This Democratic Conversion Should Not Be Trusted: An Address Delivered in New York, New York, on September 25, 1872
THIS DEMOCRATIC CONVERSION SHOULD NOT BE
TRUSTED: AN ADDRESS DELIVERED IN NEW YORK,
NEW YORK, ON 25 SEPTEMBER 1872
New York , 26 September 1872.
On the evening of 25 September 1872, Douglass appeared at the Cooper
Institute in New York City to speak at the third of a weekly series of mass
Republican rallies intended to run until the close of the election. This oration
was one of numerous campaign speeches Douglass made for the Republicans
between late August and late October in Maine, Massachusetts, New York,
and Pennsylvania. Prior to Douglass’s lecture, the chairman of the rally,
Luther R. Marsh, introduced the first speaker, Edwards Pierrepont, an influ-
ential local lawyer and former U.S. district attorney. Pierrepont attacked the
accuracy of Charles Sumner’s recent statement on Grant and characterized the
president as a quiet man of action and leadership and Horace Greeley as a
good and kindly journalist who could never govern a nation. Marsh next
introduced Douglass, whom the audience, despite the stifling heat and poor
circulation of air in the cramped hall, greeted with loud ovations. According
to the New York Times, when Douglass finished his speech, “he waved his
handkerchief three times, each wave eliciting a thundering cheer that made the
walls ring. At the end of the last, three additional cheers were given for
Douglass.” New York , 26 September 1872.
FELLOW-CITIZENS: For the first time in the history of this Republic, the
whole body of colored citizens will have the right to vote for a President of
the United States in November.1The Fifteenth Amendment granted the right of suffrage to all male citizens of the United States. Passage of the amendment by the necessary three-fourths of the states secured its ratification in March 1870. They are not only men but freemen, not
only freemen but citizens of the Republic and men among men.
The people of this country are composed of different nations and races,
but no race in the United States have as much at stake in the present election
as we who have been so recently invested with the rights of manhood and
citizenship. The rights of all others have been secured and confirmed by
time and practice. No power in the country is tempted to interfere with or in
any manner abridge such rights. With us the case is different. We are still a
hated caste, and motives stand thick through all the land for compassing
our degradation. The master class at the South is not yet reconciled, and
there are many in the North who sympathize with them. Hence, though we
are now free and legally enfranchised, though we are equal before the law
with all other citizens, we have reasons for special vigilance and exertion in
order to hold and exercise the rights so recently secured to us as a class.
As a general rule, I deprecate all appeals to classes for political pur-
poses. The time is not distant when all classes will be merged in a common
citizenship, and when to be an American citizen will be sufficient to insure
respect in every part of the country and among all classes of the American
people; but that time has not yet come, and until it does come, we are
almost compelled to act as a class to exert our proper influence. We are, in
some measure, on trial before our country and the world, and thoughtful
men are everywhere watching and studying our deportment in the exercise
of the high trust with which we are now invested.
It was once said that the negro does not know enough to vote, and this
was the only decent ground upon which our right to vote was denied and
withheld.
I am sorry to say that some of our number—only a very few—men
who have more learning than common sense, have been making conces-
sions to this degrading idea. They have been writing to Mr. Sumner2Charles Sumner. and
sundry other white gentlemen in different parts of the country to tell them
how to vote.
Now, if we colored people are so destitute of sense and political sagac-
ity as to ask the white people how we shall vote, it might be well to confine
all voting to the white people, and thus save the trouble and expense of
counting our votes at all.
Now gentlemen, if any of our people are confused and bewildered, and
do not know how to vote in the approaching election, or if any class of the
American people have doubts of our ability to form intelligent opinions of
public men, parties, principles, and measures, I hope the proceedings of
this meeting may be made useful to them. The colored citizens of New-
England have already spoken in Faneuil Hall, and their word has gone over
the whole country.3Douglass spoke at the pro-Grant convention of blacks that met in Faneuil Hall in Boston on 5 September 1872. The colored citizens of New-York will have a not less
universal hearing, nor be less potent in point of right influence.
