state convention, called to revise the
New York constitution, to incorporate an equal suffrage provision for blacks
and women. The convention drew many notables, besides Douglass, from the
antislavery and women’s rights movements including Susan B. Anthony,
Olympia Brown, Parker Pillsbury, Charles Remond, Elizabeth Cady Stanton,
and Lucy Stone. In the absence of the Association’s president, Lucretia Mott,
Stanton presided at the convention. Douglass served on the business commit-
tee and entered the floor debates that frequently arose around the question of
giving priority to obtaining black suffrage or woman suffrage. The remarks
appearing below were delivered at the end of the convention’s morning ses-
sion on the twentieth. Although unfriendly to the purposes of the convention,
the New York Herald labeled Douglass “the ablest, most dignified, and best
man in the body." NASS, 10, 17 November, 1 December 1866; New York
Herald, 21, 22 November 1866; New York Tribune, 22 November 1866.
MR. DOUGLASS said he had sometimes marveled that when men conceived
the idea of forming a government for the well-being and progress of soci-
ety, they ever attempted the experiment without the cooperation of woman.
It must have been in a paroxysm of vanity and self-importance that he
concluded that he could inaugurate and construct a Government without
her assistance. We do not construct a government because we are male or
female, but because we are human, because we are moral beings, capable
of being influenced in our conduct by hope and fear; because we are liable
to sin. By every fact to which man can appeal as a justification of his own
right to a ballot, a woman can also appeal with equal force.
Ours is called the best Government on earth—a masterpiece of states-
manship; and when men would be recondite as well as patriotic they
discourse learnedly of its admirable adjustments and balances. But it has its
defects; one of them this movement comes to remedy. It is weak, not
because it is a republican government, but because claiming to be re-
publican it has within itself so many anti-republican elements.
He feared the Convention, while claiming to be an “Equal Rights”
Convention was in danger of becoming merely a woman’s rights conven-
tion.1The call of the convention had been issued by officers of the American Equal Rights Association under the title "EQUAL RIGHTS CONVENTION FOR NEW-YORK STATE.” The call announced that the convention's intention was “to consider the question of so amending the [New York] Constitution as to secure the right of suffrage to all citizens, without distinctions of race or sex." New York Tribune, 21 November 1866. The women must take the negro by the hand. With them it is a
desirable matter; with us it is important; a question of life and death. With
us disenfranchisement means New-Orleans, it means Memphis, it means
New-York mobs,2Douglass refers to three major anti-black riots of the Civil War and immediate postwar era- the New York City riot of 13-16 July 1863, the Memphis riot of 1-3 May 1866, and the New Orleans riot of 30 July 1866. The Memphis riot began on 1 May 1866 when a group of recently discharged black soldiers attempted to prevent the arrest of two black men. After shots were exchanged, the police retreated. They returned that evening reinforced by a poorly organized sheriff's posse of two hundred men. Frustrated in their search for the soldiers involved in the afternoon’s incidents, the police and posse began assaulting any black person they could locate, including women, children, and old men. During the next two days, churches, schools, and homes in black neighborhoods of Memphis were burned and forty-six blacks were killed and an additional seventy-five injured. The local Union army commandant, General George Stoneman, allowed the riot to die out before sending troops into the areas. The northern Republican press strongly condemned the incident as evidence of southern white intransigence on the race question. Jack D. L. Holmes, “The Underlying Causes of the Memphis Race Riot of 1866," Tennessee Historical Quarterly, 17: 195-222 (September 1958); Thomas B. Alexander, Political Reconstruction in Tennessee (1950; New York, 1968), 54-57; Riddleberger, 1866: The Critical Year, 177-82. it means being driven from the workshops and the
schools. In some ways the men are compelled to protect the women; they
protect them from the motives both of politeness [and] affection; but my
race is hated, and in no proportion to the measure of the dislike is the
necessity of defense before and in the law. Nowhere in the world can
woman attain the elective franchise without lifting the negro with her. A
higher and holier element will be introduced into our politics whenever
either is led to the ballot-box.
Mr. Douglass then instanced and answered some of the stock objec-
tions to woman’s franchise. He did not see why a woman should be any less
womanly after walking to the polls with her husband, than after walking to
the Post-Office or to church with him. He demanded the ballot for woman
because she is a citizen, because she is subject to the laws, because she is
taxed, and because, if she commits crime, she must be arrested, tried,
convicted and punished like any other criminal. If we admit woman to be a
reasoning and responsible being, we admit the whole. Woman must be
harmoniously educated, and nothing but the ballot will give her an ade-
quate knowledge of politics. Then we shall have the light of her intellect
and the benefit of her remarkable intuition in our public affairs. In matters
of criticism he felt more confidence in a woman of good sense and taste
than in any man. Let woman go to the polls and express her will, and we
shall have different men and measures than we have now.
Mr. Douglass dissented from Mr. Pillsbury’s opinion that it was best to
dispense with invective. He could say “Copperhead” yet; and if Mr.
Pillsbury had become very loving all at once, he must have repented of his
sins.3During the morning session of the convention, both Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Parker Pillsbury had praised the support by several Democratic congressmen for women‘s rights and repudiated the further use of the epithet “Copperhead” to describe that party. For example, Pillsbury had declared “the equal suffrage party must deserve the sympathy, if it does not win the cooperation of all good and honest men; and this cannot be done if we do not show candor, sincerity and circumspection of speech and work." When Stanton had made a similar remark earlier that morning, Douglass had briefly taken the floor to characterize northern Democratic support for women's rights as “the trick of an enemy to assail and endanger the rights of black men. He [the northern Democrat] did it to make a point against the liberal policy of the Republicans and to shame them out of their anti-Slavery principles." New York Tribune, 21 November 1866; New York Herald, 21 November 1866. Love and hate involved each other.
He rejoiced at the assemblage to-day, meeting for a movement so
radical as this; it is auspicious of triumph. This infant being rocked in the
cradle to-day will ere long be a giant. He knew of no better thing to
bequeath to the children of this generation, than the prospect of someday
taking part in the Government under which they live.