We Are Here and Want the Ballot-box: An Address Delivered in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on September 4, 1866
WE ARE HERE AND WANT THE BALLOT-BOX: AN ADDRESS
DELIVERED IN PHILADELPHIA, PENNSYLVANIA,
ON 4 SEPTEMBER 1866
New York , 5 September 1866 and New York , 5 September 1866. Other
texts in Philadelphia , 5 September 1866; Philadelphia , 5 Sep-
tember 1866; Rochester , 10 September 1866.
In an attempt to rally broad public support for the Johnson administration’s poli-
cies of southern “restoration” and states’ rights, supporters of the president
held a “National Union” convention in Philadelphia in August 1866. Radical
and moderate Republican opponents of those policies responded by calling
their own convention in Philadelphia the following month. Although it was
officially a “Southern Loyalists’ Convention,” prominent northern Re-
publicans attended as honorary delegates to demonstrate that anti-Johnson
sentiment was national in scope. Douglass was among those selected by a
Republican mass meeting to represent Rochester, New York, at the Loyalists’
gathering. He attended the convention on 3-7 September despite newspaper
threats of mobbings and private efforts by such individuals as Governor Oliver
P. Morton of Indiana to prevail upon him to stay away “in order to save the
Republican party from detriment.” The fears of northern white Republicans,
combined with the barely concealed racism of many of their border-state
colleagues, led the convention virtually to ignore Douglass and the few other
black delegates during its official proceedings. On the morning of 4 Sep-
tember, however, Douglass attended a private meeting of the New York
delegation to the convention held at the Union League House and chaired by
General Hiram Walbridge. Senator Zachariah Chandler of Michigan and
Governor Richard Yates of Illinois each addressed the gathering. According
to the New York , “As soon as it was learned that Fred Douglass was in
the room the audience of delegates grew clamorous to hear him, and . . .
amid deafening applause and cheering the dusky orator stepped on the ros-
trum.” After Douglass’s speech Theodore Tilton and a number of other speak-
ers offered brief remarks. A report on Douglass’s address pronounced it “the
speech par excellence thus far.” Indianapolis , 12 July 1866:
New York , 31 August, 3, 4 September 1866; New York , 3
September 1866; Rochester , 1, 5 September 1866:
Philadelphia , 4 September 1866; New York , 5 Sep-
tember 1866; New York , 13 September 1866; Chicago , 28 April 1867; Tracts
No. 2 (n.p. , n.d.), 4; Riddleberger, , 205-16; Howard
K. Beale,
(1930; New York, 1958), 184-87.
MR. PRESIDENT1Born in Ithaca, New York, Hiram Walbridge (1821-70), prominent New York City merchant and politician, migrated to Toledo, Ohio, with his parents in 1836. He attended the Ohio University at Athens, practiced law in Toledo, and served as brigadier general in the Ohio militia in the early 1840s before moving first to Buffalo and then to New York City, where he shifted his career from law to commerce. From 1853 to 1855 he was a Democratic congressman. Although Walbridge supported compromise efforts during the secession crisis of 1860-61, he subsequently became one of the leaders of New York City‘s “War Democrats." In 1862 he unsuccessfully ran for Congress as the candidate of a coalition of Republicans and War Democrats and two years later campaigned for Lincoln's reelection. Walbridge also played an important part in organized efforts to improve trade and transportation and presided over the International Commercial Convention held in Detroit in July 1865. New York Times, 4 November 1866, 7 December 1870; Christopher Dell, (Rutherford, N.J., 1975), 127, 177, 303; , 1762. AND GENTLEMEN:—This, to me, is certainly an unex-
pected call, and I feel myself almost entirely inadequate to respond to it. I
have made many speeches on different occasions and before large assem-
blies, in this country and in other countries, but I never appeared before any
audience under circumstances that so entirely unfit me for utterance as that
upon which I appear before you to-day. I came here to this Convention for
no display, for no exhibition of myself, for no attempts at oratory. It would
have been enough for me, enough for those who sent me, and enough for
the race to which I belong, if I could be permitted to sit in silence, to walk in
silence in this grand procession, and to sit in silence in the grand presence
of the Convention now assembled in this city. I should have been entirely
content with this—to be a man among men. (Applause)
But since you have called upon me I may try to say something concern-
ing what I conceive to be the great issue about to be tried at the ballot box by
