New Hampshire for the Republicans: An Address Delivered in Concord, New Hampshire, on February 26, 1875
NEW HAMPSHIRE FOR THE REPUBLICANS:
AN ADDRESS DELIVERED IN CONCORD, NEW HAMPSHIRE,
ON 26 FEBRUARY 1875
Concord (N.H.) Daily Monitor, 27 February 1875.
On the evening of 27 February 1875 in Concord’s Phenix Hall, Douglass
addressed a Republican rally as he had a few days earlier in Lancaster and
Manchester. Phenix Hall was filled to capacity and “hundreds more were
unable to gain admission.” The local press declared, “We have seen many
large audiences gathered in this city in political campaigns in past years,
especially during the years of the rebellion, but never such an audience as
gathered last evening to greet Frederick Douglass.” Moses Humphrey called
the meeting to order at 7:30 P.M. and Congressman Mason W. Tappan deliv-
ered the first address. Douglass, who followed, “was received with tremen-
dous applause, and the waving of handkerchiefs by the hundreds of ladies
present.” At the time of the address, Douglass was suffering from a “severe
cold,” which made it difficult for him to be heard, but as he spoke his “voice
improved, and he was listened to with the closest attention.” The rally con-
cluded with music by Brown’s Cornet Bands and “with three cheers for the
whole Republican ticket, and three cheers for Frederick Douglass.”
Mr. Douglass commenced by expressing the pleasure he felt in appearing
before them, and regretted that the hard work of the campaign had se-
riously impaired his voice. Years ago he had appeared before them as a
fugitive slave,1Douglass is known to have spoken in Concord, New Hampshire, in February 1844 and in June 1845. Both dates predated the purchase of his freedom in 1847. advocating the cause of the slave, but to-night he addressed
them as an American citizen, having a common interest with all other
citizens in the peace, prosperity and permanence of the republic. (Loud
applause.) He little thought 32 years ago that any such audience as that now
assembled, would listen to anything he might have to say on any subject, or
that he should even meet the noble youth he then saw at Bradford, studying
law and playing the fiddle, as an honored member of Congress from the
State of New Hampshire.2Mason Weare Tappan. I then little thought that at first sound of the
trumpet, he would, in the front rank of battle, do as much honor to the
State, as he had done to himself and country. I did not think I should ever
address a Concord audience with him as the honored Chairman. Little, too,
did I think 32 years ago, when I went down to Peterborough, and was
welcomed to the home of Mr. Cheney,3Douglass is not known to have spoken in New Hampshire in 1843, but he did speak there in February, September, and December 1844. On one of those occasions Douglass might have visited with Moses Cheney (1793-1875), a paper manufacturer and member of the antislavery Free Will Baptist denomination. Cheney was born in Thorton, New Hampshire, and lived and worked most of his life in Holderness in the same state, except for a residence in Peterborough from 1835 to 1845. Charles Henry Pope, The Cheney Genealogy (Boston, 1897), 489-93; Sobel and Raimo, Biographical Directory of U.S. Governors, 3: 970. that I saw then and there a boy,
father to the man, who is soon to be Governor of New Hampshire.4The son of Moses Cheney, Persons Colby Cheney (1828-1901) was born in Holderness, New Hampshire, and followed his father into the paper manufacturing industry at the age of seventeen. While still pursuing his business interests, Cheney steadily rose in influence in the New Hampshire Republican party, serving as state representative (1854-55), state railroad commissioner (1864-67), and mayor of Manchester (1871-72). In the 1875 gubernatorial election Cheney received only a plurality of votes, but the legislature awarded him the office. He was reelected by a three-thousand-vote majority the following year. Cheney later served briefly as a U.S. senator (November 1886-June 1887) and as U.S. minister to Switzerland (1892-93). Pope, Cheney Genealogy, 532-33; Sobel and Raimo, Biographical Directory of U.S. Governors, 3: 970; BDAC, 686; DAB, 4: 54-55.
The speaker then, in eloquent terms, congratulated the audience upon
the splendid achievement, though at fearful cost, of the abolition of slavery
throughout the United States. Under slavery the republic drifted like a
rudderless ship, without chart, compass, or pilot, with no port in view, and
its free institutions doomed to certain death. The abolition of slavery,
however, had given new life to these institutions. (Loud applause.) The
foul, haggard, and damning curse of slavery had made the nation a source
of dangerous solicitude to its friends, and of satisfaction to the crowned
heads of Europe, and had tended to utterly destroy the moral influence of
our country in the government of the world. Let us rejoice then, that that
infamy has been washed away, but alas! at what fearful cost of blood and
treasure. History proclaimed the sad fact that even the least concession to
right and justice was only permanently established at fearful cost. Eighty
years of war and persecution, of terrible legal murders, martyrdom, and
tortures had to be gone through to establish the fundamental rights of
religious liberty in Europe and this country.5An allusion to the Spanish-Dutch wars between 1566 and 1648. So with regard to the eman-
cipation of the slave. In the future the people of New Hampshire would
wonder how the American people came to differ in regard to the simple
truth asserted by the abolitionists, viz: that a man is himself. Pro-slavery
people said: No, a man is not himself, and if you say he is himself, we, with
bloody hands, will destroy this republic; if you elect a President supposed
to sympathize with the idea that every man belongs to himself, then we will
fight. That was the origin of the war; that was the issue involved in it.
