FREDERICK DOUGLASS ET AL. TO ANDREW JOHNSON¹Andrew Johnson (1808–75) assumed the presidency on 15 April 1865 following the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. Born in Raleigh, North Carolina, the self-educated Johnson served in the Tennessee legislature (1834–37, 1839–43) before being elected a Democratic congressman (1843–53), governor (1853–57), and U.S. senator (1857–62). In 1862, Lincoln appointed Johnson, a Unionist, military governor of Tennessee, and two years later Johnson was elected as Lincoln’s vice president. Radical Republicans opposed Johnson’s Reconstruction policies, and in 1867, after the president had attempted to oust Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton in defiance of the Tenure of Office Act, succeeded in impeaching him. At the Senate trial in 1868, conviction failed by one vote. After his presidential term, Johnson returned to Tennessee, which elected him to the U.S. Senate in 1874. Robert W. Winston, A(New York, 1928); James E. Sefton, (Boston, 1980).

Washington, [D.C.] 7 February 1866[.]

MR. PRESIDENT—

In consideration of a delicate sense of propriety, as well as your own repeated intimations of indisposition to discuss or to listen to a reply to the
views and opinions you were pleased to express to us in your elaborate
speech to-day,²On the morning of 7 February 1866, President Andrew Johnson received a delegation appointed by the National Convention of Colored Men, an organization of black men from thirteen states that was then meeting in Washington. Douglass, his son Lewis, and George T. Downing were among the thirteen men (including one white man) escorted into the president’s office at the Executive Mansion. Downing opened the interview, and Douglass then stated the purpose of the visit. Johnson’s reply was courteous, but he sidestepped the concerns of the group, most of which centered on the Thirteenth Amendment and its enforcement in the southern states. After the meeting, the delegates met briefly with Radical Republicans opposed to Johnson’s policies. Later that day, Douglass composed a written reply to the president, signed by all the delegates, which appeared in the next day’s edition of the Washington . , ser. 1, 4:96–106; , ser. 2, 3:299–301; Washington , 7 February 1866; Washington , 8 February 1866; Benjamin Quarles, (Washington, D.C., 1948), 226–28.
the undersigned would respectfully take this method of
replying thereto. Believing, as we do, that the views and opinions you expressed in that address are entirely unsound and prejudicial to the highest
interests of our race as well as our country at large, we cannot do other
than expose the same, and, as far as may be in our power, arrest their dangerous influences. It is not necessary at this time to call attention to more
than two or three features of your remarkable address:

1. The first point to which we feel especially bound to take exception
is your attempt to found a policy opposed to our enfranchisement, upon
the alleged ground of an existing hostility on the part of the former slaves
toward the poor white people of the South.³In his impromptu reply to the black delegation, Johnson observed: “The query comes up, whether these two races, situated as they were before, without preparation, without time for passion and excitement to be appeased, and without time for the slightest improvement, whether the one should be turned loose upon the other and be thrown together at the ballot-box, with this enmity and hate existing between them. The query come up if right there we don’t commence a war of races. I think I understand this thing—and especially in this case when you force it upon a people without their consent.” Johnson’s solution was to allow the people of each state to resolve the question of black enfranchisement. , ser. 1, 4:102. We admit the existence of this
hostility, and hold that it is entirely reciprocal. But you obviously commit
an error by drawing an argument from an incident of a state of slavery,
and making it a basis for a policy adapted to a state of freedom. The hostility between the whites and blacks of the South is easily explained. It has
its root and sap in the relation of slavery, and was incited on both sides by
the cunning of the slave masters. Those masters secured their ascendancy
over the poor whites and the blacks by putting enmity between them.

They divided both to conquer each.⁴The phrase is often attributed to Italian political philosopher Niccolò Machiavelli (1469–1527), who in turn indicated its ancient classical origin. John Bartlett, , 16th ed. (Boston, 1992), 118. There was no earthly reason why
the blacks should not hate and dread the poor whites when in a state of
slavery, for it was from this class that their masters received their slavecatchers, slave-drivers and overseers. They were the men called in upon
all occasions by the masters when any fiendish outrage was to be committed upon the slave. Now, sir, you cannot but perceive that, the cause of this
hatred removed, the effect must be removed also. Slavery is abolished.
The cause of antagonism is removed, and you must see that it is altogether
illogical (and “putting new wine into old bottles,” “mending new garments with old cloth”)⁵Matt. 9:14–17; Mark 2:18–22; Luke 5:33–39. to legislate from slave-holding and slave-driving
premises for a people whom you have repeatedly declared your purpose
to maintain in freedom.

