The Negro Problem: An Address Delivered in Washington, D.C., on October 21, 1890
THE NEGRO PROBLEM: AN ADDRESS DELIVERED IN
WASHINGTON, D.C. ON 21 OCTOBER 1890
Washington , 22 October 1890. Other texts in Washington , 22 October
1890; Detroit , 7, 14 November 1890; Speech File, reel 18, frames 117-29, FD
Papers, DLC; (Washington, 1890), 3-16.
Three thousand people gathered in Washington’s Metropolitan A.M.E.
Church on 21 October 1890 to hear Douglass lecture on contemporary racial
problems. Organized by the Bethel Literary and Historical Association, the
meeting began with prayer by the Reverend James A. Handy, James Storum,
president of the association, spoke briefly in praise of Douglass, and John H.
Smyth, former minister to Liberia, introduced Douglass, “amid long-
continued applause.” So great was the demand for copies of the speech that
the Washington Post published it in its entirety and ran off three editions of the
issue containing it. A dispatch to the New York claimed the oration was
one of Douglass’s “greatest platform efforts and his bravest public utterance
of late years.” When the Detroit reprinted this speech in full,
Douglass wrote its editor to thank him “not only for myself but for the cause’s
sake.” Washington lawyer Richard S. Smith spoke for a number of Douglass’s
correspondents when he wrote that the “great speech” contained “the words
of philosophy in the voice of eloquent reason.” R[ichard] S. Smith to Douglass,
22 October 1890, C[harles] B. Purvis to Douglass, 23 October 1890,
James H. A. Johnson to Douglass, 6 November 1890, Douglass to Editor of
the , 20 November 1890, General Correspondence File, reel 5,
frames 845-46, 849, reel 6, frames 9-10, FD Papers, DLC; Washington
, 16 October 1890; Washington , 22 October 1890; Washington
, 25 October 1890; New York , 1 November 1890; Detroit
, 28 November 1890.
Members and Friends of the Bethel Literary and Historical Association: I
esteem it a great privilege to be with you and assist in this your first meeting
since the close of your last winter’s term. The organization of your association
was an important step in the progress of the colored people in this city.
It is an institution well fitted to improve the minds and elevate the sentiments
not only of its members, but of the general public. Nowhere else
outside of the courts of law and the Congress of the United States have I
heard vital public questions more seriously discussed. The men selected to
address you know very well that what they may utter is subjected to close
scrutiny and severe discussion. Mere rant, bombast, and self-inflation may
pass elsewhere, but not here. For this reason, and for my own self-respect,
I shall endeavor to say only what I believe to be the truth upon what is
popularly called "The Negro Problem."
My first thought respects the importance of calling things by their true
names. This importance cannot be over-estimated or over-stated. Truth is
the fundamental, indispensable, and everlasting requirement in obtaining
right results. No department of human life can afford to dispense with
truth. The carpenter cannot join his timbers without having the parts of
contact perfectly true to each other. The mason cannot build a wall that will
stand the test of time and gravitation without applying the plumb and
making the wall vertical and true. No train of cars is safe on the road where
the rails are not true. No shot is certain of its aim where the gunbarrel is not
true. As in mechanics, so in politics, morals, manners, metaphysics, and
philosophies, nothing can stand the test of time and experience that does
not stand on the unassailable, indestructable, unchangeable, and, considering
how important this truth is, eternal foundation of truth. It seems strange
that falsehood should hold such sway in the world. One main advantage by
which error is able to darken, blight, and dominate the minds of men is the
skill of its votaries in using language deceitfully, in pandering to prejudice
by misstating and misapplying terms to the existing relations of men. It has
been well said that in an important sense words are things.1Douglass adapts a line from Lord Byron, , Canto III, Stanza 88. Coleridge, , 6: 172. They are
especially such when they are employed to express the popular sentiment
concerning the negro: to couple his name with anything in this world seems
to damage it and damage him likewise. Hence I object to characterizing the
relation subsisting between the white and colored people of this country as
the negro problem, as if the negro had precipitated that problem, and as if
he were in any way responsible for the problem. Though a rose by any
other name may smell as sweet,2, act 2, sc. 2, lines 43-44. it is not in good taste to give it a name that
suggests offensive associations. There are, on the other hand, things that
are in themselves revolting, and should not be given fair-seeming names.
The slaveholders understood this principle well enough. Slavery lost something
of its offensive aspect when it was called a domestic institution or a
social system and other like names. Emancipation was made to look dangerous
when it got itself called an experiment, although slavery itself was
an experiment, and liberty is the normal condition of man. “The negroes
were the cause of the war,” said Mr. Lincoln,3President Abraham Lincoln made such a statement while advocating colonization to a delegation of black leaders called to the White House on 14 August 1862. Basler, , 5: 372. and straightway the loyal
soldiers of the Republic began to kick and beat the poor negroes on the
banks of the Potomac, and the Irish began to hang, stab, and murder the
negroes in New York. It is dangerous even to a dog to be given a bad name.
I am, therefore, in favor of employing the truest and most agreeable names
to describe the relation which at present subsists between ourselves and the
other people of the country.
Again, another advantage to error and one which is often employed
with marked skill and effect is the presentation to the minds of men of what
may be called half truths for whole truths, and thus making a sweet and
wholesome truth the cover for a bitter falsehood. A counterfeit nearest in
likeness to what is genuine is always most likely to impose upon the
unskillful. A lie ceases to be very dangerous when it parts with its ability to
deceive. The devil is less dangerous as a roaring lion than when transformed
as an angel of light.4Douglass adapts 1 Pet. 5: 8.
The application of these homely truths and familiar examples will
become apparent in the discussion I propose of what is popularly but
improperly called the race problem. It seems that the American people
have a special liking for this mathematical formula as applied to the negro.