the American people. It is well that all sides should be heard in a great crisis
like this. One man may tell a good deal of truth; one race may tell, perhaps,
a large amount of truth; but it takes all men, of all classes, of all cliques and
conditions in life to tell the whole truth. (Applause)
I read the address recently read and adopted by a convention in this
city, not of us, not with us and for us;2From 14 to 16 August 1866 supporters of President Andrew Johnson's Reconstruction program held a convention in Philadelphia in the Wigwam, a ten-thousand-seat auditorium especially constructed for the occasion. When the call for the meeting was issued on 25 June 1866, its sponsors had intended to launch a working coalition between conservative Republicans and northern Democrats for the fall congressional elections. Except for a few prominent pro-Johnson Republicans such as James Doolittle, Orville H. Browning, Montgomery Blair, and Henry J. Raymond, most of the delegates to this “National Union Convention” were northern Democrats or former Confederates. Raymond wrote the original draft of the meetings “Declaration of Principles” and “Address to the People,” but the southerners and Democrats forced the removal of provisions favorable to the Fourteenth Amendment, the Freedmen's Bureau, and the Civil Rights Act. The “Address” instead called for the immediate readmission to Congress of representatives from the former Confederate states and for an end to congressional interference with southern domestic affairs. With few exceptions, the Republican press assailed the convention and the “Address” as a wholesale capitulation to the Democratic party on the chief issues of Reconstruction. (n.p., n.d.), 1-2, 8-15; Albert Castel, (Lawrence, Kans., I979), 78, 85-86; Riddleberger, , 206-14. but I found many things in that
address to which I could heartily assent, and to nothing in that address
could I assent more heartily than the powerful argument there made against
taxation without representation.3The slogan of the American Revolutionaries usually attributed to James Otis does not appear in the published “Address to the People” of the National Union Convention. Douglass is probably paraphrasing the extensive legal arguments cited in the “Address” to protest Congress's refusal to readmit representatives from any of the former Confederate states except Tennessee. , 10-15. (Laughter and applause.) If that address
had emanated from a colored convention I think I should have gone [along
with] every word of it. It was only a knowledge of the motives which
inspired it and the limited construction which was to be given it that led me
at all to reject it or to regard it as an unfortunate state paper.
One of the great evils of our country in times of peace, in times of war,
and all the time of our history has been a disposition on the part of some
men, excellent men, many of them, too, to limit eternal and universal
principles. That has been the great error of the American people—to limit
what in its very nature is illimitable; to circumscribe principles intended by
the great Creator of the universe for the harmony of the universe, to be
equally applicable to all the people of the country. For instance, that
glorious document which can never be referred to too often on occasions
like this—the Declaration of Independence—(applause)—to which we
are all pledged, our lives, our sacred honor, all that we have on earth—sets
out with the doctrine that “all men,” not a part of men, “all men”—not all
white men, “all men”—not the Englishman; not all men of the Teutonic or
of the Caucasian race; but “all men,” “all men are created equal.” (Ap-
plause.) That great doctrine, so long-limited, circumscribed, applied to a
particular race and to a particular class, I regard this Convention as intend-
ing to make a practical fact for this whole country. (Applause)
Perhaps I am getting too broad for comprehension. (A Voice— “Not a
bit.”) But I heard at the Southern Convention, a few moments ago, and I
took my license to speak from the able speech there made by the late
Attorney General Speed.4Appointed U.S. attorney general by Lincoln in December 1864, James Speed (1812-87) held that cabinet post until July 1866, when he submitted his resignation to Andrew Johnson. Born near Louisville, Kentucky, Speed graduated from St. Joseph's College in Bardstown, Kentucky, in 1828 and then studied law at Transylvania University. He established a legal practice in Louisville and taught law at the University of Louisville. After a term in the state legislature, Speed ran unsuccessfully as a proemancipation candidate for the state constitutional convention of 1849. After Lincoln’s election, Speed publicly battled against secession and was elected to the state senate in 1861 as a Unionist. His support for black suffrage and the Fourteenth Amendment caused Speed's break with Johnson. The presiding officer of the Southern Loyalists' Convention, Speed bitterly assailed Johnson‘s Reconstruction policies in his welcoming address on the morning of 4 September 1866. Returning to legal and teaching careers in Kentucky, Speed remained active in that state's Republican party leadership but never again held public office. Riddleberger, , 206, 214- 15; Castel, , 26-28, 67, 80-81; Robert Sobel, (Westport, Conn, 1977), 314-15; , 5: 625; , 2: 89; , 17: 440. (Applause. A voice—“three cheers for him,”
