The Issues of the Day: an Address Delivered in Washington, D.C., on March 10, 1866
THE ISSUES OF THE DAY: AN ADDRESS DELIVERED
IN WASHINGTON, DC, ON 10 MARCH 1866
New York Tribune, 12 March 1866.
After several “Copperhead proprietors” refused to rent their premises, the
National Equal Suffrage Association arranged to sponsor a lecture by Doug-
lass at the City Assembly Rooms on Louisiana Avenue at 7:30 P.M. on 10
March 1866. “Long continued applause” greeted Douglass after Con-
gressman William D. Kelley, president of the Association, introduced him.
When Douglass concluded his speech, George T. Downing, General Oliver
0. Howard, and Senators Richard Yates and Henry Wilson spoke briefly.
Kelley, who had introduced a petition signed by local black property owners
when House debate began in January 1866 on a bill to enfranchise the Dis-
trict’s blacks, closed the meeting to “go home and agitate, agitate for the
truth, until the truth prevails.” Washington Daily Morning Chronicle, 8, 10
March 1866; Washington Daily lntelligencer, 12 March 1866; NASS, 17
March 1866; Nashville Colored Tennessean, 31 March 1866; James H.
Whyte, The Uncivil War: Washington during the Reconstruction, 1865-1878
(New York, 1958), 50-52.
He began by referring to the agitation of the Slavery question which had
been going on for thirty years, and said that the first precept he ever learned
was, “servants be obedient to your masters.”1Variations of this injunction appear in Eph. 6: 5, Col. 3: 22. Titus 2: 9, and 1 Pet. 2: 18.
Some of the specious arguments of slaveholders in justification of
Slavery were presented by the speaker in such a manner as to elicit the
plaudits of his large audience. The war for the Union was begun by both
sections without reference to Slavery, and the North, which had professed
friendship for the bondmen, was forced to cry out, “Help me, negro, or I
sink.”2Douglass adapts Julius Caesar, act 1, sc. 2, line 113. The negro will work, as is proved by reports from all the Southern
States; and that he will fight has been satisfactorily demonstrated. For the
reason that he was servile, that struck upon one cheek he presented the
other,3An allusion to Matt. 5: 39 and Luke 6: 29. his former masters argued that he was naturally born a slave. The
speaker had frequently been asked why the negro did not rise in insurrec-
tion when in a state of Slavery? to which he had invariably answered,
“Because as both the North and the South were against him, he never had
any reasonable prospect of success.”
The negro is a permanent element of society, and cannot be colonized;
the American people cannot part with him in time of peace, for then his
labor is a positive necessity; nor in time of war, for then his finger of steel
and muscles of iron would be of invaluable service to the nation. It had
been argued by so called philosophers that the colored race must die out;
but the speaker was of the opinion that if Slavery had failed to accomplish
their extermination, so much desired by some, liberty would not. For 200
years the colored people of this country had moved among us as dwarfs;
with no education, no churches, no hope for the future. The speaker graphi-
cally pictured the horrors of Slavery with its concomitants, the lash, the
bloodhound, and the auction-block; and said that notwithstanding the
obstacles thrown in their way, the negroes had furnished “Uncle Toms” for
the Church, and Robert Smalls for the navy; comparisons had been made
between the Indian and the negro, and invariably favorable to the former;
but while the Indian shuns civilization, the negro is always found in the
vicinity of churches and schoolhouses.
The great question is, What relation to the whites of this country shall
the negro sustain? They should receive encouragement, and should be
taken by the hand and lifted bodily from the slough of mental and moral
degradation into which they have been submerged for the last 200 years.
Mr. Douglass claimed the right of suffrage for the negro, because
physically, intellectually, morally, and religiously he is a man, because he
is a citizen subject to the laws, and being thus amenable, desires the right
that will give some dignity to his citizenship. Congress has disregarded the
inhuman decision of a former Chief Justice with reference to the negro’s
status, and for one, he sustained Congress in its action.4Douglass refers to the Civil Rights Act of 1866, which the Senate passed on 2 February and the House of Representatives on 13 March. Negating Chief Justice Roger B. Taney’s opinion in the Dred Scott case (1857) that blacks could not hold federal citizenship, the act declared that “all persons born in the United States and not subject to any foreign power, excluding Indians not taxed," were citizens of the United States protected in their civil rights regardless of race, color, or “previous condition of slavery." Exclusive enforcement of the act's provisions was given to the federal courts. Vetoed by President Johnson on 27 March, the act was passed over his veto on 9 April. U.S. Statutes at Large, 14: 27; Patrick W. Riddleberger, 1866: The Critical Year Revisited (Carbondale, Ill., 1979), 86-104. Heretofore the
negro has had no inducements offered him to rise in the moral or mental
scale, but give him the elective franchise and he will elevate himself,
because he understands that something will be expected of him. He asks
enfranchisement because he is weak and needs protection, and because he
has earned it by coming to the rescue when the Nation was in deadly peril.