They seem determined to keep his brain forever employed and his time
forever occupied in solving a great variety of problems, and generally to his
disadvantage. As soon as he solves one another is propounded to him, and
when he thinks, good, easy soul, his work is done he finds a new one
invented, a new burden imposed, and a new hardship inflicted. There may
be rest for the weary,5Douglass loosely paraphrases Job 3: 17. but there seems at present no rest for the negro. He
has been solving problems during all his history.
1 have before referred in this place, I think, to the fact that the negro
was confronted 200 years ago by what was considered a great religious
problem, one which was very difficult of solution. That problem was:
Ought the negro to be baptized in water and admitted to membership in the
Christian church? This was, as I have often said, considering the time of it,
a tremendous problem. As in our day in regard to negro problems, the
opinions of the wise and great were strongly pronounced and much divided.
The right of the negro to baptism was fiercely disputed, especially
by those who owned them as slaves. What is plain to all now was dark and
doubtful to many then. It is easy to fancy that men spoke of it with bated
breath. and saw in the negro’s baptism a menace to the peace and stability
of society, as well as of slavery. For to baptize the negro and admit him to
membership in the Christian church was to recognize him as a man, a child
of God, an heir to Heaven, redeemed by the blood of Christ, a temple of the
Holy Ghost, a standing type and representative of the Saviour of the world,
one who, according to the apostle Paul, must be treated no longer as a
servant, but as a brother beloved.6Philem. 1: 16. Viewed in this light, his admission to
baptism, and to the church was a matter for the gravest consideration. It
touched the money nerve of the Christians of that day, for their wealth was
largely invested in negro flesh and blood. It was well said that the proposition
was novel, extraordinary, and full of danger. It would impair the value
of the slave, and it would put in jeopardy the authority of the master; they
were right, and if the negro was to be regarded as a Christian, he could not
be regarded as a heathen, and as the Bible sanctioned only the enslavement
of heathen, the negro Christian could not be bought and sold, enslaved and
whipped, according to the requirements of the relation of master and slave.
From every view they could take of it the proposition to baptize the negro
was rank radicalism and deserved stern resistance at its inception.
To the credit of the church and its ministers, it must be said that one
learned and able divine, in the person of Dr. Godwin, was equal to the
situation. He met the arguments of the opposition to negro baptism in a
book of 200 pages, in which he endeavored to show that baptism would not
impair either the value of the slave or the authority of the master.7Morgan Godwyn articulated these views in (London, 1680). His
argument was a curious one. It divided the negro into two separate parts,
giving one to the Lord and the other to the slaveholder, and leaving nothing
to himself. Baptism, he said, freed the negro from the bondage of the devil,
but not from the bondage of his earthly master. The controversy over this
problem was long and furious and the negro only won a partial victory after
all. The matter was finally settled, as usual, by a kind of compromise. The
negro was baptized and admitted to the church, but a sort of second table
was set for him. He could take the Lord’s supper only after his white
brethren had finished eating the bread and drinking the wine. He was not
even allowed to enter the same door of the sanctuary by which his white
brethren entered. A separate door was cut for him in the wall, leading to a
high and dark place in the gallery, where his presence could give no offense
to the Lord’s white people on the floor.
It is strange that this state of things did not disgust and repel the negro,
and drive him from religion altogether, but it did not. He clung to religion
all the same. Believing that half a loaf was better than no bread,8This saying was first recorded in Heywood, , Part 1, Chap. 11. he took
what he could get of the church, kept on praying and singing, and sometimes
shouting. He could pray as fervently for the conversion of the scoundrel
who tore his flesh with the lash, as for his best friend. He was made to
think that his offensive black skin on earth would be changed for a white
one in Heaven. It was a strange fancy, but quite a natural one when we see
the importance given to color in the problems before us in our day.
Another problem greatly disturbed the conscientious during the time of
slavery. It was this: Can a negro contract a valid marriage? If he could, and
could inforce his right to his wife and children, it would prove an inconvenient
limitation on the power of his master. If what God has joined together
no man shall put asunder,9Mark 10: 9. the right to sell the wife from the husband and
the husband from the wife must cease. In the minds of the men who had to
deal with it no such limitation in the right of the master could be allowed or
tolerated for a moment. The master must have the right to buy and sell as he
pleased, was the solution of that problem. One terrible evil of this solution
of the marriage question is still seen in our land. Unable to contract valid
marriage, the negro felt himself unrestrained, and licensed to do as he
pleased. He was not expected to limit his conduct by any rule or principle of
morality or decency, but took to himself the freedom of the beasts of the
field and the fowls of the air. He had in law no wife, no family, no children,
and did not own himself. The consequence of this state of things may be
seen very often in our own city at the police court and elsewhere, and the
very people who are responsible for this immorality and crime make merry
over our wretchedness and talk solemnly about the terrible negro problem.
Happily for us, and happily for our common country, as we shall see
later on. the Southern solution of this negro problem has now been unsolved
by the act of emancipation and the superior civilization of the loyal
American people over the people of the old slaveholding States.
Another troublesome problem presented to our Christian country was
whether the negro should have the help of the Bible with which to get to
Heaven; whether, in fact, the command to search the Scriptures imposed
any obligation or duty on him. Our Southern brethren, with whom we have
always been profoundly sympathetic even unto this day, decided this problem
against the Bible, and against the negro, as usual. They made it a
crime, to be punished with banishment, imprisonment, and stripes, for any
one to teach the negro to read. Yet the descendants of these same men, with
the education of their fathers, are now asking us in piteous tones to allow
them in their superior wisdom and goodness of heart to solve what they are
pleased to call the negro problem of today. They are crying out lustily to the
nation, like demons tormented before their time. “Hands off! We want no
Federal authority, and want only local self-government. We want to be let
alone!” They tell us that they know the negro, and that they can manage
him better than can anybody else. They can manage his wages, his voting.
and his education, and all that pertains to him. I hope the nation will not let
them do any such thing. They have shown a strange aptitude for such a
task.