which were given.) He gave us to understand there that we were to find out
what was the truth, what we felt to be the truth, what we knew to be the
truth, and in that Convention proclaim it, and at the ballot box make it law,
crystallize it into legislation and make it the law of the land.5Douglass paraphrases the address of James Speed to the Southern Loyalists’ Convention immediately after his election as presiding officer. Among Speed 's exhortations to the meeting was, “Speak the truth as you feel it; speak the truth as you know it; speak the truth as you feel for your country; speak the truth as you love permanent peace, as you hope to establish the institutions of this Government. so that our children and our children‘s children shall enjoy a peace that we have not known." Tracts No. 2 (n.p., 1866), 9-11; New York , 5 September 1866. We are not
one inch higher in this matter at this gathering than they are at that gathering
and on that platform, as I just heard it before I came here.
You will pardon me if I shall on this occasion, in coming to this
platform, bring with me an individual that has been associated with me for
the last twenty-five—l may say for the last fifty years—the negro. (Laugh-
ter. A voice— “Bring your friend with you”) It would not be exactly fair
for me to come here and not remember him, not to bring him with me. I
may say I appear here under some disadvantages; but at the same time I
appear under, perhaps, greater advantages and responsibilities than most
other men who have attended this Convention, or who are in attendance on
this Convention. I am here as a representative, and a representative of a
multifarious constituency such as, perhaps, no other man in the Conven-
tion can be said to represent. (Laughter.) ln the first place I represent the
black race. There is no mistaking that by the curl of my hair and the flatness
of my nose. (Laughter.) In the next place I represent the white race. And
there is no mistaking that, in so much as that in the State of Maine the
Copperhead journals there deny the negro of all credit, of all praise for
whatever talent I may exhibit and ascribe it entirely to the white race to
which I belong. (Laughter.) 1 represent the black race and the white race,
and the black and the white race combined. And, so far as my own experi-
ence goes to show it, from the peaceable manner in which the blood of the
two races have lived together for the last fifty years in this organism—
(Laughter)—I have not the slightest fear of a war of races. (Loud laughter
and applause.)
Gentlemen, we have representatives here from the North and represen-
tatives from the South. I honor all these representatives—rejoice in them;
but I can claim to represent here not only the black and the white, and the
white and the black, but I represent the North and the South. (Laughter.) I
am a citizen of the State of Maryland, and some have given me credit for
having in my veins the blood of one of its early Governors.6Douglass probably alludes to the rumor that his father was Colonel Edward Lloyd V who employed his master Aaron Anthony. Among his many political ofiices, Lloyd had been govemor of Maryland from 1811 to 1816. It is more likely that Anthony, a man of much humbler origins, was Douglass's father. Douglass,, 51-52; Preston, , 22- 23, 44-47. (Laughter.) It
is not customary for a man to disclaim his aristocratic origin. (Loud and
contained laughter.) I represent Maryland—(laughter)—for it was only
twenty-eight years ago yesterday when I appeared in the streets of Phila-
delphia in a hurry—(laughter)—for then I neither had a local habitation
nor a name.7In his flight to freedom by train and boat, Douglass left Baltimore in the morning, passed through Philadelphia during the afternoon, and arrived in New York City late in the evening of 3 September 1838. Douglass, “Escape From Slavery,“ 126-28; idem, , 218-23. (Laughter.) But I was in pursuit of both. (Laughter.) How well
I have succeeded, my appearance in the procession yesterday must an-
