The Final Test of Self-government: An Address Delivered in Rochester, New York, on November 13, 1864
THE FINAL TEST OF SELF-GOVERNMENT:
AN ADDRESS DELIVERED IN ROCHESTER, NEW YORK,
ON 13 NOVEMBER 1864
Philadelphia Press, 19 November 1864 and Rochester Democrat, 14 November 1864.
Other texts in Baltimore American and Commercial Advertiser, 19 November 1864; Liber-
ator, 25 November 1864; National Anti-Slavery Standard, 26 November 1864; Boston
Commonwealth, 26 November 1864; Peoria (Ill.) Daily Transcript, 29 November 1864.
The recent victories of Union armies in the South and the reelection of
Abraham Lincoln less than a week before provided a jubilant backdrop for
Douglass as he prepared to embark on a lecture tour that would take him back
to his native state of Maryland for the first time in twenty-six years. Douglass
addressed the meaning of the presidential election when he spoke to a “large
congregation” that gathered at Spring Street A. M. E. Zion Church in
Rochester at 2:30 P.M. on Sunday, 13 November 1864. The Rochester Demo-
crat, which published those remarks, noted, however, that they comprised
only “the closing words of Mr. Douglass’ discourse.” According to that
paper, the speaker had begun by referring “with deep feeling to his visit to
Baltimore this week, where he will address and congratulate on its deliv-
erance from bondage, the city where he once toiled as a slave.” Although the
Democrat did not publish Douglass’s opening words, other newspapers over
the next two weeks did reprint a stenographically recorded text of what they
identified as Douglass’s remarks when he took leave of his friends at Zion
Church on 13 November. Several of these later accounts, which also reported
Douglass’s Baltimore appearances, state that he spoke in the “evening,” but
no evidence has been found for a second meeting at the church on that Sunday.
Since the widely circulated passage corresponds to the Democrat’s descrip-
tion of the part of the afternoon speech that it omitted, it is included here as the
introduction to Douglass’s address. Rochester Democrat, 12 November 1864.
What a wonderful change a few short years have wrought! I left Maryland a
slave. I return to her a freeman! I left her a slave State. I return to find her
clothed in her new garments of Liberty and Justice, a free State!1In a referendum on 12 October 1864, Maryland voters approved a new state constitution by a narrow majority of 263 out of 59,973 ballots cast. The fifth article of the constitution declared: “Hereafter, in this State, there shall be neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except in punishment of crime, whereof the party shall have been duly convicted; and all persons held to service or labor, as slaves, are hereby declared free." The new constitution went into effect on 1 November 1864, after challenges to the legality of absentee ballots from soldiers had been overruled. Charles Lewis Wagandt, The Mighty Revolution: Negro Emancipation in Maryland, 1862-1864 (Baltimore, 1964), 223, 257- 64; Jean H. Baker, The Politics of Continuity: Maryland Political Parties from 1858 to 1870 (Baltimore, 1973), 104-06. My life
has had two crises—the day on which I left Maryland, and the day on
which I return. I expect to have a good old-fashioned visit, for I have not
been there for a long time. I may meet my old master there, whom I have
not seen for many years.2A reunion with Thomas Auld did not take place until 17 June 1877, when Douglass visited his childhood home in St. Michaels, Maryland. Dickson J. Preston, Young Frederick Douglass: The Maryland Years (Baltimore, 1980), 183-86. I heard he was living only a short time ago, and
he will be there, for he is on the right side. I made a convert of him years
ago! He was a very good man, with a high sense of honor, and I have no
malice to overcome in going back among those former slaveholders, for I
used to think that we were all parts of one great social system, only we were
at the bottom and they at the top! If the shackles were around our ankles,
they were also on their necks. The Common Council and city authorities
have promised to be present at the next meeting in Baltimore. I shall be glad
to see them. I shall return to them with freedom in my hand, and point to her
free Constitution, and as the olive branch was a sign that the waters of the
flood were retiring,3An allusion to the olive leaf brought back to Noah on his ark, signaling that the waters of the great flood were receding. Gen. 8: 11. so will the freedom which I shall find there be a sign
that the billows of slavery are rolling back to leave the land blooming again
in the purer air of Liberty and Justice.