Fellow-citizens, while we are deeply interested in maintaining the
present financial and foreign policy of the Government which has given to
our country credit, prosperity and peace; while we are touched by the
humanity of the Administration toward the Indians, and commend its
wisdom; while we, in common with other citizens, desire light taxation and
an honest administration of the Government, the chief and all commanding
interest which all feel in the contest, is found in its bearing upon the great
questions of human liberty and equality. Here it touches us deeply, and is a
matter of supreme concern. To the millions of our color at the South it is
vastly more important than to us. It is, in effect, a thing of peace and war, of
order and disorder, of life and death, if not of liberty and slavery. It, in fact,
involves the maintenance of all the progress made during the last dozen
years, and the inauguration of a process of reaction, which may land our
race into a condition only a little better than the bondage and degradation of
ages from which we have just begun to emerge.
I know that this statement of the issues involved is stoutly denied by
one party to this canvass, and no doubt honestly denied, but you and I know
that there is such a thing as being honestly wrong. Hell is said to be paved
with good intentions.4James Boswell popularized this proverb in his . James Boswell, , 2 vols. (1791; London, 1906), 1: 555.
The political canvass before us is indeed a very peculiar one. There is
nothing like it in the past, and I hope there may never be anything like it in
the future. To outward seeming we have two political parties seeking to
possess the Government, while professing substantially the same princi-
ples and commending their candidates for the same noble qualities and
dispositions. Two parties and one platform. It is this seeming agreement
which leads to confusion, and would almost deceive the very elect. We
have no longer an honest fight between armies under their own respective
colors, battling for their own honestly-cherished objects, but a war under
the same flags, between armies in the same uniforms, and professing the
same objects.
The best illustration of the political contest now proceeding is found in
our late war for the Union. You will remember that neither party to that
conflict was willing to declare its true object. The South said it was not
fighting for slavery, and the North said it was not fighting against slavery;
and yet they were fighting hard, and everybody who had any brains knew at
the time that the two were really fighting about slavery, and that one was for
it and the other was against it.
If we were left to find the path of duty simply by the light of professions
and platforms, and by the men we find on the one side and on the other, we
might possibly be misled; but happily we are dependent upon no such
deceptive guides. There is such a thing as history, and the parties to this
canvass have their respective histories. All the present rests upon all the
past. You cannot divorce today from yesterday, nor this year from last year.
In front of us today we have the same old enemy, the same old snake in a
new skin, the same old Democratic Party, thinly veneered by a scale torn
off the Republican Party. The wolf is all the more dangerous because of his
white coat.5Douglass adapts “The Wolf in Sheep's Clothing" from .
It is said that they have changed, that they have reformed; and yet you
learn here to-night, from the words of the leading traitor of the South, that
he is not ashamed of the lost cause.6Douglass alludes to Edwards Pierrepont's earlier speech in which he quoted remarks made by the former Confederate president Jefferson Davis to rallies in Augusta and Atlanta, Georgia, on 25 and 27 May 1872, respectively. In the latter speech, Davis is quoted as declaring “I don't believe I did any wrong, and, therefore, I don't acknowledge it." New York , 26 September 1872. There is great talk about reconcilia-
tion; it is said that we must forget and forgive. We have heard a great deal of
religion preached lately about our Southern brethren and the Democratic
Party. It is said to have been converted.7Such prominent Democrats as the Ohioan Clement L. Vallandigham had spoken since 1866 of the Democrats' need to reconcile themselves to the results of the Civil War and to move ahead to the new issues of the day. During the presidential campaign of 1872, however, the Democrats and the Liberal Republicans employed the theme of reconciliation much more vigorously than in the past. They spoke often of how their combined forces represented the reconciliation between North and South and black and white. Charles Sumner, a Liberal Republican defender of the new Democrats, acknowledged this reconciliation and couched it in biblical terms. In a letter to the black citizens of Washington, D.C., on 29 July 1872, Sumner wrote: “Most anxiously I have looked for the time, which seems now at hand, when there should be reconciliation, not only between the North and South, but between the two races." Seven days later he wrote: “Can we not after seven years begin a new life, especially when those once our foes repeat the saying, ‘Thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God?' . . . Their [the Democrats'] support is the assurance that the cause he [Horace Greeley] has so constantly guarded, whether of Equal Rights or Reconciliation, is accepted by Democrats and this is the pledge of a true union beyond anything in our history." Frank L. Klement, (Lexington, Ky, 1970), 304-08; , 20: 192, 197. (Laughter.) But I am a little
incredulous—some would say sceptical—about this matter. Conversion is
a great fact, even in the individual, but when 2,900,000 men are suddenly
converted, a fact of that kind, it seems to me, requires a good deal of
evidence to support it.8The figure Douglass cites here is roughly equivalent to the total number of votes cast for Horatio Seymour, the Democratic presidential candidate in 1868. The final tally for Seymour was 2,706,829 votes. W. Dean Bumham, (Baltimore, 1955), 98-108. The largest number I ever heard of being converted
in a single day was three thousand, and that was on the day of Pentecost.9Acts 2: 41.