But again, in the history of the negro we had another perplexing
problem. It was this, and this was in some sense a national problem: Can
the negro be made a soldier? This, too, was a very serious problem for the
country, for it was a matter of Union or no Union, of life or death. For at one
time it needed all the material which the nation could command to settle the
problem of our national existence. It will be remembered that at the beginning
of the war it was given out that no negro need apply. He was not to be
allowed to shoulder a musket, carry a knapsack, or, wear a Union uniform.
The glory of the battle-field was to be won wholly by white men. The negro
might dig, but not fight. He might be a servant, but not a soldier. He might
carry a pick-ax, but never a musket.
In considering this problem the nation, strangely enough, shut its eyes
to the fact that in the history of the Revolution the negro fought bravely for
American independence, and in the war of 1812 he even extorted praise
from the stern lips of Gen. Andrew Jackson. His fighting qualities were
nobly admitted by the hero of New Orleans. In spite of this it was insisted
that the negro was a born coward; that he could never make a soldier; that
he would run at the sight of a whip, and that he would run much faster at the
sight of a gun. Time and events, however, helped the negro and the nation
in the solution of this problem, as I think they will help in the solution of
any others that may arise. Fort Wagner, Port Hudson, Vicksburg, James
Island, Olustee, Petersburg, Richmond—a great cloud of witnesses rise
before us to solve the problem of the negro’s soldierly qualities.10Douglass cites a number of battles and campaigns during the Civil War in which black soldiers played a distinguished role: Fort Wagner near Charleston, South Carolina, on 18 July 1863; Port Hudson in Mississippi on 27 May 1863; the Vicksburg campaign during the spring and summer of 1863, especially the Battle of Milliken's Bend on 7 June 1863; James Island, also near Charleston, on 16 July 1863; Olustee or Ocean Pond, west of Jacksonville, Florida, on 20 February 1864; and the combined siege of Petersburg and Richmond from the summer of 1864 to spring 1865, particularly the Battle of the Crater on 30 July 1864. Long, , 359, 363, 387-88, 466, 548; Cornish, , 142-45, 151-57, 267-69, 273-79.
Whether the negro could be educated, was another problem, and I
think this has been solved to the satisfaction of all candid men. He would be
a dishonest man, or an amazingly stupid one who, in the face of the
thousands of negro teachers, and the hundreds of negro preachers, doctors,
lawyers, authors, and editors, with which the country is now studded, who
should insist, as it once was insisted, that education was impossible to the
negro.
But the greatest problem for the negro was whether he could with
safety be made free. Good men knew that slavery was wrong, but how to
get rid of it was the great question. Neither the pulpit, nor the press, nor the
statesman could see a solution of this great problem, and yet that problem
has been solved. The negro is free, and the country is cleansed of its
greatest curse, crime, and scandal.
There were terrible things to happen upon the passing away of slavery.
The freedom of the slave was to be the signal of ruin. There was to be no
more cotton, no more sugar, no more work done by the negro, and the
South was to become a howling wilderness.11A paraphrase of Deut. 32: 10. “But against all these dark
forebodings, these pictures of dismal terror, the late war made short work
of the whole problem. That sturdy old Roman, Benjamin Butler, made the
negro a contraband, Abraham Lincoln made him a freeman, and Gen.
Ulysses S. Grant made him a citizen.
But now, though all this has been done, though slavery has been
abolished, though the negro has been freed, though he has become a
citizen, though the Union has been saved, in part by his valor, the negro is
not to be let off quite yet. He is to be made the victim of a new deal by
precipitating upon the country a false issue. He is to face another problem.
Now that the Union is no longer in danger; now that the North and
South are no longer enemies; now that they have ceased to scatter, tear, and
slay each other, but sit together in halls of Congress, commerce, religion,
and in brotherly love, it seems that the negro is to lose by their sectional
harmony and good will all the rights and privileges that he gained by their
former bitter enmity.
This, it is found, cannot be accomplished without confusing the moral
sense of the nation and misleading the public mind; without creating doubt,
inflaming passion, arousing prejudice, and attracting to the enemies of the
negro the popular sympathy by representing the negro as an ignorant, base,
and dangerous person, and by representing to those enemies that his existence
to them is a dreadful problem. With their usual cunning, these
enemies of the negro have made the North partly believe that they are now
contending with a vast and mysterious problem, the mere contemplation of
which should cause the whole North to shudder. The trick is worthy of its
inventors, and has been played for all that it is worth. The orators of the
South have gone North and have eloquently described this problem, and the
press of the South has flamed with it, and grave Senators from that section
have painted it in most distressing colors. Problem, race problem, negro
problem, has, as Junius says, flitted through their sentences in all the
mazes of metaphorical confusion.12A paraphrase of a line from the seventh public letter of “Junius” to Sir William Draper. , 3d ed. (London, 1769), 27.
In speaking of this subject in another place, I said what I say now, that
these Southern people have outwitted the North. Like skillful prestidigitators,
they have turned the attention of the spectator to a distant
object while they have manipulated the thing in hand. They have imitated
the running of the hunter who draws a red herring across the path of the
game to divert the hounds.
The true problem is not the negro, but the nation. Not the law-abiding
blacks of the South, but the white men of that section, who by fraud,
violence, and persecution, are breaking the law, trampling on the Constitution, corrupting the ballot-box, and defeating the ends of justice. The true
problem is whether these white ruffians shall be allowed by the nation to go
on in their lawless and nefarious career, dishonoring the Government and
making its very name a mockery. It is whether this nation has in itself
sufficient moral stamina to maintain its honor and integrity by vindicating
its own Constitution and fulfilling its own pledges, or whether it has
already touched that dry rot of moral depravity by which nations decline
and fall, and governments fade and vanish. The United States Government
made the negro a citizen, will it protect him as a citizen? This is the
problem. It made him a soldier, will it honor him as a patriot? This is
the problem. It made him a voter, will it defend his right to vote? This is the
problem. This, I say, is more a problem for the nation than for the negro,
and this is the side of the question far more than the other which should be
kept in view by the American people.