swer.8As delegates gathered in Philadelphia‘s Independence Square on the moming of 3 September 1866 to begin a ceremonial procession to the Union League House that would officially commence the first day of the Southern Loyalists' Convention, Douglass found himself shunned by nearly everyone. At the last moment, however, Theodore Tilton, editor of the New York , linked arms with Douglass and the two marched up the street to the applause of the crowd. Political reaction to the incident was mixed. The Philadelphia reported that “Copperheads” were greatly exercised at the sight of “a man whose hair is grey, but whose skin is tinged with yellow, walking unmolested through the streets of Philadelphia, in company with ‘Boys in Blue.' " Radical Republican Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania privately worried that this public “exhibition of social equality" was “foolish bravado" that might damage the party. Republican senator Richard Yates of Illinois, however, related that the action of Douglass and Tilton made him feel “as if the sunlight of heaven glowed on his head brighter than before." To critics of the pair Yates declared that he “would be prouder by far to march in the same procession with Frederick Douglass than with Andrew Johnson." Philadelphia , 4 September 1866; New York , 4 September 1866; Rochester , 12 September 1866; Chicago , 28 April 1887; Douglass, , 429- 32; Thaddeus Stevens to William D. Kelley, 5 September 1866, quoted in Quarles, , 231. (Laughter and applause.)
I went North, for l was then what would be called a runaway. I do not
consider that there is any disgrace attaching to that. It is true I came away
unceremoniously. (Laughter.) I was unable to part in that decorous and
circumlocutory manner that good manners, perhaps, would prescribe, for I
came away without bidding my master good-by. I ought to have done it but
for one thing. I knew if I attempted to do that he would not let me go.
(Laughter.) For that reason I did not tell him anything about it.
I am going to speak to you of the claims of the negro. Perhaps it is
hardly necessary, when you are up to this point, but for the sake of some
who hear and who stand by let me say a word on behalf of that great
principle of human equality to which I have referred as applied to the black
race.
Some things have been settled, fellow-citizens, by the war, by the
tremendous conflict which has at last subsided. Some things have been
settled concerning my race, and one of the things settled is this, that the
negro will fight. (Applause) We have been accustomed to regard him as a
natural born Christian (laughter)—so well born that he needed not to be
born again; that if smitten on one cheek he would turn the other also;9Douglass alludes to John 3: 3, 7, and to the portion of the Sermon on the Mount in Luke 6: 29. but
the late war has decided that he would fight. I always knew he would fight
or thought I knew it; and the only reason why he has not demonstrated his
ability to fight heretofore is, that the negro is not only a natural born
Christian, but he is a philosopher—he is a thinker. The only reason he has
not fought before is because he had no reasonable probability of whipping
anybody. (Laughter) As soon as he was convinced that there was the
slightest shadow of hope, he was ready to bare his bosom to the storm of
war and to face the enemy, with a valor scarcely inferior, if inferior at all, to
the very best troops we have marshalled against the foe. (Applause) It is
settled he can fight and will fight.
Another thing is settled. It is settled that he is a permanent part of the
American people. That he is here and that no scheme of colonization or no
mode of extirpation can be adopted by which he shall be entirely eradicated
from this land. He is here. I know that there are certain ethnological
statesmen who are predicting his disappearance from the republic; that he
will die out like the Indian. But they forget an important fact—that their
simile, if it is to be called a simile, lacks similarity, lacks likeness. There is
no resemblance in the elements that go to make up the character of a
civilized man between the Indian and the negro. The one, too stiff to bend,
breaks. The one refuses your civilization, rejects it. He looks upon your
towns and your cities, your villages, your steamboats, and your canals and
railways and electric wires, and he regards them with aversion. He sees the
ploughshare of your civilization tossing up the bones of his venerated
fathers, and he retreats before the onward progress of your civilization. He
retreats from the Atlantic to the lakes, from the lakes to the great rivers, and
disappears finally on the western slope of the Rocky Mountains. While he
remains here he disdains your civilization; he abhors your fashions, he
refuses to adopt them.
