FREDERICK DOUGLASS TO JOHN T. SARGENT¹John Turner Sargent (1807–77) was a liberal Unitarian minister whose life was marked by activism in benevolent and social reform causes, including poor relief, temperance, women’s rights, and abolitionism. The scion of an affluent Boston merchant-shipping family, Sargent graduated from Harvard in 1827 and the Divinity School at Cambridge in 1830. His defense of his theologically controversial friend Theodore Parker led to Sargent’s break with the Unitarian establishment in 1844—an estrangement that allowed him greater engagement in the abolitionist movement. In 1845 he coauthored the statement “Protest Against American Slavery, by One Hundred and Seventy Unitarian Ministers”; in 1850 he became a member of the Boston Vigilance Committee, which assisted fugitive slaves; and from 1852 until 1871, he was a member of the executive committees of both the American Anti-Slavery Society and the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, serving several terms as president of the latter organization. He was a correspondent of nearly all prominent northeastern abolitionists, including Frederick Douglass. Lib., 10 October 1845, 1 June 1860; New York Times, 26 January 1866, 26 January 1868, 28 January 1870; Dictionary of Unitarian and Universalist Biography (online).

Boston, [Mass.] June 1866.²Sargent supplied his street address when sending this letter as “13 Chestnut St.”

REV. JOHN T. SARGENT, PRESIDENT MASS.,

ANTI-SLAVERY SOCIETY.³Sargent appended the following prefatory note when he sent Douglass’s letter to be printed: TO THE EDITOR OF THE STANDARD: MY DEAR FRIEND: Foreseeing that a full Report of our Fourth July meeting at Framingham next Wednesday would not be in season for your next issue of THE STANDARD, I so far anticipate as to send you the following copy of a very good letter from Frederick Douglass, which I shall be reading probably at Framingham at about the same time you are having it set in type at New York. Yours, very truly, JOHN T. SARGENT.

MY DEAR SIR:

I regret exceedingly that other duties and engagements will prevent
my being present and assisting in your forthcoming annual Anti-Slavery
celebration of the Fourth July at Framingham, Massachusetts.⁴From the mid-1840s until at least 1866, the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society held a Fourth of July picnic at Harmony Grove in Framingham, Massachusetts, roughly sixteen miles west of Boston. Over the years, many prominent eastern abolitionists spoke at this annual affair. Undoubtedly, the most notable of these occasions was in 1854, when William Lloyd Garrison publicly burned a copy of the U.S. Constitution, branding it “a covenant with death, and an agreement with hell.” According to the report in the New York Times, the 1866 event appeared only slightly less radical: the main speaker, Wendell Phillips, called on Congress to “admit no rebel State . . ., until land, education, and the ballot, under the sanction of Federal authority, are the secure inheritance of every man born on its soil!” Lib., 7, 14, 21 July 1854; New York Times, 9 July 1866; Donald Yacovone, “A Covenant with Death and an Agreement with Hell,” Masshist.org. It gives
me pleasure, however, to assure you and the earnest men and women
who have this celebration in hand, that I most fully accord with you as to
the wisdom and propriety of continuing your work for the full and complete emancipation of my race, and doing so in your own well-earned