What these problem orators now ask is that the nation shall undo all
that it did by the suppression of rebellion and in maintenance of the Union.
They ask that the nation shall recede from its advance in justice, liberty, and
civilization. They boldly ask that what was justly and gratefully given to
the negro in the hour of national peril shall be taken from him in the hour of
national security. They ask that the nation shall stultify itself and commit an
act of national shame which ought to make every lover of his country cry
out in bitter indignation and unite as one man to oppose a demand so
scandalous and so shocking to every sentiment of honor and gratitude.
And from whom does this demand come? Not from the men who gave
their lives to save the nation, but from those who gave their lives to destroy
it. Not from the free and loyal North, but from the rebellious and slave-
holding South. Not from the section where men go to the ballot-box with
the same freedom from personal danger as they go to church on Sunday, but
from that section where personal safety is endangered, where Federal
authority is defied, where the amendments to the Constitution are nullified,13That is, the Fourteenth and Fifteenth amendments.
where the ballot-box is tainted by fraud, and red-shirted intimidation
makes a free vote impossible. It comes from the men who led the
nation in a dance of blood during four long years, and who now have the
impudence to assume to control the destiny of this Republic as well as
the destiny of the negro.
And what are the reasons they give for demanding of the nation this
retreat from its advanced position? They are these: They tell us that they are
afraid, very much afraid; they are alarmed, very much alarmed, by the
possibility of negro supremacy over them. This is the calamity from which
they would be delivered, and with eloquent lips and lusty lungs they are
calling out: “Men and brethren, save us from this threatened and terrible
danger?"
My reply to this alarm is easy. It is that the wicked flee when no man
pursueth;14Prov. 28: 1. that the thief thinks each bush an officer;15Douglass slightly misquotes , act 5, sc. 6, line 12. that the thing they
pretend to fear can never happen, and that blank absurdity is written upon
the face of it. The eagle, with fierce talon and bloody beak, screaming in
terror at the approach of a harmless blackbird would not be more absurd
and ridiculous. The superior intelligence of the whites, the comparative
ignorance of the blacks, the former dominion of the whites and the former
subjection of the blacks, the habit of bearing rule of the whites, and the
habit of submission by the blacks make black supremacy in any part of our
common country utterly impossible.
But supposing such an occurrence possible. what hardship would it
impose? What wrong would it inflict? Who would be injured by it? If the
blacks should get the upper hand, their rule would have to be regulated by
the Constitution and the laws of the United States. They could not discriminate
against white people on account of race, color, or previous condition
without finding the iron hand of the nation laid heavily on their shoulders.
The white people of the South are the rich, the negroes are the poor; the
white people are the land-owners, the negroes are the landless. The white
people of the South are numbered with the ruling class of the nation. They
have behind them every possible source of power. They have railroads,
steamships, electric telegraphs, the Army and the Navy. They have the
sword and the purse of the nation behind them, and yet they profess to be
shaking in their shoes lest the 8,000,000 of blacks shall come to rule over
them and their brethren, the 50,000,000 of whites.16According to the eleventh U.S. Census, the population of 1890 included 45,862,023 native-born whites, 9,121,867 foreign-born whites, 7,470,040 blacks, and 168,320 Asians. U.S. Bureau of the Census, , 2d ed. (Washington, 1896), 10-11.
Now I am here to say that there is nothing whatever in this supposition.
I can hardly call this invention a cunning device, for the pretense is too
open, too transparent, too absurd, to rise even to the dignity of low cunning.
It is an old ragged pair of trousers, and an old mashed and battered hat
of the last century stuck upon a pole in a field where there are neither crows
nor corn. It is the cry of fire by the thief, when he would divert the officer of
the law. It is as I have said, a red herring to divert the hounds from the true
game, and the strange thing is that any class of our citizens, white or black,
can be deceived by it.
But black supremacy is not the only string on the harp of a thousand
strings upon which our Southern brethren play. They are not merely afraid
of black supremacy, but they are afraid of ignorant black supremacy. Now,
this danger is just the one to appeal to the North. The Northern people are
not in love with ignorance or illiteracy. They deplore it; they hate it, and
take every means in their power to banish it from their States. They naturally
sympathize with any people in deploring it and who are making
honest efforts to remove it from among them. Hence they are pouring out
millions of dollars to the South, and are sending competent teachers there
to enlighten the ignorant and to lift up the black man from the darkness and
ignorance to which he had been doomed by slavery and by these would-be
negro problem solvers.
But the men in the South who are loudest in their outcry against the
ignorance of the negro are not those who wish to have him instructed, but
those who would make his ignorance a reason for depriving him of the
rights secured to him under the Constitution.
But again, when before in the history of the Southern people have they
been alarmed by the presence of ignorance among them? When before did
they ask the nation to assist them in stemming the tide of ignorance? The
whole history of the legislation of the South—by the South 1 mean the
ruling class of the South—is on the side of ignorance. Their laws have
made it a crime to enlighten the black man’s ignorance. It has been the
policy of the ruling class there to oppose education not only for the blacks,
but for the poor whites. But as I have said, this cry is raised not for help to
educate the negro, but as an excuse for taking from him the right of
suffrage, by which he can in some measure promote his own education and
the education of those about him.
But, admitting what I do not admit, that the ignorance of the negro is
recognized by the South as a source of danger, and admitting the sincerity
of Southern men who are professing to deplore it, I have to say to them: If
you could stand the ignorance of the negro when he was a slave, you can
stand it now that he is free, at least a reasonable length of time for his
education. Clearly enough, the remedy is not in the abridgement of his
rights, but in the education of his mind. It is not in evading the plain
provisions of the Constitution, but in teaching him the duties imposed by
the Constitution; not in taking away his vote, but in teaching him how to
use it.