But not so with the negro. He accepts them; he rejoices in them; he
adopts your religion; he adopts your political ideas; he receives willingly
your mode of government; he incorporates himself naturally with your
civilization. More unlike you than the Indian in form and in features, but
incomparably more like you in all the elements that go to make up civilized
man than the Indian. Against him there is a prejudice; against the Indian
none. There is a romantic reverence—a sort of hero-worship—paid the
Indian all over this country; while the negro is despised; yet the Indian
rejects your civilization, and the negro accepts it. He is with you, of you,
been here for the last two hundred and fifty years, braving the same
latitudes, longitudes and altitudes in facing the same climate; enduring
hardships that well might exterminate another people, yet living, flourish-
ing with you, accepting all that is valuable in your civilization and serving
you at every turn.
It was said by Daniel O’Connell twenty years ago that “the history of
Ireland might be traced like a wounded man through a crowd by his tracks of
blood.” Incomparably more truthfully may this statement be made respect-
ing the negro. For two hundred and fifty years we have been subjected to all
the exterminating forces of slavery—marriage abolished, organization un-
known, if more than five meet together, stripes, education denied, the right
to learn to read the name of the God that made us denied, the family tie broken
up—yet under it all, under all the exterminating forces of slavery here we are
to-day, and an Uncle Tom in the church,10Douglass makes an allusion to the pious nature of the title character in Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel (1852). and a Robert Small in the harbor of
Charleston. (Loud applause.) Well my friends, we shall not be sent away,
because there is nobody to send us away. (Laughter)
We shall not be sent away for another reason, because we are useful to
you—useful to the South, useful to the North, useful to the whole country.
In time of peace useful as laborers, with whom in that Southern clime no
laborers can compete, and useful to you in time of war, because we can
fight. (Applause) And America may need both our usefulness [and] our
industry as a means of defence against internal and external foes.
Well, fellow citizens, it is about admitted, I suppose. that we are here
between four and five millions strong.11The U.S. Census reported the black population of the United States as 4,441,830 in 1860 and as 4,880,009 in 1870. After the 1870 figure was deemed an underenumeration, the government issued a new total of 5,392,172 for the 1870 black population. U.S. Bureau of the Census, , Part I, ser. A1-5, A91-104, A119-34. The question comes at once, shall
the presence of this vast black population be made a blessing to themselves
and a blessing to us, a blessing to the whole country, or a curse to them-
selves, a curse to you, and a curse to the whole country? Statesmanship has
but one answer. It has given it this morning from the eloquent lips of
Senator Yates.12Richard Yates (1818-73) was born in Warsaw, Kentucky, emigrated with his family to Springfield, Illinois, and graduated from Illinois College in Jacksonville in 1835. A lawyer, he served five times in the state house of representatives during the 1840s before being elected to Congress as a Whig in 1850. In the House Yates championed land grants to both railroads and farmers in the western territories and opposed the Kansas-Nebraska Act. Defeated in his bid for a third term, Yates returned to his legal career until elected Republican governor of Illinois in 1860. For the next four years he struggled to have his state meet its Civil War enlistment quotas. In 1863 Yates prorogued the Democratic-controlled state legislature after it endorsed a compromise peace settlement with the Confederates and managed the state’s war efforts on his own authority for over a year. After the war Yates served in the U.S. Senate from 1865 to 1871, where he supported Radical Reconstruction of the South and the impeachment of Andrew Johnson. Yates had addressed the meeting of the New York delegates to the Southern Loyalists' Convention immediately before Douglass. In response to a question from the audience asking the senator's opinion on the right of a state to disenfranchise men on account of color, Yates declared: “No State had any right to deprive any man, of whatever class or condition, of the God-given rights implanted in all by nature. That was true as to the American, the Indian, the African, and was especially true as to the Irishman." New York , 5 September 1866; Richard Yates and Catherine Yates Pickering, , ed. John H. Krenkel (Danville, Ill, 1966); Jack Nortrup, “A Western Whig in Washington," , 64: 419-41 (Winter 1971); Linda Hartman, “The Issue of Freedom in Illinois under Gov. Richard Yates, 1861-1865," , 57: 293-97 (Autumn 1964); Sobel and Raimo, , 1: 374; , 1856; , 6: 638-39; , 11:48; , 20: 599-601. (Applause) Philanthropy has but one answer, and it has
given it from a thousand pulpits and a thousand platforms to-day. It is this,
the thorough and complete incorporation of the whole black element into
the American body politic. (Great applause.) Anything less than this will
prove an utter failure in my judgment.