and long established character of Abolitionists, and by the use of your
old and well-approved methods and instrumentalities. In that character
you have wrought wonders; demonstrated the divinity of your mission,
and strikingly illustrated the truth that in a righteous cause “ may
chase a , and put thousand to flight.”⁵Deut. 2: 30. Though bodily
absent I shall be present in that higher and more universal sense,—the
sense in which the friends of justice and equality are one the world over!
I shall be with you in earnest sympathy and sincere appreciation, and
in all grateful sentiments for your many labors and services. It is a very
great privilege to be accounted worthy to be with you in this sense, for
I see no workers in the cause of Reform exercising a wiser foresight, a
steadier purpose, a sterner integrity, a heartier zeal, or a more sublime
faith in the ultimate triumph of truth than yourselves. The complaint
against you, at the present hour, is that you persist in thinking that your
work as Abolitionists is not completed. This I take to be your highest
praise. Names are of less importance than things, and you have chosen
to look at things as they are, and have refused to be cheated by professions and appearances. Slavery has nominally received its death blow a
great many times, and has, as often, required still blow to kill
it! No doubt when the declaration went forth that “ALL MEN ARE CREATED EQUAL”⁶Douglass quotes from the Preamble of the Declaration of Independence. sanguine men regarded it as the death blow to slavery in
America, but they were mistaken. When the “slave trade” was abolished⁷Anglo-American antislavery activists took action in the spring of 1807 to restrict the international trade in African slaves with the hope of facilitating the demise of slavery throughout the Atlantic world. Led by William Wilberforce, Parliament overwhelmingly passed the Act for the Abolition of the Slave Trade on 23 February 1807, which outlawed the slave trade throughout the British Empire. It went into effect upon receiving royal assent on 1 May 1807. That same year, on 2 March, northern members of Congress headed passage of the Act Prohibiting the Importation of Slaves, which went into effect on 1 January 1808. Notably, this act did not restrict the interstate slave trade. Abolitionists in both Britain and America had high hopes these laws would gradually but progressively bring slavery to an end within a generation or two. The obvious insufficiency of these laws to restrain, let alone end, Atlantic slavery significantly contributed to the rise of immediate abolitionism in Britain and America in the early 1830s. Matthew Mason, Slavery and Politics in the Early American Republic (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2006), 14–16, 132; EAAH, 3: 128–30.
and slavery in the Territories prohibited,⁸Douglass is apparently referring generally to the two major legislative initiatives to prohibit slavery in the federal territories. The Northwest Ordinance, passed by Congress in 1787, restricted slavery from the territories north and west of the Ohio River, and the Missouri Compromise of 1820 prohibited slavery from expanding north of 36° 30´ north latitude between the Mississippi River and the Rocky Mountains. Despite lamentable breakdowns in enforcement, these acts successfully facilitated the creation of seven free states. Nevertheless, slavery became entrenched south of these demarcated territories, and with the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, all federal territories were opened to slavery. Douglass, like nearly all supporters of the Republican party before the Civil War, considered the passage of this bill to be the work of an insatiable “slave power” bent on legalizing slavery throughout the entire nation. Don E. Fehrenbacher, The Slaveholding Republic: An Account of the United States Government’s Relations to Slavery (New York, 2001), 253–79; John Craig Hammond, Slavery, Freedom, and Expansion in the Early American West (Charlottesville, Va., 2007), 1–8, 96–123, 150–68. slavery received its death blow,
but that old abomination did, after all, manage to live and wax strong,
till, towering aloft in its marvelous pride and power, it has dragged the
nation through four years of bloody war, and entailed upon the country
indescribable calamities and sorrows. But it is now said that it has not
only received its death blow, but that it is dead,—that the war has killed