(Applause and laughter.)
For my part, I have learned this in the case of individuals: they usually
remember the time when and the place where their dungeon shook; when
their feet were taken out of the mire and clay and set upon a rock; but thus
far the Democratic Party have been unable to tell me when, where, how,
and under whose preaching this great conversion has taken place. Where I
have been they were talking of the Prodigal Son, but here in New-York,
perhaps, they don’t care much about the Prodigal Son. (Laughter) Be-
tween the two—between the Democratic Party and the Prodigal Son—
there are certainly some points of resemblance. For instance: He was
hungry. (Loud laughter and applause.) He seems to have been from home
for about twelve years, and to have had little or nothing to eat all the time,
so that he would even fain have filled himself with the husks that the swine
did eat. But when he saw his father he said: “Father, I have sinned before
heaven and in thy sight, and am no more worthy to be called thy servant.”10Luke 15: 18-19.
Now, this was humility, and it is there that the parallel ceases. (Applause)
He did not come home to drive out the elder son, but only wanted to be
made a servant in his father’s house.
It is here, as I said, that the analogy ceases. The Democratic Party does
not come home in that spirit, after having spent our substance, wasted our
wealth, piled up a mountain of debt. Well, I did not come here to argue or to
expound. I have doubts about the sincerity of this Democratic conversion.
For one, I don’t think it will be safe to trust to that conversion just yet. I am
willing to receive the Prodigal Son, but I would keep him in a subordinate
position for a little time longer. Let us imitate the wisdom of our Methodist
brethren and take the Democrats on probation (Applause and laughter.)
I have an appeal to make to you on behalf of my race. There are
millions of them who are to-night like chickens under a fence when the
scream of the hawk is heard in the air. In this anxious state they are afraid of
the shadow—of the adumbration of a possibility of the reinstatement of the
old master class to power in the Southern States, and I am here to-night to
ask you for four years more of the beneficent rule of the Republican Party,
and four years more of the steady, unimpassioned, eagle-eyed, clear,
steady, firm-nerved little man—Ulysses S. Grant. (Enthusiastic applause.)
When you felt the earth crumbling beneath your feet, when the fate of the
Republic trembled in the balance, oh, then, in your extremity you called
upon the black man to reach out his black, iron arm. (Applause) And they
came 200,000 strong; and from that hour the tide of the battle turned. We
don’t say we put down the rebellion, but we helped to put it down, and so
incurred the heavy displeasure of the master-class at the South. And that
displeasure is not now passed. We are unable to meet it without your help.