You want me to speak my honest sentiments? (A voice—
“Yes.”) . . .†Here the New York reads: “He should have the right to sue and be sued, and have the right to the jury box. The witness box and the ballot box. The negro is a man. A political revolution for manhood's suffrage is going on here as well as in Europe. The masses must be respected everywhere. It is dangerous to deny any class of people the right to vote. But the black man deserves the right to vote for what he has done to aid in suppressing the rebellion, both by fighting and by assisting the Federal soldier wherever he was found. He deserves to vote, because his services may be needed again. We should conciliate our friends as well as our foes." (We ask a right to all the different boxes—to the witness-
box, the jury-box, and the ballot-box. (Applause) I tell you we want that
box, for all in that box are certainly secure. We ought to ask for that
especially. Anybody out of it are (A voice—“In a bad box;” laughter and
cheers.) Yes, in a bad box. I ask it because the negro is a man, and we have
recently become aware that a great revolution is going on—a great political
revolution in the United States. It is for manhood suffrage. (Great ap-
plause.) All that can be urged in the face of any man’s right to vote, can be
urged as to his right to vote, no matter what his color. We want it not only
because we are men, [but] because of what we are here in this country
especially. In a monarchical, aristocratic or autocratic [government] it is a
burden which is easy to be borne by the masses, for the burden is dis-
tributed over a vast number of individuals, leaving but a small portion to
each individual; and besides the masses of men in all communities can take
care of themselves. (Applause.). When they move, thrones, dominations,
principalities and powers tremble and have to give way; when they move,
crowns and coronets are rent; when they move, they must be respected.
We have heard from Downing St[reet] how the good people of old
England assembled in Hyde Park to assert their right to suffrage. They were
not black people, but white men who assembled there to assert their right to
suffrage, and the people, in the majesty of their might, rose when the
Government would prevent them and declared that they would meet—they
did meet. Downing St[reet] turned pale. It would have cost the privileged
classes of Old England dearly if they had insisted on preventing the
assemblage.13By 1866 popular sentiment in Great Britain favored parliamentary action to widen the suffrage. In July of that year the Reform League-comprising ex-Chartists, trade unionists, and middle-class sympathizers-requested permission to use Hyde Park in London for a mass demonstration. The London police commissioner, at the instruction of the home secretary of Lord Derby's Conservative party ministry, denied the League access to the royal park. Nevertheless, on 22 July a crowd of twenty thousand gathered at the park entrance. When the vanguard of the crowd was forced against the iron railings surrounding the park, the fence collapsed and demonstrators spilled into the gardens. The police attacked the crowd but were unable to clear the park of demonstrators until military units arrived on the following day. Several hundred people were injured. The Hyde Park rioting embarrassed the government and generated further support for a suffrage bill, culminating in passage of the Second Reform Bill in 1867 that greatly expanded the electorate. F. B. Smith, (Cambridge, 1966), 121-33; John W. Derry, (London, 1963), 186-93; Guy Williams, (London, 1978), 112.
I go for this right because our Government is a democratic one; because
it is based upon the principle of universal suffrage; and the right cannot be
denied on account of complexion.
And I have another argument. It is this—the black man has deserved it.
I do not say that the black man has fought any better than the white man in
the last great war. I do not mean to say that you could not have put down the
rebellion without him, for I believe you could. The whole people of the
North were able to end it, to put down all the slave masters of the South.