(We meet here to-day under a condition of things which ought to excite
in every colored man’s heart the profoundest gratitude. Every man who has
labored and prayed for the deliverance of his country from the curse of
human bondage, should feel that he has not labored and prayed in vain.
The progress made, and the changes wrought in the fundamental ideas
and in the institutions of this country during the last two years, are vast and
wonderful. We have been living at an immense rate, and have hardly had
time to take breath and review the ground over which we have travelled.
The work of an age has been compressed into a day, and the wheel of events
has revolved so swiftly that the minds of immediate beholders are confused
and fail to comprehend them. Only after-generations will be able to con-
template intelligently the events of to-day, and appreciate their grand
significance.
Yet it is plain that our work is not yet done. We are still in motion, and
the question is where shall we stop? In what condition shall we be left when
the war is ended? Shall all progress cease as soon as the goading lash of
military necessity is withheld from our backs? Shall we lose all we have
gained? or shall we go forward till we gain all that the country requires?
I am free to say that I still press these questions with some anxiety. I
have never been among the most sanguine as to the final results of this war.
Neither have I been among those weak men who have despaired of the
Republic. Further am I now from that weakness than ever. If there ever was
a dark day in the history of this war, that day of darkness is past. Whether
we consult the civil or military aspect of affairs, the national situation is
equally encouraging, cheering and hopeful. We may all breathe freer to-
day than we did last Sunday. A heavy weight has been rolled from the heart
of the nation. The winter of our discontent has been made glorious sum-
mer—all the clouds that lowered about our house are “in the deep bosom
of the ocean buried.”4Douglass quotes Richard III, act 1. sc. 1, lines 1-4.
We have just passed through another Presidential election, the most
momentous and solemn that ever occurred in our country or in any other.5In the presidential election of 8 November 1864, Lincoln gained a resounding electoral victory over the Democratic candidate, General George B. McClellan, taking 212 votes to his opponent's 21. The popular vote was much closer, Lincoln receiving 2,206,938 votes and McClellan 1,803,787. W. Dean Burnham, Presidential Ballots: 1836-1892 (Baltimore, 1955), 247, 888.
All elections are important in this country, especially are all Presidential
elections so, but this election was one to determine the question of life or
death to the nation. Other elections have arisen, and have been settled as to
the proper management of the ship of State. The question in this contest
was whether we should, with our own hands, scuttle the ship and send her
to the bottom.6Viewed by many Northerners as a document intimating permanent disunion, the Democratic platform of 1864, written largely by Peace Democrats, declared “that after four years of failure to restore the Union by the experiment of war, . . . justice, humanity, liberty, and the public welfare demand that immediate efforts be made for a cessation of hostilities, with a view of an ultimate convention of the States, . . . to the end that, at the earliest practicable moment, peace may be restored on the basis of the Federal Union of the States.“ The party's standard-bearer, General George B. McClellan, supported by the War Democrats, rejected the notion of the war as a “failure” but supported negotiations and promised that “when any one state is willing to return to the Union, it should be received at once, with a full guarantee of all its constitutional rights." Allan Nevins, The War for the Union, 4 vols. (New York, 1959-71), 4: 98-103; Donald Bruce Johnson, comp., National Party Platforms, 2 vols. (Urbana, Ill., 1978), 1: 34; William Starr Myers, A Study in Personality: George Brinton McClellan (New York, 1934), 456-57.
This election, I hold, was the final test of our fitness for self-
government. The friends of Republican Government throughout the world
must have viewed it in that light—and will now rejoice in the result—
while all the advocates of caste, of aristocratic pretensions, of despotic
Government, of limiting the power of the people, all who are for King-craft
and priest-craft, will be rebuked and chagrined by the result.
The enemies of human liberty, both in our own country and in others,
watched last Tuesday in hope to see the Great Republic of this country
commit suicide, and smiled at the prospect; but the people have rebuked
those enemies who looked and hoped thus for our national ruin.