To me there is something mendacious and insolent rather than pathetic
and persuasive in the language of Southern men on this question. There is
something of the old-time Southern swaggard and assumption in their tone
and bearing—a tone and bearing which is entirely out of date, out of place,
and out of harmony with the age and body of our times—a tone and bearing
which invites rebuke rather than sympathy, disgust rather than approbation.
Such men as Senator Butler, of South Carolina,17Matthew Calbraith Butler. should remember
that there is such a thing as modesty as well as decency for men of such
antecedents, and that it is neither modest nor decent for them to coolly
propose the expulsion of citizens innocent of crime from the State of South
Carolina, or from any other State in the American Union. It is only a little
while ago that Senator Butler and his class were in arms against the Government
which these same negro citizens loyally and bravely endeavored to
save from disloyal hands.
But let me say again, the South neither really fears the ignorance of the
negro, nor the supremacy of the negro. It is not the ignorant negro, but the
intelligent North that it fears; not the supremacy of a different race from
itself, but the supremacy of the Republican party. It is not the men who are
emancipated but the people who emancipated them that disturb its repose.
In other words the trouble is not racial, but political. It is not the race and
color of the vote, but the type of civilization represented by the vote.
Disguise this as it may, the real thing that troubles the South is the Republican
party, its principles, and its ascendency in the Southern States.
When it talks of negro ignorance, and of negro supremacy, it means this,
and simply this, and only this. It uses the word negro simply as a means to
the end of awakening popular prejudice and enlisting its influence in favor
of its bad cause, a cause for which they have shown themselves capable of
committing frauds the most scandalous, and cruelty the most barbarous.
We all know that the negro problem would vanish into thin air, would
utterly disappear like the mist before the morning sun, if the intelligent
negroes of the South would renounce their connection with the Republican
party and support only the Democratic party. What the South wants, and
what it means to have, peaceably if it can, or forcibly if it must, is a solid
Democratic party South. There is not an intelligent man at the South that
does not know this, and there is not an honest man at the South, who, if he
would speak candidly on the subject, would not confess this. The trouble is
that the people of the North do not see this in its true light. Honest themselves,
they cannot readily believe that others are not alike honest. They
have never believed in the story of outrages committed against the negro
voters of the South, because they themselves would not be guilty of such
outrages, and have been easily imposed upon by the pretended fear of
negro supremacy professed by the South.
But let me be more intelligible. My idea about the problem business is
this: When a case has been in litigation before a court of highest resort, and
that case has been solemnly adjudicated in that court, that case is finished
and all the parties to it must submit to the decision or become law-breakers
and criminals. The case goes into history henceforth res adjudicata. It is
settled. If this beneficent rule did not exist there would be no end to
litigation and no repose for the public mind.
To make my meaning still more clear: When in England a few years
ago Northampton saw fit to send Mr. Bradlaugh,18British free-thinker Charles Bradlaugh (1833-91) waged a nearly-six-year struggle to be seated in the House of Commons without first swearing an oath of allegiance on the Bible. The eldest of seven children of a London solicitor's clerk, Bradlaugh received little formal education before starting to work as an office boy at age twelve. After military service from 1850 to 1853, he returned to London and rose to become managing clerk of a law firm. He also became a popular orator and the proprietor of the , a newspaper advocating atheism and republicanism. In 1880 Bradlaugh won election to the House of Commons from Northampton but that body rejected his offer to affirm rather than swear allegiance and denied him his seat. After Bradlaugh's constituents reelected him four more times. Parliament relented in 1886 and seated him. Once in office, he championed the interests of the peoples of India and sponsored legislation that made affirmations a legal substitute for oaths. [J. P. Gilmour]. (1933; New York, 1972); , 248-50. an infidel, to represent
it in the British House of Commons, and he was not allowed to take his
seat, the admission of an infidel to the House of Commons was a problem;
but when he continued to knock at the door of the house till he was finally
admitted, the infidel problem, so far as the right of membership of that
house was concerned, was solved.
Again, we are not the only people whose rights have been denied on the
ground of race. Our brother Shem19An allusion to the son of Noah from whom, the Bible declares, Abraham and the Jewish people are descended. Gen. 5: 32, 10: 21-31, 11: 10-27. has had a taste of proscription as well
as ourselves. No Jew was at one time eligible to membership in the parliament
of Great Britain, but after long years of agitation of the question Mr.
Baring,20Douglass errs regarding the identity of the first professing Jew to sit as a member of the British Parliament. Lionel Nathan de Rothschild (1808-79), a London banker, was first elected to the House of Commons in 1847 and five times reelected but not allowed to take his seat because he declined to take the parliamentary oath containing the words “on the true faith of a Christian." In 1858 both houses of Parliament passed legislation to enable Jewish members to swear an oath of allegiance in accordance with their religious principles and Rothschild finally took his seat. His son, Nathan Meyer Rothschild (1840-1915) became the first practicing Jew in the House of Lords upon his elevation to the peerage in 1885. The Barings, a distinguished London merchant family, were descended from German Lutherans, not Jews, and worshipped in the Anglican faith. , 17: 304-06; , 480-81. an eminent Jew, was admitted to a seat in parliament. The Jewish
problem, when Mr. Baring was seated, was ended. I mean this: When the
American people declared their independence of Great Britain and made
good that declaration by victory in a seven years’ war, the problem of
American independence was solved, and there was never anything afterwards
concerning it which could be called problematical. It was a fixed
fact, and has remained such until now, and will remain so, I trust, forever.
There is a grand agitation now in progress in Great Britain for local
self-government, at the head of which are Mr. Gladstone and Mr. Parnell.21William Ewart Gladstone and Charles Stewart Parnell.
If Great Britain shall grant home rule to Ireland, the Irish problem
will be solved, and it will be nonsense thereafter to speak of it as an
unsolved problem. Our American women are asking for a sixteenth amendment
to the Constitution whereby they may vote. They ought to have it. If
the American people shall adopt such an amendment, the women problem
will cease to exist.