it; that the “Emancipation proclamation”⁹It was on this date that the Emancipation Proclamation, an executive order that freed most black slaves in the states in secession, went into effect. The proclamation was the political and social outgrowth of the reality of the Civil War. Initially, President Abraham Lincoln could not emancipate slaves without losing conservative Democratic support in the northern and border states; later, he could not do so because issuing an act of emancipation while the Union lacked a major military victory would make the Union look weak. The platform for emancipation began when General Benjamin Butler defined captured slaves as contraband, i.e, spoils of war, prompting congressional Republicans to pass the First and Second Confiscation Acts. Using his war powers as president, following a military victory at Antietam on 17 September 1862, Lincoln announced the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, declaring that all slaves held in rebel states on 1 January 1863 to be free. On said date, he signed the permanent Emancipation Proclamation. Lincoln did not believe that his war powers extended to border states not in open rebellion or to portions of rebel states then under Union control. Therefore, slaves in many counties in Tennessee, Virginia, and Louisiana, as well as in the border states, were unaffected by the proclamation, which made the crafting of a constitutional amendment outlawing slavery vital. Despite the limits presented by states in open rebellion, historians note that the conservative application of Lincoln’s war powers in this matter successfully avoided the legal problems of emancipation created by the Confiscation Acts, began to shift the Union’s focus of the war from a legal battle against rebellion to a moral battle against slavery, and started a gradual change within the country regarding race relations. John Hope Franklin, The Emancipation Proclamation (Garden City, N.Y., 1963), 50–56, 61; Roy P. Basler, ed., Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, 9 vols. (New Brunswick, N.J., 1953–55), 5: 433–36; David S. Heidler and Jeanne T. Heidler, eds., Encyclopedia of the American Civil War: A Political, Social, and Military History, 5 vols. (Santa Barbara, Calif., 2000), 2: 650–52. has killed it; that the “Amendment to the Constitution,” declaring that there shall be “no slavery in any
of the States but for crime”¹⁰Douglass alludes to the Thirteenth Amendment, ratified in December 1865. has killed it; that the “Civil Rights bill”¹¹Douglass is referring to legislation recently passed by Congress that thereafter would be known as the Civil Rights Act of 1866. Immediately after the Civil War, southern states established Black Codes, which so restricted the activities of freedmen as to essentially reestablish slavery in a slightly milder form. In response, Congress passed a bill in early March 1866 that made it a crime to deprive any person of his or her federal civil rights, giving the federal government the power to enforce these rights. The law declared that all persons born in the United States were citizens, thereby overturning Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857), in which the Supreme Court had ruled that blacks could never be citizens of the United States. Furthermore, the bill stated that all citizens, regardless of race, had the right “to make and enforce contracts, to sue, be parties, and give evidence, to inherit, purchase, lease, sell, hold, and convey real and personal property, and to full and equal benefit of all laws and proceedings for the security of person and property.” President Andrew Johnson vetoed this act on 27 March, but Congress overrode his veto on 9 April. Since even some of the Republican supporters of the act doubted its constitutional legitimacy, they immediately crafted the Fourteenth Amendment, which incorporated most of the bill’s content. Douglass was correct in placing little faith in the efficacy of this law to end the oppression of African Americans, since it was always feebly applied by the federal judiciary. By the 1880s, it was a dead letter, largely ignored until the mid-twentieth century. “An Act to protect all Persons in the United States in their Civil Rights, and furnish the Means of their Vindication,” 14 Stat. 27–30; Foner, Reconstruction, 243–46, 250–51; EAAH, 1: 284–85.
has killed it; in a word, slavery is now unconstitutional,—unlawful, and
therefore dead,—has ceased to exist. Well, in theory, this is quite true;
but in practice the case is far otherwise. To my thinking there has been
no time, these fifteen years past, when I could not prove that slavery is
unconstitutional,—but the ugly fact of its existence was dreadfully palpable for all that. I value the “Proclamation” of ’63,—the Amendment to
the Constitution, the Civil Rights bill, and I rejoice in the “Freedmen’s
Bureau,” but I see plainly that until the negro has the ballot at the South