First—The election was a peaceful one. There was much in the out-
look during the last fortnight to awaken the most painful apprehension. The
cry had gone forth from one of the great parties that it would have a “Free
ballot or a free fight.” It was a brutal threat, and was taken up by all that
was [were] brutal and blood-thirsty amongst us. Secret associations had
been formed, and hundreds of thousands of dollars were expended for arms
and ammunition to be used, not against rebels and traitors, but, in a
contingency, against the breasts of loyal and patriotic men. The frauds and
conspiracies, baffled and exposed, made their votaries desperate and dan-
gerous. But in spite of all, the election was a peaceful one, and in this was a
grand triumph.7Douglass alludes to the so-called Election-Day plot, schemes by Confederates and Copperheads to disrupt the national election of 1864 through major disturbances in Chicago and New York and diversionary ones in Cleveland and Boston. In Illinois, Southern sympathizers and Confederates operating from Canada intended to damage local telegraph and railroad lines, seize Camp Douglas, a loosely guarded prison camp outside of Chicago, and liberate its eight to nine thousand prisoners. The commander of Camp Douglas, Captain Benjamin Jeffrey Sweet, thwarted the plot by reorganizing his secret service and planting spies among the prisoners and in various state lodges of the Sons of Liberty, a Copperhead organization. On the Sunday before the election soldiers raided the meeting places of the conspirators, discovered a large cache of arms and ammunition, and arrested several of the principal plotters. In New York, conspirators led by Colonel Robert M. Martin and James A. McMasters, a local editor, planned to set fires at strategic points throughout the city, seize government buildings, and release Confederate prisoners at Fort Lafayette. Believing that they had the support of twenty thousand well-armed men within the city and that Governor Horatio Seymour would not send in the militia to put down the disorder, they arranged to procure incendiary devices and decided on Election Day, 8 November, for their maneuvers. However, on 5 November, after having received information on the conspiracy, General Benjamin F. Butler and ten thousand troops arrived in New York City with orders to suppress any sign of rebellion. On 7 November, the New York conspirators, chastened and demoralized, abandoned their plans. The Ohio and Massachusetts disruptions never materialized. Wood Gray, The Hidden Civil War: The Story of the Copperheads (New York, 1942), 206-07; George Fort Milton, Abraham Lincoln and the Fifth Column (New York, 1942), 323-33; Nevins, War for the Union, 4: 131-34; Oscar A. Kinchen, Confederate Operations in Canada and the North: A Little-Known Phase of the American Civil War (North Quincy, Mass., 1970), 148-63. Had it been otherwise that great political element which
held itself in permanent session might have been called together for the
purposes which led it to continue its organization.
Second—The people vindicated their wisdom as well as their pa-
triotism by the election. The question was one of life and death. The issue
was never more squarely and directly presented. Slavery and anarchy were
ranged on one side and Liberty and order on the other. Between them the
people have chosen, and have chosen wisely and well. Your patriotic voter
at home and your brave sons and brothers on the battle-field, the one by
means of the peaceful ballot, the other by means of the peace-making
bullet, have dealt stunning blows on the head of this most wicked of all
wicked rebellions. What you have now done at the polls, and what the loyal
armies are doing in the field, vindicates man’s right to govern himself by
showing him capable of self-government.
The best argument advanced for the reign of anarchy and slavery was
the deceptive one that the war had failed to suppress these two destructive
forces. In letter this argument is true, but in spirit utterly false; and the
people scouted the letter and denounced the falsehood, refusing even to
follow truth when made thus to serve a lie. The war was a failure only when
conducted by those who predicted its failure, and who wished it to fail.
I have said that this election was the final test of our national fitness for
self -government: I believe it. There can never come a more trying one. We
have passed the ordeal and have come out of it like pure gold. We have had
many victories on the battle-field, some of them vast and glorious; but
since the war begun we have gained no victories on the field of battle and
blood half so great and glorious as that won last Tuesday at the peaceful
ballot-box.
Nevertheless, the war is still upon us, and is very properly the all
absorbing and all controlling thought of the nation. I value much this
intense concentration of national thought. It is a profound solicitude, one
which has never slumbered since the first shot struck the granite walls of
Sumpter.8Fort Sumter. In this all absorbing and all commanding thought for the safety
of the country, we have a solid guarantee, that we shall come out of this
fiery contest a redeemed and purified nation.
A man is never lost while he still earnestly thinks himself worth saving;
and as with a man, so with a nation.
Those among us who have fallen so low as to deny the value of their
own Government and to think it might be dispensed with, have found the
country entertaining a similar opinion respecting themselves! Let me not
mispresent, however. These men profess to desire the Union. I grant it. But
what kind of a Union do they by their own confession demand? They want
no Union cemented with human Liberty. That they hold to be a dreadful
calamity. What they want is, a Union held together by the blood of the
slaves.