But this I do say, while I do not say that you could not go it alone—the
negro helped you to put it down. They were your friends, too. They helped
your escaping prisoners from Southern dungeons—Andersonville, Belle
Isle14Shortly after the First Battle of Bull Run, the Confederacy established a prison camp for captured Union enlisted men on Belle Isle, a 100-acre island in the James River at Richmond, Virginia. This camp was a counterpart to the more famous Libby Prison in Richmond, which housed captured officers. During the winter of 1863-64 as many as ten thousand prisoners were confined on Belle Isle. Since there were no barracks and the supply of tents was insufficient for the camp’s population, thousands of prisoners went without shelter of any kind. Food rations were also inadequate, and hundreds of prisoners died of the combined effects of exposure and malnutrition. To relieve the strain on Richmond's food resources, most of the Belle Isle prisoners were transferred to other camps during 1864. The only major escape of Union prisoners from Richmond-area camps occurred from Libby Prison, not Belle Isle. U.S. Sanitary Commission, (Philadelphia, 1864), 45-55; Isham, Davidson, and Furness, , 416-18; Hesseltine, , 114-32, 169; Mark M. Boatner III, (New York, 1959), 57. and Castle Thunder.15Two Confederate prison camps were popularly known as “Castle Thunder." The one in Petersburg, Virginia, was a converted tobacco warehouse that received its nickname after artillery reports reverberated through its corridors during the Union siege of the city in 1864-65. The Richmond, Virginia, Castle Thunder was also a converted warehouse, but it housed mostly political prisoners and accused spies rather than captured Union soldiers. Hesseltine, , 119, 247; Boatner, , 131. And all I ask you to remember in this Conven-
tion [is] that you may want them again. Mr. Douglass continued a few
minutes longer, referring to the wholesale pardoning business of the Exec-
utive,16On 29 May 1865 Andrew Johnson issued a proclamation that granted full “amnesty and pardon" to all but a few categories of former Confederates provided they took a loyalty oath to the United States and agreed to support all wartime emancipation measures. The exceptions to Johnson's amnesty were primme high-ranking Confederate civil, military, and diplomatic officials who had left similar positions in the U.S. government but also included “all persons who have voluntarily participated in said rebellion and the estimated value of whose taxable property is over $20,000." The president, however, retained discretionary power to pardon “any person belonging to the excepted classes, and such clemency will be liberally extended as may be consistent with the facts of the case and the peace and dignity of the United States." Thousands of Confederates applied for presidential clemency. Johnson responded generously to their appeals and by June 1865 had granted more than 12,500 individual pardons. Richardson, , 8: 3508-10; Dorris, , 110-13, 240-41; Sefton, , 108-11; McKitrick, , 142-44. drawing a picture of the horrors and deaths inflicted on the sons of
the North, and contrasted Presidential clemency with Rebel cruelty and
hate.)17From New York , 5 September 1866. (A person in the audience here asked, “How about Beecher?”) I
have been often asked the question, “How do you account for Henry Ward
Beecher’s position?”18Although an outspoken antislavery clergyman since the 1840s, Henry Ward Beecher endorsed Andrew Johnson's policy of speedy readmission of southern states to all their former rights. Beecher publicly enunciated his position in a letter to a Soldiers’ and Sailors' Convention held in Cleveland, Ohio, in August 1866. While expressing concem for the freedmen's rights, Beecher's letter warned of the dangers of prolonged military rule in the South and declared that “the first demand of our time is entire reunion.” Radicals so bitterly assailed Beecher’s letter that he thereafter became reticent in his public statements regarding Reconstruction. [Henry Ward Beecher], (n.p., 1884), 7-14; Beale, , 48, 221, 358; Clifford E. Clark, Jr., (Urbana, Ill., 1978), 166-78; , 2: 129-35. But I have never been able to answer it satisfac-
torily to myself. I answer it about as he answered a question put to him on
one occasion by a pert, inquisitive lady who said, “Mr. Beecher can you
tell in what condition Paul was when he was elevated up to the third
heavens?”19Paul actually was describing another person caught up in religious fervor in 2 Cor. 12: 2: “I knew a man in Christ above fourteen years ago, (whether in the body, I cannot tell; or whether out of body. I cannot tell: God knoweth;) such an one caught up to the third heaven." “I am sure,” said Mr. Beecher, “if Paul didn’t know himself,
I don’t see how I should.” (Laughter and applause.) [And that is my answer
to that question. (Renewed laughter and applause.)]20From New York , 5 September 1866.