The only thing that stops the bloody arm of the Kuklux to-night is Ulysses
S. Grant.11From 1869 to 1872 the depredations of the Ku Klux Klan spread throughout the South, especially in Georgia, Mississippi, North Carolina, and South Carolina. Since the Klan's strength exceeded the power of any one state to control it, President Grant and Congress took measures to curb the terror. In his first few years in office Grant cautiously helped reinforce some state militia so they could combat the Klan. On 31 May 1870 Congress passed the Enforcement Act. Intended primarily to protect the guarantees of the Fifteenth Amendment, the act made it a federal felony for anyone in disguise to deprive someone of their rights or to retaliate against the person for exercising them. This bill received President Grant’s support and laid the basis for further federal indictments against the Klan. Under growing public pressure, especially from Republicans in the South, President Grant and Congress created a committee in January 1871 to investigate the Klan further. From this inquest issued the Ku Klux Act of 20 April 1871, which made any conspiracy to travel on public highways in disguise with the purpose of depriving anyone of his rights a federal offense subject to federal jurisdiction. The act empowered the president to use U.S. troops against the Klan and to suspend habeas corpus if necessary. President Grant speedily issued a proclamation in support of the act and gave warning to conspirators in the South. When Klan terror became extremely alarming in North and South Carolina during the summer of 1871, Grant sent Attorney General Amos T. Akerman there to investigate; by mid-October, Grant had suspended habeas corpus in nine South Carolina counties while Akerman began making mass arrests. Although Grant's actions had checked some of the Klan's expansiveness by 1872, he had by no means thwarted the silent society. Klan activities continued unabated in many districts of the South, while political considerations and constraints upon the exercise of federal power within the states often checked the hand of President Grant. Hesseltine, , 238-51: McFeely, , 367-73; James E. Sefton, (Baton Rouge, 1967), 220-29; Trelease, , 383-418. (Loud applause.) Keep him there. (Voices—We will.)
I am not here to abuse Horace Greeley. I have known him well and
long, and have loved him much, but he is in very bad company. My friends
say, Why, Mr. Douglass, are you going to desert Horace Greeley? I answer,
No, but Horace Greeley has deserted us. It is like the story of Paddy when
he landed in the United States and first resolved to ride a mule. He knew
nothing of the use of a saddle and still less of that of the stirrups. Well, he
mounted the mule, but disdained to use the stirrups. Using a stick, he made
the mule begin to gallop, and as the animal dashed along the stirrups struck
his sides and caused him to rush madly on, nearly unseating Paddy. By and
by the mule got one of his hind legs in the stirrup, which being observed by
Paddy, he shouted: “Be jabers, if yez is going to get on, it is time for me to
get off." (Laughter.) Now, as the Democratic Party has begun to mount
Horace, it is time for me to get off Horace. (Loud applause.) It is a
remarkable evidence of the intelligent instincts of the colored people of the
South, and shows how wisely they have selected in this matter, when it is
known that, not withstanding all the blandishments, they can see that with
Horace Greeley in power the old master is again brought back into power,
while with Grant in power liberty and equality prevails throughout the
land. (Loud applause.)
But I have spoken of the Democratic platform as in substance the same
as the Republican platform. In this I have been too liberal to our adver-
saries, and less than just to our friends. The Democratic platform was
doubtless intended to bear a Republican construction, and to seem like the
genuine article, but it is, in fact and in effect, as opposed to it as freedom is
to slavery. There are three or four little words in it, put in for a purpose
which makes it a political document of the most dangerous and destructive
kind.12The section of the Democratic platform to which Douglass alludes states that “local self-government, with impartial suffrage, will guard the rights of all citizens more securely than any centralized power." Johnson, , 1: 41. As on a railroad, you have only to move the switch a single inch,
and the train is taken from the true track and hurled over the embankment,
killing and maiming the passengers. So here we have one or two little
words which change the whole direction of the country from safety to ruin,
and from liberty to slavery. The Cincinnati Democratic platform declares
itself opposed to reopening the questions settled by the Thirteenth, Four-
teenth and Fifteenth Amendments. In another place it declares for “local
self-government with impartial suffrage,” as against national protection
and universal suffrage.