In like manner, when the negro was declared free by the highest
authority in the land, when the whole system of his bondage was broken
up, when he was invested by the organic law of the land with the title,
dignity, and immunity of an American citizen, and when it was declared
that any discrimination made by any State against him on account of race or
color was unlawful, I hold that his race condition could no longer be
considered a problem. The thing was done; it was finished. The nation had
taken its position and all the parts of the nation must ultimately adjust
themselves to the whole. The individual States may be great, but, the
United States is greater. The mountain will not and cannot go to Mahomet,
so Mahomet must and will in the end go to the mountain.22Douglass utilizes an English proverb, familiar since the seventeenth century. Smith, , 819. Herein is the
ground of my hope. The tread of civilization, the power of large bodies to
attract small ones, the force of national greatness, the generation of patriotism
by the idea of common country, and the inclination to the strong
rather than to the weak will ultimately bring the individual States in line
with the Federal body. I affirm that while the National Government shall
remain in the hands ofthe Republican party and under the principles of that
party, no State will or can permanently disfranchise any of its citizens
because of race or color or previous condition. Attempts may be made to do
this, but the race problem in that respect is solved, and the case cannot be
reopened.
But I am asked, what of the future? and will the various peoples of the
country ever be thoroughly assimilated? or, to speak more plainly, will they
intermarry? My answer is, “Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.”23Matt. 6: 34.
We should not cross that stream till we have come to it.24The most famous literary presentation of this adage is in Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s , Book 6. , 5: 436. Whether such
marriages will ever become common or not is no matter of vital concern to
anybody. It is mere speculation and is utterly without practical importance,
so far as the rights of the American people are concerned. It touches no
question of politics, statesmanship, or religion.
Individual interests, personal preferences, public sentiment, may be
safely left to regulate the relation of the races in respect of intermarriage.
Such, I think, is the view that common sense will take of it, but such does
not seem to be the view taken of it by some of our people—white, black,
and mixed. There seems to be a fascination about the subject which makes
it impossible for men to let alone. They thrust it into our faces on all
occasions, in season and out of season, and seem distressed because we
cannot solve the problem for them. Some of them say that the repugnance
of the white race for the black makes marriage between them impossible,
and yet they proceed with great warmth and eloquence to denounce it as a
thing to be closely watched and guarded, and by no means encouraged. If
the thing is impossible to happen no one should be afraid that it will
happen.
I noticed while at my post in Hayti25President Benjamin Harrison appointed Frederick Douglass minister resident and consul general to the Republic of Haiti on 1 July 1889. Douglass sent the Department of State his letter of resignation on 30 July 1891 and it was accepted officially on 11 August 1891. James G. Blaine to Douglass, 1 July 1889, William F. Wharton to Douglass, 11 August 1891, General Correspondence File, reel 5, frames 405-08, reel 6, frames 199-200, FD Papers, DLC. that even the Senate of the United
States was compelled to listen to a learned disquisition upon this subject of
race intermarriage from the lips of the eloquent, learned, and distinguished
Senator from Kansas.26Douglass alludes to a speech delivered by Kansas Senator John James Ingalls (1833-1900) on 23 January 1890. Born into the family of a Massachusetts shoe manufacturer, Ingalls graduated from Williams College in 1855 and then trained for the law. In 1858 he migrated to Kansas and eventually settled in Atchison where he edited a weekly Republican newspaper. After filing to gain the Republican nomination for lieutenant governor in 1862, Ingalls ran for that office as the candidate of a fusion “Union” ticket of Democrats and independent Republicans in both the 1862 and 1864 elections. Ingalls returned to the practice of law until 1873 when a corruption scandal drove U.S. Senator Samuel C. Pomeroy from office. Chosen to replace Pomeroy, Ingalls won a national reputation for his virulent denunciations of political foes rather than for any legislative accomplishments. In 1891 his Senate career ended after three terms as a consequence of the victory of a coalition between Populists and Democrats in the state legislature election. In his later years, Ingalls prospered as a lecturer and writer. , 51st Cong., 1st sess., 803; Burton J. Williams, (Lawrence, Kan., 1972); , 3: 346; , 8: 415-16; , 9: 462-63. I have always entertained for that gifted gentleman
the highest respect. When he is right he is very right and when he is wrong
he is very wrong. There is no halfness in his character and composition. He
is either all or he is nothing. In the present instance he happens to be not
only wrong but very wrong. His argument against the admixture of the race
is intense but narrow, brilliant but unsound, learned but inconsistent and
illogical. He not only contradicts the facts and the science of the case but
contradicts himself. He asserts that only the bad qualities of each race are
inherited by a mixed race, and at the same time he permits himself to say
that he attributes whatever ability I happen to possess to the Caucasian side
of my parentage. So good a logician as Senator Ingalls should not have
allowed himself, almost in the same breath, to knock down the whole
superstructure of his argument. Mr. Ingalls is a brave and a generous man,
and I am surprised that these qualities were allowed to forsake him on the
occasion referred to. Had he listened to the manly side of his character, he
would have hesitated to slay with his brilliant rhetoric a million of his
colored fellow-citizens. He took advantage of his position on the floor of
the United States Senate to deal us a blow which we had no means of
parrying. His advantage was great, and the meanness of his attack must be
measured by the greatness of his advantage. Had any colored man of spirit
and ability been a member of the Senate to reply to his attack, Mr. Ingalls
would not have been inconsistent with his well-known chivalric qualities.
But the case was otherwise.