he is still at the mercy of his old masters, and, though nominally free, he
will be practically a .

The power that keeps him from the ballot-box and the jury-box will
take from him the musket with which he helped to put down the rebellion;
will drive out from the South his friendly teachers and missionaries; will
put down free speech, and a free press, and will make the negro’s freedom
a mockery!

Laws are valuable only when justly administered. The best laws on
the Statute Book amount to nothing unless the injured party has the power
to claim their protection. Of what value is the law where you cannot get
into court; where no lawyer will undertake your cause, and where, if you
did succeed in getting into court, you shold find the whole bar, judge, and
jury holding the doctrine of the “Dread Scott Decision,”¹²Dred Scott (c. 1795–1858), a Missouri slave, was taken by his master in the 1830s into Illinois and Wisconsin, where slavery had been prohibited by either the Northwest Ordinance or the Missouri Compromise. In 1846, Scott sued for his liberty, arguing that his four-year stay on free soil had given him freedom. When the Missouri Supreme Court overturned a lower-court ruling in favor of Scott, the case was appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court. After much bargaining among the justices and controversial outside meddling by president-elect James Buchanan, the Court handed down a complicated decision on 6 March 1857. The majority opinion, written by Chief Justice Roger B. Taney, held that as a black, Scott was not a citizen and was therefore not entitled to sue in federal court; Scott’s previous residence in free territory had not made him free upon his return to Missouri, since his status was determined by the laws of the state in which he resided when the case was raised; and the Missouri Compromise was unconstitutional, since it violated the Fifth Amendment’s prohibition against Congress’s depriving persons of their property without due process of law. Don E. Fehrenbacher, The Dred Scott Case: Its Significance in American Law and Politics (New York, 1978), 242–47, 252–53, 261–65, 279–80, 305–24; Carl B. Swisher, Roger B. Taney (1935; Hamden, Conn., 1961), 35, 121–26, 139–40, 158–59, 234, 317; Appleton’s Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 6 vols. (New York, 1888–89), 6: 28–31; Dictionary of American Biography, 20 vols. (New York, 1928–36), 18: 289–94; DANB, 548–49. that you have
“no rights which white men are bound to respect!” This atrocious sentiment is as rampant to-day at the South as before the war, and it only needs
the withdrawal of loyal troops to display its demoniacal crimes everywhere as it has already done in Memphis, and Alexandria, and other parts
of the South.¹³Douglass is referring to two recent attacks on African Americans in the South. On 1 May 1866, the collision of two buggies driven by a black and a white man sparked three days of vicious rioting in Memphis, Tennessee. In the end, forty-eight persons—all but two of them black—had been killed, and most of the African American section of the city destroyed. Earlier, on Christmas Day 1865, black revelers were attacked on the streets of Alexandria, Virginia, by Confederate veterans, some still wearing their army uniforms. Thanks to the rapid intervention of U.S. military forces to quell this disturbance, only one black person (among many wounded) was killed, dozens of white attackers were arrested, and at least five of them were convicted and served time in prison. These were but two of innumerable violent assaults upon southern blacks in 1866, with the worst occurring in New Orleans on July 30, when thirty-four blacks and three white Republicans were killed, and over one hundred persons injured. Washington Evening Star, 26, 27, 28 December 1865, 7 April 1866; Foner, Reconstruction, 261–63.

But why not melt away into the mass of our fellow-citizens, and leave
the negro to the care of politics, and religion, the government, and people?

Alas for the negro if these are to be his only protectors and advocates!
With politics availability is the ruling principle, and, unhappily, our religion sets out with a curse upon the negro, and only blesses him when
he has the power to bless himself. The government and people will have
very little to do with looking after the administration of justice in the
slave States when once those States shall be fully restored to their former
standing in the Union. Abundant proof of this is furnished in the history of the last thirty years. Slavery was above the Constitution,—above
the law—and above the government. It could shoot, hang, or imprison
without consulting Constitution, law, or government, and will do it again
unless the negro is enfranchised, and made, thereby, a man among men,
a citizen among citizens. Until this is done the negro is not safe;—his
freedom is but a name. Your country will be in danger, and your work as
Abolitionists will not be complete. In vain are all schemes of reconstruction, restoration, and reconciliation that practically leave the negro in the
legislative power of his master. They are destined, like all previous compromises, to mock and torment their inventors.

The plan of reconstruction now commended to the people for their
adoption,—by omitting the one essential principle of impartial suffrage,

has defeated the benevolent intentions of its framers, disappointed the just
hopes of the loyal colored people all over the country, robbed American
citizenship of its most valuable property, and left it an empty name. For,
to tell me that I am an equal American citizen, and, in the same breath,
tell me that my right to vote may be constitutionally taken from me by
some other equal citizen or citizens, is to tell me that my citizenship is
but an empty name. To say that I am a citizen to pay taxes, work on the
roads, obey the laws, support the government, and fight the battles of the
country, but, in all that respects voting and representation, I am but as so
much inert matter, is to insult my manhood, and stamp the country which
permits the monstrous injustice, with the crime of ingratitude.

You are right in availing yourselves of the ideas and assoclations that
cluster gloriously about the fourth of July; for the demand, to-day, is the
same old demand of 1776, and there can be no solid peace to the country,
no rest to the public mind, no perfect union between the States till the
government of all the States shall stand upon the principle that “all men
are created equal.”

Yours truly,

FREDERICK DOUG LASS.

PLSr: NASS, 7 July 186