If we failed to reward the negro, for his services in the past, we could not
justly count upon him in the future. He claimed suffrage for the negro
because this is a Government based on universal suffrage. The doctrines of
the Declaration of Independence were not limited to men of any particular
class of [or?] color, but applied to all alike.
He here showed the dangers as well as the insecurities incorporated
into our system of government by retaining a discrimination disfranchising
a large portion of our citizens. Without the elective franchise, the negro
would still be practically a slave. Individual ownership has been abolished;
but if we restore the Southern States without this measure, we shall estab-
lish an ownership of the blacks by the communities among which they live.
It is necessary for the protection of our own white friends, the loyal men of
the South; it is necessary, too, because the blacks are the friends of the
Government, while the whites are generally its enemies. They hate the
Yankee and the Yankee Government. Every representative of the Govern-
ment is, and will be, a hated man. The whites of the South, with the
exception of the small minority of Union men, hate the Government of the
United States as Hungary hates Austria,5Douglass, who had publicly supported the goals of Louis Kossuth and his fellow Hungarian revolutionaries in 1848, alludes to the continuing expression of Magyar nationalism within the Austrian Empire that survived the overthrow of the Hungarian Republic in 1848 and that in 1867 would culminate in the restoration of the Hungarian constitution of 1848 and the creation of a less centralized union of Austria and Hungary. Under that arrangement the two states were united through the Hapsburg monarch (ruling as emperor of Austria and king of Hungary) and imperial ministries of foreign affairs, war, and finance but retained independence in domestic matters through separate constitutions and parliaments. Binkley, Realism and Nationalism, 230-41, 274-79; AAC, 1867, 74-78, 390-94. and will continue to hate it. Shall
we entrust political power to these enemies, and withhold it from the blacks
who are our friends?
He argued for suffrage, because the nation is in honor bound to enfran-
chise the negro. By emancipating him, the hatred of the master has been
provoked, he has lost the interest he formerly held in the slave as property,
and to leave the freedman without the protection afforded by the elective
franchise, would be to make him the helpless victim of the resentment we
have ourselves provoked.
The Speaker had heard a variety of reasons advanced against it since he
came to Washington, some of them very much in contradiction of the
others. The first reason he heard against it was at the White House.6Douglass refers to his 7 February 1866 interview with President Andrew Johnson. One of
the arguments advanced on that occasion was, that the Government had
already done enough for the negro. “You went into this war slaves,” it was
said, “and you came out free.” Mr. Johnson7President Andrew Johnson. assured the colored delega-
tion that if he had not already given them sufficient proof of his interest in
the welfare of their race by his past course, there was nothing he could say
to convince them of it. He told them how he had labored in their behalf;
how he had suffered and been persecuted, and almost died for them, and
then he turned right round and said he had done no such thing; for he said
the war was undertaken for the preservation of the Union, and that it was no
part of the intention of the Government, and, consequently no part of his
own intention, to emancipate the slaves. The several objections to the
enfranchisement of the negroes, urged on that occasion by Mr. Johnson,
were here reviewed with considerable humor, and a good deal of sarcasm,
as well as sound reasoning.
Mr. Douglass, while admitting the inferiority of his own to the white
race, adverted to the time, five centuries ago, when white men were slaves
in England, with brass collars about their necks, and when in every respect
they compared unfavorably with the negroes of the present day. The
negroes are down now, but will be up in obedience to the laws of progress
and civilization. He did not believe in any essential incompatibility of the
races. The white man and the negro agreed very well in himself. The
Constitution framed by the fathers contained no such words as white and
black. The words were, “We, the people.” The only distinction admitted
was that arising directly out of the institution of Slavery, which institution,
being abolished, there remained only, “the people.” Free negroes voted
then, and for years afterwards, in Pennsylvania, Maryland, North Car-
olina, Virginia,8Douglass’s chronology is only partially correct. Free blacks were disenfranchised in Pennsylvania in 1838 and in North Carolina in 1835. However, they were denied the vote much earlier in Maryland (1809-10) and earlier still in Virginia (1723). Berlin, Slaves Without Masters, 190; Litwack, North of Slavery, 75, 77, 84-87; Curry, Free Black in Urban America, 220-21; John H. Russell, The Free Negro in Virginia, 1619-1865 (1913; New York, 1969), 119. and other States, and it was only when Slavery became
strong that it demanded the withdrawal of this right. He asked for his race
only this simple right of which they had been deprived, and which, as freed
men, now belonged to them.