2. Besides, even if it were true, as you allege, that the hostility of the
blacks toward the poor whites must necessarily project itself into a state of

freedom, and that this enmity between the two races is even more intense
in a state of freedom than in a state of slavery, in the name of Heaven, we
reverently ask, how can you, in view of your professed desire to promote
the welfare of the black man, deprive him of all means of defence, and
clothe him whom you regard as his enemy in the panoply of political
power? Can it be that you would recommend a policy which would arm
the strong and cast down the defenceless? Can you, by any possibility of
reasoning, regard this as just, fair or wise? Experience proves that those
are oftenest abused who can be abused with the greatest impunity. Men
are whipped oftenest who are whipped easiest. Peace between races is not
to be secured by degrading one race and exalting another, by giving power
to one race and withholding it from another, but by maintaining a state of
equal justice between all classes. First pure, then peaceable.

3. On the colonization theory you were pleased to broach very much
could be said.⁶Near the end of the interview, following attempts by Douglass and Downing to respond to some of Johnson’s arguments against black enfranchisement, the annoyed president countered: “I think you will find, so far as the South is concerned, that if you all inculcate there the idea in connection with the one you urge, that the colored people can live and advance in civilization to better advantage elsewhere than crowded right down there in the South, it would be better for them.” , ser. 1, 4:105. It is impossible to suppose, in view of the usefulness of the
black man in time of peace as a laborer in the South, and in time of war
as a soldier at the North, and the growing respect for his rights among the
people, and his increasing adaptation to a high state of civilization in this
his native land, there can ever come a time when he can be removed from
this country without a terrible shock to its prosperity and peace. Besides,
the worst enemy of the nation could not cast upon its fair name a greater
infamy than to suppose that negroes could be tolerated among them in
a state of the most degrading slavery and oppression, and must be cast
away, driven into exile, for no other cause then having been freed from
their chains.

GEORGE T. DOWNING,
JOHN JONES,⁷John Jones (1816–79), often referred to by contemporaries and the press as the “most prominent colored citizen of Chicago,” was the freeborn son of a free mulatto mother and a German named Bromfield. A native of Greene County, North Carolina, Jones was later apprenticed to a Tennessee tailor. Jones worked until he could save $100, then moved in 1841 to Alton, Illinois, and married Mary Richardson, whom he had met in Tennessee. In 1845 the couple moved to Chicago, where Jones taught himself to read and write and where he set up a tailor shop that catered primarily to whites. A successful businessman, Jones owned property worth an estimated $85,000 before the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. He lectured throughout Illinois, stressing economic success and social integration as fundamental goals for black advancement. He was vice president of the 1853 Colored National Convention held in Rochester, New York, and participated in the Illinois Colored Convention of 1856. Jones’s speaking took on added fervor in 1853, when he fought laws discouraging black migration to Illinois, and again in 1864, when he led the successful fight for the repeal of the state’s Black Laws. Jones’s home was a way station for the Underground Railroad and a meeting place and guest home for fellow abolitionists, including Frederick Douglass and John Brown. ., 18 May 1860; Chicago , 12 March 1875, 22 May 1879; Allen H. Spear, (Chicago, 1967), 6, 55, 77, 107, 111; Harold F. Gosnell, (1935; Chicago, 1967), 81–82, 111; Arna Bontemps and Jack Conroy, (Garden City, N.Y., 1945), 28–36; , 366–67.
WILLIAM WHIPPER,
FREDERICK DOUGLASS,
LEWIS H. DOUGLASS,⁸Lewis Henry Douglass (1840–1908) was the eldest of Frederick and Anna Murray Douglass’s three sons. Born in New Bedford, Massachusetts, Lewis attended school in Rochester. He also worked in his father’s newspaper office, where he learned the printer’s trade. During the Civil War, Lewis enlisted in the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts Infantry and rose to the rank of sergeant major. After the war, he spent several years working in Denver, Colorado, as a secretary for the Red, White, and Blue Mining Company. While there, he also learned typography. In 1869 he moved to Washington, D.C., where he found employment at the Government Printing Office, largely through his father’s connections. That same year, he married Helen Amelia Loguen, daughter of Jermain Wesley Loguen.In 1873 he joined his father’s staff at the New National Era and was placed in charge of the paper’s editorials. During the administration of Ulysses S. Grant, Lewis served two years as a member of the council of legislation and another two years as a special agent for the post office. During the Hayes administration, he served under his father as an assistant marshal for the District of Columbia. Upon leaving that post, he pursued a career in the real estate business. , ser. 2, 3: 860; , ser. 3, 1: 126; McFeely, , 248, 271–72; Paul Finkelman et al., eds., , 3 vols. (New York, 2006), 1: 423–25.

AND OTHERS.

PLSr: Washington , 8 February 1866. Other texts in New York , 9 February 1866; Baltimore , 10 February 1866.