If it be true that good qualities are not transmissable in such unions; if it
be true that only evil, and that continually, must descend to the children of
such parents, it may well be asked why any of the mulatto and quadroon
children and grandchildren of our earlier statesmen are found anywhere
outside of the thick walls and iron-barred windows of our prisons. Why are
they walking our streets and employed in our houses as trusted servants and
stewards? Why are they our teachers, professors, and preachers? Why are
they respected and treated as gentlemen and Christians in every part of the
world except our own? O, no, Mr. Ingalls! Your argument will not hold. It
will not bear the test of either reason or experience. Your language is the
language of alarm, and the question you should put to yourself is, What if.
in a nation of a hundred millions, there should occasionally happen a
marriage between two different varieties of the human family? Who would
be hurt by it? Who, outside of the parties themselves, should give them-
selves any trouble about it? The sun would not cease to shine, the rain to
descend, nor the grass to grow. Men would not cease to go to and fro in the
earth, or knowledge cease to increase, or the wheels of civilization cease to
roll onward. If the country has endured, during 240 years, lawless relations
between the two peoples, it should not go into paroxysms of alarm over
what may possibly take place under lawful conditions.
And now comes Mr. Isiah Montgomery,27Isaiah Thomton Montgomery (1841-1921) was the son of Mary Lewis and Benjamin Thornton Montgomery, slaves of Joseph Davis, the brother of the Confederate president, Benjamin Montgomery was a literate slave and was given considerable authority in managing the commercial affairs of the Davis brothers’ plantations at Davis Bend, Mississippi. Isaiah Montgomery served Joseph Davis as valet and secretary before the Civil War. When the Union navy briefly occupied Davis Bend in 1863. Admiral David D. Porter befriended the younger Montgomery and employed him as a cabin boy. After the war, Joseph Davis sold the Davis Bend plantations to the Montgomery family. Isaiah aided his father in the management of this property until financial reverses forced them to sell the land in 1881. Seven years later, Isaiah Montgomery founded the all-black town of Mound Bayou, Mississippi, which became the hub of an agricultural colony of more than four thousand blacks. Montgomery was the only black delegate at the 1890 state constitutional convention and attracted severe denunciations from Douglass and other black leaders for supporting a constitutional amendment that effectively disenfranchised most black voters. His accommodationist views, however, won him the friendship of Booker T. Washington and the two cooperated in organizing the National Negro Business League in 1890. Theodore Roosevelt appointed Montgomery a federal revenue collector but financial irregularities in his accounts forced him to resign in 1903. New York , 11 October 1890; Janet Sharp Hermann, (New York, 1981); , 446-47. of Mississippi, with his
solution of the pretended negro problem. I have spoken of him elsewhere,
and I take back nothing that I have said either of this remarkable man, or of
his remarkable address. He has surrendered to a disloyal State a great
franchise given to himself and his people by the loyal nation. He has taken
the work of solving the nation’s work out of the nation’s hands. He has
virtually said to the nation: “You have done wrong in giving us this great
liberty.” He has surrendered a part of his rights to an enemy who will make
this surrender a reason for demanding all of his rights. He has conducted his
people to a depth from which they will be invited to a lower deep, for if he
can rightfully surrender a part of his heritage from the National Government,
he may surrender the whole. The people with whom he makes this
deal are restrained in dealing with the rights of colored men by no sense of
modesty or moderation. They want all that is to be had, and will take all that
they can get. Their real sentiments is that no negro shall have the right to
vote. Yet I have no denunciation for the man Montgomery. He is not a
conscious traitor though his act is treason; treason to the cause of the
colored people, not only of his own State, but of the United States.
I wish the consequences of his act could be confined to Mississippi, but
I fear this cannot be. Other colored men in other States, dazzled by the
fame obtained by Mr. Montgomery through the Democratic press, will
probably imitate his bad example. I speak of this Montgomery business
more in sorrow than in anger. I hear in the plaintive eloquence of his
marvelous address a groan of bitter anguish born of oppression and despair.
It is the voice of a soul from which all hope has vanished. His deed kindles
indignation, but his condition awakens pity. He had called to the nation for
help—help which it ought to have rendered but did not—and in a moment
of impatience and despair he has thought to make terms with the enemy, an
enemy with whom no colored man can make terms but by a sacrifice of his
manhood. There is no need here of an analysis of Mr. Montgomery’s
address. Its character is known and it has nothing to commend it but its
ability and plaintive eloquence. The logic of the speech would have conducted magnanimous men to a prompt rejection of the surrender, for it was
an appeal to all that was noble, grateful, and generous in the hearts of
Mississippians. They should have said. “No, Mr. Montgomery; your
people have been our best friends when we needed friends, and we scorn to
take from you the franchise accorded to you by the wisdom and magnanimity
of the National Government.”
Ladies and gentlemen— I have been requested to say an encouraging
word to our people before I leave for my post of duty at Port-au-Prince,28On 6 December 1890 Douglass left New York City to return to his diplomatic post in Haiti aboard the . New York , 7 December 1890; Detroit , 12 December 1890.
and if I have not already said such a word I find it quite easy to do so now.