He did not feel vindictive toward the Rebels, for had he lived at the
South and been a slaveholder, he might possibly have been a Rebel himself.
He had nothing to say even in regard to Jeff[erson] Davis, no objection to
raise against the mitigation of his punishment. Here he exclaimed with
much sarcasm that Davis would never be punished,9Captured at Irwinville, Georgia, Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederacy, was held in military custody at Fortress Monroe, Virginia, from May 1865 to May 1867. In the early months of his imprisonment Davis was shackled, prevented from corresponding with his wife, and kept under constant armed guard; later he received significantly improved treatment. On 11 May 1867 he appeared in U.S. District Court in Richmond, Virginia, where, with the approval of the Johnson administration, he was released on $100,000 bond. After many delays and much dissension among the participating parties, Davis's case was dropped in December 1868 without ever getting into court. Hudson Strode, Jefferson Davis, Tragic Hero: The Last Twenty-Five Years, 1864 -1889 (New York, 1964), 216-311; John J. Craven, Prison Life of Jefferson Davis (1866; New York, 1905); Clement Eaton, Jefferson Davis (New York, 1977), 262-63; Jonathan Truman Dorris, Pardon and Amnesty under Lincoln and Johnson: The Restoration of the Confederates to Their Rights and Privileges, 1861-1898 (Chapel Hill, 1953), 278-312. simply because Mr.
Johnson had determined to have him tried in the one way that he could not
be tried, and had determined not to have him tried in the only way he could
be tried—but he was going to say that he had no desire to rail, even at Jeff.
Davis. Mr. Davis had evinced great qualities; he was a great criminal, he
was a wolf, but not a wolf in sheep’s clothing,10A reference to Æsop's fable “The Wolf in Sheep's Clothing." Æsop's Fables Embellished with one Hundred and eleven Elegant Engravings (London, 1818), 26-27. although he was once
found with certain other clothing on.11Douglass's allusion repeats a popular Northern fiction that Confederate president Jefferson Davis was disguised in female clothes when Federal authorities took him into custody at dawn on 10 May 1865 in Irwinville, Georgia. In his attempt to escape the Union troops, Davis mistakenly put on a sleeveless overcoat belonging to his wife, who then draped her shawl over his shoulders. Although no reputable eyewitness considered this to be an intentional disguise, the Northern press exploited the circumstantial evidence to humiliate Davis. Eaton, Jefferson Davis, 260-61; Strode, Jefferson Davis, 220-23; Henry Harden, The Capture of Jefferson Davis: A Narrative of the Part Taken by Wisconsin Troops (Madison, Wis, 1898), 30-35.
“But what,” he asked, “shall be said of Andrew Johnson?” Perhaps it
would be improper to speak evil of dignitaries, perhaps it would be better to
leave Mr. Johnson to speak for himself as being the most damaging thing he
can do for himself. “But what,” he asked, “shall be said of him who told us
that traitors must take a back seat in the work of restoration, if he now
invests those same traitors with the supreme control of the States in which
they live? What shall be said of him who promised to be the Moses of the
colored race, if he become[s] their Pharaoh instead? Why this must be said
of him: that he had better never have been born.”12Douglass refers to Jesus’ remark about his betrayer in Matt. 26: 24: “It had been good for that man if he had not been born." He had heard that the
President feared assassination by colored men; he had investigated the
report. and came to the conclusion that Mr. Johnson was only in danger
from moral assassination, as physical assassination could not be justly
classed as being among the refinements of Northern society.
When in England the speaker observed no special prejudice against
color, and had often been courteously approached by Americans with the
request that he introduce them to some noble Lord. On this side of the water
the same gentleman would have disdained to ask the same favor of a negro.
The speaker ended by picturing the condition of the freedmen as the na-
tion’s friends, when accorded all the political rights of the white men.