It is the joy of the hour that the country has rebuked this shocking
profanity and sent its authors to their own place.
I take his election to mean:
First—That the American people are capable of governing themselves
in the most exciting and trying circumstances which can possibly arise to
test their capacity.
Second—I take it to mean that the people have a true idea of what is
becoming the majesty of insulted law, and will not return the sword to its
scabbard until the rebels shall disband their armies and lay down their
arms.
Third—I hold it to be an endorsement, full and complete, of all the
leading measures inaugurated by the present Administration, looking to the
final extirpation of slavery from our land.
Fourth—It means that the Constitution of the United States shall be
so changed that slavery can never again exist in any part of the United
States.
So much, I think, has been decided by the election of last Tuesday. That
I am not mistaken in this, you have only to refer to the nature of the
canvass.
You will bear me witness that on the part of the opponents of the
Administration, next to the cry that the war is a failure, there was none so
freely and so generally used as the cry against the negroes. Relying upon all
that is mean, base, selfish, narrow, proud, bigoted, vulgar to the public
mind, they hoped to excite popular opposition by fastening upon the Union
party the charge of being an abolition party. The people heard it all, and
saw it all, and have accepted it all. They are the abolition party. The wily
pro-slavery orators and unscrupulous pro-slavery editors have charged the
Union party with being a negro party, and the people have answered, “we
are not ashamed of the negro.”9Democratic pamphleteers and orators had leveled these charges against the Republicans since before the Civil War. In some of the more vitriolic speeches and literature, critics not only portrayed the Republicans as friends and supporters of blacks but also intimated that many Republicans were themselves of African extraction and sought black dominance of the nation. Frank Freidel, ed., Union Pamphlets of the Civil War, 1861-1865, 2 vols. (Cambridge, Mass, 1967), 2: 980-81, 994.
All the negro minstrels, all the low clowns of the circus, all the buf-
foons of the theatre, all the rowdies in the street, all the gambling hells of
our cities, were endeavoring to manufacture a sentiment in favor of the vile
slaveholding traitors, and against the Union party, and the people have
despised and rebuked them all. Yet, my friends, we are not out of danger.
We are still in the midst of war, and war at the best of it is an eclipse, an hour
of darkness and uncertainty. Our enemy is still in the field, and the loyal
people are scanning the horizon for the first gray streak above the hills. We
are impatient for the dawn. The lightning itself, flashing everywhere
athwart the continent, is not swift enough with the news of campaigns,
marches, sieges, battles and blood-bought victories.
We look and long for peace. It is natural and creditable that such is the
fact. War is an evil—a terrible evil. It has planted agony at a million
hearthstones in our land, and mantled our country all over with the shadow
of death. We would stop this terrible havoc and dreadful effusion of blood:
but we know, as Henry Winter Davis10Politician Henry Winter Davis (1817-65) was born in Annapolis, Maryland, and educated at Kenyon College and the University of Virginia. An intense opponent of the Democratic party, Davis first joined the Whigs and, after their dissolution, the Know-Nothings, under whose banner he first represented Maryland in Congress (1855-61). In 1859 he switched his allegiance to the Republican party and, much to his native state’s chagrin, vocally and vehemently opposed secession. Defeated for reelection as a Unionist in 1861, Davis returned to the House in 1863-65, where, as a Radical Republican, he co-authored the Wade-Davis bill (1864). A staunch supporter of the Union, Davis labored in Congress for the emancipation and enlistment of slaves. Gerald S. Henig, Henry Winter Davis: Antebellum and Civil War Congressman from Maryland (New York, 1973); Raymond W. Tyson, “Henry Winter Davis: Orator for the Union," Maryland Historical Magazine, 58: 1-19 (March 1963); Herman Belz, “Henry Winter Davis and the Origins of Congressional Reconstruction," Maryland Historical Magazine, 67: 129-43 (Summer 1972); David C. Roller and Robert W. Twyman, eds., The Encyclopedia of Southern History (Baton Rouge, 1979), 331-32; BDAC, 783; NCAB, 2: 458; ACAB, 2: 97-98; DAB, 5: 119-21. has expressed it, peace is to be
found only at the other side of the battle-field.)11From Rochester Democrat, 14 November 1864.