He then drew a graphic picture of the mourning, distress, and desola-
tion with which the country was filled during that tremendous struggle for
national life, and portrayed the ecstatic sense of relief which came to all
loyal hearts when victory at last perched on the flag of the Union. He
proceeded to say, I am here, my friends, to ask you to see to it that this inch
of progress, wrested from the clutch of barbarism, shall be so conserved by
the voters of New Hampshire on the 9th of March,6A gubernatorial and congressional election took place in New Hampshire on Tuesday, 9 March 1875. that the whole country
shall know that New Hampshire, as in the hour of battle and danger, is now,
as he trusted she ever would be, on the side of human progress. (Deafening
applause.) He was not here to ask them to revive the flames of sectional
animosity or to study revenge, but for the sacred purpose of aiding in
establishing peace on a sure foundation—not a peace which rested on one
man’s standing on the neck of another, but a peace which arises out of equal
justice and equal rights to all. Such was the only peace worth having, and
this country could never see any solid peace while any class was trampled
in the dust, or while social rights were guaranteed to one class, and denied
to another. We could not, if we would, wholly forget the past, for man by
his nature, must necessarily look before and after, and every great event in
history left some of its traces in the present, and signally did that great
struggle which swept into bloody graves nearly half a million of men.
Therefore we should study the lessons it taught us.
It was said that we Republicans had violated the constitution in using
the strong arm of the federal government in repressing lawlessness in the
South. But those who said this, without the least scruple had used the same
means for the spread and maintenance of slavery. A Democratic President
sent soldiers into Boston to drag back into the hell of slavery that noble
fugitive, Anthony Burns, who was free, first by nature, and second by his
own heroism. No Democratic politician or paper had any protest to make to
such use of federal troops. After instancing the heroic exploits of Capt.
John Brown, he said: While slavery was the base line, it was considered
perfectly constitutional for the military power to be used to hand John
Brown over to the hangman. But now when Gen. Grant sends gallant Phil
Sheridan to New Orleans (cheers) to repress Southern violence, they called
it unconstitutional—worse than that—“Centralization.”7In late December 1874, President Grant sent General Philip Sheridan to inspect conditions in the South, especially in Louisiana, which had experienced a year of racial violence and political confusion. Ever since the massacre of over seventy blacks at Colfax in Grant Parish on Easter Sunday (13 April 1873), organized white violence against blacks, led by the powerful White League, had increased, especially in rural areas, and often went unpunished. Although the administration of Governor William Kellogg was nominally the legitimate government, his opponent in the 1872 gubernatorial election, John McEnery, continued to contest the results and actually convened a dual government, complete with a lieutenant governor and legislature, which met irregularly in New Orleans. McEnery's faction evinced its strength and the depth of polarization in Louisiana when in early September 1874 his government's militia overpowered that of the Kellogg administration in the streets of New Orleans and actually occupied the city until federal troops restored it to Kellogg on 18 September. The election of 1874 only exacerbated the tensions. The Returning Board did not issue the results until 24 December. Despite its domination by Republicans and the liberal use of fraud, it certified fifty-three Republicans to face fifty-three Democrats in the state house of representatives while leaving to that body the decision on the remaining five seats. Three days after General Sheridan's arrival on 1 January 1875, when the new legislature met for the first time, a coup of the Democrats followed closely by a countercoup of the Republicans requiring federal troops shook the State House. Sheridan, who stated in a letter that “the lives of citizens have become so jeopardized that unless something is done to give protection . . . all security usually afforded by law will be overridden,” quickly decided that conditions in New Orleans required his command of the city with federal troops. Taylor, Louisiana Reconstructed, 267-307; Sefton, United States Army and Reconstruction, 238-39; Du Bois, Black Reconstruction, 42; Vincent, Black Legislators in Louisiana, 185. (Laughter.) If
however, the American people could stand centralization for slavery, they
could stand centralization for liberty. I have no fear of centralization while
the ballot is in the hands of the American people. That would keep every-
thing within constitutional limits.