Now, first: I object to the word “settled.” It leaves room for certain
men to deny, as Mr. Black, of Pennsylvania, does deny, that anything was
settled by those amendments.13Douglass refers to the argument presented by Jeremiah Black while serving as chief counsel for the defense in the case of United States v. Blyew et al. Tried before the U.S. Supreme Court in early 1872, it was an important test of the constitutionality of the Civil Rights Act of 9 April 1866. The case involved a man named Blyew who had murdered a black woman in Kentucky after the Civil War and had been indicted in the state courts. Kentucky still had a statute forbidding black testimony against a white person which violated the Civil Rights Act's guarantee of the right of any citizen to testify in any case to which he was a witness. Kentucky thus forfeited jurisdiction and the Blyew case was remanded to the federal courts. Kentucky countered this action by claiming the right to punish any criminality occurring within its boundaries in its own courts and appealed the case to the U.S. Supreme Court. Black’s main defense of Kentucky's position was that the Thirteenth Amendment was wholly self-executing and did not need the Civil Rights Act to guarantee its enactment. Indeed, he argued that the Civil Rights Act was unconstitutional. Black stated that Congress claimed jurisdiction for passing the act solely on the Thirteenth Amendment, even though that amendment had not changed the original distribution of judicial authority and left untouched the right of each state to administer and adjudicate its own laws. Black did not, as Douglass suggests, discuss the Fourteenth or Fifteenth Amendment, for they were adopted after the passage of the Civil Rights Act. Douglass’s concern regarding the protection of individual liberties in the states was justified, however. Black appeared one year later before the Supreme Court as the defense counsel for Louisiana in the famous Slaughter House Cases and argued similarly that the Fourteenth Amendment granted the federal government no power to interfere in the civil affairs of the states. Chauncey F. Black, (New York, 1885), 539-57; William Norwood Brigance, (Philadelphia, 1934), 197-203; Harold M. Hyman, (New York, 1973), 465- 66. Nothing is, or can be settled by fraud; and
the Democratic party has again and again declared these amendments
frauds and unconstitutional.14The Democratic platform of 1868 stated: “And we do declare and resolve, That ever since the people of the United States threw off all subjection to the British crown, the privilege and trust of suffrage have belonged to the several States, and have been granted, regulated, and controlled exclusively by the political power of each State respectively, and that any attempt by Congress, on any pretext whatever, to deprive any State of this right, or interfere with its exercise, is a flagrant usurpation of power, which can find no warrant in the Constitution." By 1872, however, the Democrats seemed more accepting of the amendments. Their platform stated that they opposed “any reopening of the questions settled by the thirteenth, fourteenth and fifteenth amendments of the Constitution." Yet, if no longer labeling the amendments as unconstitutional but now acknowledging their passage, they persisted in their hope to counteract the amendments’ decrees. William Gillette, (Baton Rouge, 1979), 58-59, 63-64; Johnson, , 1: 38. But the most objectionable and most dan-
gerous feature of this Democratic platform is its denial of the right of the
National Government to protect the liberties of its citizens in the States, and
its declaration in favor of impartial suffrage against universal suffrage.
Under these two doctrines the whole body of liberty as contained in the
several amendments of the Constitution may be undermined, subverted
and destroyed. They point out the two ways in which those amendments
may be evaded and made of non-effect. By the one they may limit suffrage,
and by the other they may strip the freedmen and their friends of national
protection.
But we are told by our friends of the Greeley persuasion that our fears
[are] groundless; that the Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amend-
ments are now a part of the Constitution, and there is no power to take them
out of the Constitution.
Alas! this assurance is little better than a mockery: constitutions do not
execute themselves. We have had justice enough in our Constitution from
the beginning to have made slavery impossible. The trouble never was in
the Constitution, but in the administration of the Constitution. All experi-
ence shows that laws are of little value in the hands of those unfriendly to
their objects.
Besides, the very essence of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth
Amendments is in the grant of power to Congress to enforce them by
“appropriate legislation.”15The concluding sections of each of these amendments reserved to Congress the “power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation." Without legislation these provisions may be
evaded and practically rendered null and void. Now, what hope have we
that a Democratic Congress will enforce these provisions by appropriate
legislation?
But let us look at the workings of the Constitution. Under that instru-
ment it would appear that oppression of an American citizen would be
impossible in any of the States; that the citizens of New-York would be as
safe in South Carolina as in New-York; yet we well know that until within
the last few years the free liberty of a Northern man was impossible in the
South. I, therefore, as a black man first, as a man next, and as a newly-born
citizen of the United States—a citizenship beyond all others on the globe—
as such a citizen I ask you, one and all, to exert every faculty to retain in
power that party which has made the country glorious before the world, if
you want the country prosperous. I now ask you, if you desire success, to
give three hearty, rousing cheers for Ulysses S. Grant, and if you wish to do
so, follow me. Hip, hip, hip.