From every view I have been able to take of the moral and political situation
of our cause, before and since my arrival in the country, I am hopeful. I
have no doubt whatever of the future. I know that there are times in the
history of all reforms when the future looks dark; when the friends of
reform are impatient and despondent; when they cannot see the end from
the beginning; when the truth that is plain to them compels them to reject
the honesty of all who refuse to receive it. Then, too, they meet with
opposition where they expected co-operation; treachery where they expected
fidelity; and defeat where they expected victory. I, for one, have
gone through all this. I have had fifty years of it, and yet I have not lost
either heart or hope. It is true that we have been sadly disappointed in the
action, or rather the non-action, of the fifty-first Republican Congress. The
platform of the Republican party adopted at Chicago plainly committed the
Republican party to some measure of protection to the Republican voters of
the South. We had a right to expect that the pledge there given would find
fulfillment in the action of this Republican Congress. We have been disappointed,
sadly disappointed. Following the advice of a new leader from
Pennsylvania,29Pennsylvania Republican "boss" Matthew Stanley Quay (1833-1904) was the son of a Presbyterian minister in Dillsburg, York County, Pennsylvania. Quay graduated from Jefferson College in Cannonsburg, Pennsylvania, and established a law practice in Beaver, Pennsylvania. He served briefly in the Union army and received the Congressional Medal of Honor for gallantry at the Battle of Fredericksburg. Mustered out for ill-health in late 1862, Quay served as military secretary to Pennsylvania governor Andrew G. Curtin and as state assistant commissary general for the remainder of the war. After two years in the state legislature (1865-67), he edited the Beaver (1867-72) and built up a base of power in the Pennsylvania Republican party. Quay held the position of secretary of the commonwealth for a decade with one brief interruption (1872-78, 1879-82) and then the post of state treasurer (1885-87). Elected to the U.S. Senate in 1887, he battled tirelessly for higher protective tariffs. In August 1890, Quay sponsored a Republican caucus resolution that caused the tabling of the Federal Elections Bill in order to prevent a southem filibuster that would have blocked passage of new tariff legislation. Intra-party fighting among Pennsylvania Republicans prevented Quay's reelection to the Senate in 1899 and the seat remained vacant until a new legislature returned him to office two years later. James A. Kehl, (Pittsburgh, 1981); Schlesinger, , 2: 1627, 1637-38; , 1489; , 5: 147; , 1:459-60; , 15: 296-98. but not of the Thaddeus Stevens and Charles Sumner
mold, this Congress has preferred protection to commerce and property to
protection to personal and political liberty. We had hoped that it would
adopt the Federal election bill30Sponsored in the Senate by George F. Hoar of Massachusetts and John C. Spooner of Wisconsin and in the House of Representatives by Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts, the Federal Elections Bill was an effort by Republicans to revive the Fifteenth Amendment's commitment to protect the political rights of the freedmen. This measure authorized supervision of state registration procedures by federal court-appointed officials. The bill passed the House by a straight party vote in July 1890. Fear that a filibuster against the election legislation by the Democratic majority would delay passage of the McKinley tariff bill caused Senate Republicans to postpone consideration of the former until the next session of Congress. The measure was finally tabled in January 1891 by the combined vote of Democrats and several western Republicans more concerned with the currency question. Richard E. Welch, Jr.. “The Federal Elections Bill of 1890: Postscripts and Prelude," , 52 : 511-26 (December 1965); Vincent DeSantis, (1959; New York, 1969), 204-21. and the Blair educational bill. It has done
neither. The omission is, on the face of it, discouraging. But what then.
Shall we get mad and denounce and renounce the Republican party? Has
that party sinned away its day of grace? Are there no remaining reasons for
giving it our confidence? I entertain no such thought. The Federal election
and educational bills are not dead, nor are their friends idle. Mr. Cabot
Lodge31Member of a prominent Massachusetts family, Henry Cabot Lodge (1850-1924) graduated from Harvard College in 1871 and went on to receive a law degree in 1874 and a Ph.D. degree in history in 1875 from the same university. He further developed his literary and scholarly talents while serving as assistant editor of the (1873-76), lecturer in US. history at Harvard (1876-79), and associate editor of the (1879-81). He wrote numerous historical works including biographies of George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, and Daniel Webster. After two terms in the Massachusetts state legislature (1880-81), Lodge won election to the U.S. House of Representatives as a Republican and almost immediately became a national figure through his sponsorship of the Federal Elections Bill. After three terms in the House, Lodge won a seat in the U.S. Senate and remained there until his death. During his long congressional career, Lodge championed civil service reform, the gold standard, and protective tariffs. Chosen Senate majority leader and chair of the Foreign Relations Committee, Lodge gained his greatest historical fame for leading the successful opposition to the U.S. ratification of the Treaty of Versailles and consequent membership in the League of Nations. William C. Widenor, (Berkeley, 1980); Charles S. Groves, (Boston, 1925); , 1229; , 4: 1; , 19: 52-54; , 11: 346-49. and Mr. Blair32Henry William Blair. and their friends in the Senate and in the House
may permit delay but will not suffer defeat. The President of the United
States is true to his trust. No man since Gen. Grant has stood by us more
firmly than has Gen. Harrison.33Benjamin Harrison. He has let it be known openly and emphatically
that he is for stepping to the very verge of constitutional limitations
to secure honest elections, a free vote, and a fair count in every State
in the Union, and he is not the man to take any steps backward.
I admit that during many years to come the colored man will have to
endure prejudice against his race and color, but this constitutes no problem.
The world was never yet without prejudice. There exists prejudice in favor
of and against classes among men of the same race and color. There is
prejudice between religious sects and denominations; between Catholics
and Protestants; between families and individuals. The time may never
come this side [of] the millennium when men will not ask “Can any good
thing come out of Nazareth?”34John 1: 46. But what business has government, State
or National, with these prejudices? Why should grave statesmen concern
themselves with them? The business of government is to hold its broad
shield over all and to see that every American citizen is alike and equally
protected in his civil and personal rights. My confidence is strong and high
in the nation as a whole. I believe in its justice and in its power. I believe
that it means to keep its word with its colored citizens. I believe in its
progress, in its moral as well as its material civilization. Its trend is in the
right direction. Its fundamental principles are sound. Its conception of
humanity and of human rights is clear and comprehensive. Its progress is
fettered by no State religion tending to repress liberal thought; by no order
of nobility tending to keep down the toiling masses; by no divine right
theory tending to national stagnation under the idea of stability. It stands
out free and clear with nothing to obstruct its view of the lessons of reason
and experience.
It may be said, as has been said, that I am growing old, and am easily
satisfied with things as they are. When our young men shall have worked
and waited for victory as long as I have worked and waited, they will not
only learn to have patience with the men opposed to them, but with me also
for having patience with such. I have seen dark hours in my life, and I have
seen the darkness gradually disappearing and the light gradually increasing.
One by one I have seen obstacles removed, errors corrected, prejudices
softened, proscriptions relinquished, and my people advancing in all
the elements that go to make up the sum of general welfare. And I remember
that God reigns in eternity, and that whatever delays, whatever
disappointments and discouragements may come, truth, justice, liberty,
and humanity will ultimately prevail.