Another charge against the Republican party is that they have a bill
pending in the Senate, to establish social equality.8Douglass alludes to the legislation in Congress that eventually became the Civil Rights Act of 1875. Originally introduced in May 1870 by U.S. Senator Charles Sumner, the measure sought to guarantee equal access to public accommodations and facilities to all citizens, regardless of race. The bill finally passed Congress in February 1875 after provisions requiring integration of schools and cemeteries had been removed. The U.S. Supreme Court declared the law unconstitutional in an October 1883 decision that Douglass bitterly denounced. ESH, 217. What is social equality?
In what does it consist? Where does it begin and where does it end? He
confessed he hardly knew. He knew what social inequality was, and had
known it for a good while. They had a great deal of it where he came from.
A great deal of the social, but no equality. I never heard of any Democrat
denouncing the social relations of the South while slavery existed. Now
there was such a thing as social inequality there. If you don’t believe it, take
two facts. Two hundred years ago the Mayflower brought to Plymouth a
company of white persons, and the same year a Dutch galliot landed at
Jamestown a company of colored persons. There were no intermediate
races then. During all the time since we had had slavery, and social in-
equality. Out of that social inequality there had come a million and a half of
intermediates.9A visual appraisal of the presence of racially mixed blood was the method used by the U.S. census enumerators to determine the number of mulattoes in the nation's population. The census of 1870 gave a total of 584,000 mulattoes. Joel Williamson, New People: Miscegenation in the United States (New York, 1980), 24, 112-13. (Laughter and applause.) Now he never heard of any objec-
tion to social equality while that was going on. It was all right, perfectly
proper. That was social inequality. I am not here to find fault with this. I
accept the inevitable. It places me in a position where I can speak impar-
tially, at any rate. (Loud laughter and applause.) I hardly know which is
which, or which is the other. He then pointed out in a terse manner in what
social equality did or did not consist, and said all that the colored race
demanded was a guarantee of civil rights, and social equality would then
take care of itself. What they asked was only civil equality. He set forth the
improbabilities that the colored people, from their very nature, would be
changed from that docile and submissive attitude which they maintained
during the absence of their masters at the war, into the wolves and tigers
which they are represented to be by some of the white people of the South,
and the probabilities that their masters, inflamed by their resentment that
their former human chattels were now American citizens, and in some
instances holding offices, were purposely defaming the character of the
negro, in order thereby to reduce the colored people as nearly as possible to
a state of slavery.
Now, I ask you my friends, to protect these men. Not with guns. There
is a better way than that. I do not ask you to shoulder your muskets and to go
down South. You can protect them, if you like, by your moral influence, by
the power exerted by your ballots,—for every Democratic victory costs the
warm, dripping blood of my people, while every victory of the Republican
party helps to protect them in their little homes. When you vote for the
Republican party, you are doing something not merely for New Hamp-
shire, but for the whole Union; your vote either stanches the quick running
blood of the persecuted negro, or it opens new wounds in his body to bleed
afresh.
Thirty years ago, when I appealed to you for the American slave, your
sympathies were kindled, your moral indignation aroused, and your voice
went forth, and slavery fell. I come to ask for the same sympathy now, but
with additional claims. When the cloud of battle lowered upon the country,
and threatened to overwhelm us with defeat and disaster, Abraham Lincoln
called upon the negro to advance; and they came 200,000 strong, to the
defence of the flag. Not only because our cause is just, but because we did
this, I am emboldened to ask you that the liberty which you gave us in your
justice and magnanimity, you will now defend and protect, and maintain to
the end. Stand by us. I believe you will. I know you will. I feel it in my
bones. I was at Lancaster last night. The people were there. I was at
Manchester two nights ago. The people were there. I am at Concord to-
night, and the people are here.10In an effort to guarantee Republican victories in New Hampshire’s statewide elections, Douglass addressed large and enthusiastic crowds at Republican rallies in Manchester, Lancaster, Concord, and Dover. Douglass was well received in each city he visited, though there were conflicting reports concerning his reception at Manchester. The Concord Daily Monitor estimated the attendance of the rally held at the Smyth Opera House as “between three and four thousand people" and characterized Douglass's delivery as “eloquent.” The Manchester Daily Union, however, painted a very different picture, describing Douglass's address as “below the standard upon which he had been placed by the imagination of his hearers." The audience, according to this report, was “cold and restless" during the delivery. Concord (N.H.) Daily Monitor, 20, 24, 25, 26 February 1875; Manchester (N.H.) Daily Union, 25, 26 February 1875. (Loud cheers.) We have watered your soil
with our tears, drenched it with our blood, and tilled it with our hard hands,
and fought for your country, and we only ask to be treated as American
citizens; to be treated as well as those who fought against you. Don’t
punish your friends and reward your enemies; don’t lavish all your love
upon those who sought to cut the throat of the republic, but reserve a little
for those who tried to save it to the extent of their ability. (Loud and
prolonged applause.)