FREDERICK DOUGLASS TO R. C. HEWETT,
GEORGE FOLLANSBEE,¹The only available copy of this letter by Douglass indicates that it was sent to the editors of the Washington Tribune and the Washington Capital. R. C. Hewett and George Follansbee owned and edited the Tribune, a short-lived daily newspaper. Wilhelmus Bogart Bryan, Bibliography of the District of Columbia: Being a List of Books, Maps, and Newspapers, Including Articles in Magazines and Other Publications to 1898 (Washington, D.C., 1900), 203; George P. Rowell and Co., Geo. P. Rowell and Co.’s American Newspaper Directory, Containing Accurate Lists of All the Newspapers and Periodicals Published in the United States, Territories, the Dominion of Canada and Newfoundland, 1876 (New York, 1876), 31. AND DONN PIATT²Donn Piatt (1819–91) helped found the Washington Capital in 1871 and was its editor through 1879. His efforts in his native Ohio on behalf of the successful Democratic presidential candidate Franklin Pierce in 1852 gained him an appointment as secretary of the American legation in France (1853–55). He served in the Union army during the Civil War, rising to the rank of colonel. After the war, he served a stint in the Ohio legislature and then moved to Washington, where he served as a correspondent for the Cincinnati Commercial. During his decade in the nation’s capital, he exercised tremendous influence as both a lobbyist and an opinion setter. Impelled by his Jacksonian principles of negative government, Piatt used his considerable rhetorical skills to incessantly deride Republican Reconstruction-era policies and politicians—especially Ulysses S. Grant. The historian Mark W. Summers argues that Piatt’s satirical style and unremitting charges of official corruption became the model for most journalists reporting from Washington in the Grant era, and significantly contributed to the loss of public support for Reconstruction. Rowell, American Newspaper Directory, 31; Mark Wahlgren Summers, The Press Gang: Newspapers and Politics, 1865–1878 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1994), 123–42; Peter Bridges, Donn Piatt: Gadfly of the Gilded Age (Kent, Ohio, 2012).

[n.p. 11 February 1875]

[“]There is still one other alternative to which we are exposed—one
which is truly fearful to contemplate. Human nature is the same everywhere. There are many varieties of man, but only one human nature; and
it is possible that, stung to madness and desperation by continued and
unceasing outrages, and seeing no manner of escape, a spirit of retaliation and revenge may be aroused which will fill the South with scenes of
rapine, blood and fire. To avoid this catastrophe we earnestly appeal to
Congress for the action already mentioned, and we invite the sympathy
and support to this appeal of all the lovers of liberty and order throughout
the country[”]³The passage quoted by Douglass is the conclusion of a public statement produced by “representative colored men” from southern states who met in Washington, D.C., on 29 January 1875. It was printed in full in the Washington National Republican on 1 February. Consisting of about a dozen leaders of Washington’s black community, including most sitting African American members of Congress and Douglass, the group appealed to congressional Republicans to unite to pass both the Civil Rights Act and the Enforcement Bill pending before them. To justify these bills, the statement recounted many of the atrocities recently perpetrated on African Americans in the South. It also praised President Grant for efforts to maintain order in the region and for pressing Congress for more stringent legislation to stem violence against blacks. Since public sentiment had hardened against Reconstruction by this time, editorial responses to the statement from across the political spectrum tended to ignore its discussion of the plight of African American citizens while roundly condemning its concluding warning that a desperate black population might resort to violence. This was precisely the case with the moderate Republican New York Tribune and the Democratic Washington Capital. Ultimately, the Civil Rights Act was signed into law by Grant on 1 March 1875, but the stringent Enforcement Act failed to pass before the Forty-third Congress adjourned on 3 March. Washington National Republican, 28 January, 1, 8, February 1875; New York Tribune, 2 February 1875; Washington Capital, 7 February 1875; Calhoun, Conceiving a New Republic, 69–78.

Strangely enough, both the and the have mistaken
this statement and treated as a what was intended as an ;
have construed a wail of despair into a stamp of defiance. To say that a
natural consequence of injustice and violence is to invite injustice and
violence, or that like begets like, is a ‘ suggestion.’

Now, Mr. Editor, in conclusion, I admit that the language of the resolutions is strong, but is it stronger than the circumstances call for? What
have we seen during these three years?⁴Although the entire Reconstruction era was punctuated by racial violence, the period 1873–75 saw unprecedented campaigns of intimidation, assault, and murder directed against African Americans and their white allies in attempts to overthrow the remaining Republican-controlled state governments in Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana. Here, Douglass lists four recent incidents that captured national attention. His tallies of casualties are not correct, but then, most reports of these events available to him were statistically inaccurate. The White League, having overturned Republican rule in at least eight Louisiana parishes by the late summer of 1874, next attempted to force the resignation of Governor William P. Kellogg and other Republican state officials in New Orleans. On 14 September, eight thousand armed white conspirators routed at least three thousand black militia and five hundred Metropolitan Police, and for three days ruled the capital. (New Orleans, rather than Baton Rouge, served as the state capital during Reconstruction.) Only the commitment of six U.S. Army regiments by President Grant restored the city and the state government to Republican hands. State elections in November were marred by widespread violence. In response, a Republican-controlled returns committee disqualified votes from majority-black parishes that had elected Democrats, thus producing more disputed results. Enraged, Democrats attempted to forcibly take over the lower house when it assembled on 4 January 1875, but armed federal troops thwarted the coup by entering the House chamber and arresting the usurpers. To the shock and dismay of southern Republicans, their Radical friends, and President Grant, protests of these events across the North decried the intervention of federal troops in “local affairs,” but were silent on the depredations of the White Leagues. This clear evidence of the eagerness of the northern populace to disengage itself from Reconstruction convinced Republicans leaders (except for a handful of Radicals) that it was time to end federal efforts to protect the lives and civil rights of African Americans and their white allies in the South, or else they risked losing their voter base in the North. Tunnell, Crucible of Reconstruction, 202–03, 204–05; Trefousse, Historical Dictionary of Reconstruction, 137, 142, 255; Foner, Reconstruction, 551, 554. Three thousand of our people
murdered in a single State; thousands escaping from Georgia to Mississippi; a sentiment abroad in the South which gets itself expressed by ruffian tongues, ‘No more harm to shoot a nigger than to shoot a bear;’ fifty
shot down in the streets of New Orleans; one hundred in Coushatta;⁵During the spring and summer of 1874, conservative whites throughout Louisiana formed local branches of the White League, a paramilitary organization committed to ending Republican rule and reinstating white supremacy. In late August, armed White Leaguers in Red River Parish, resentful of the influence of Republican state senator Marshall Twitchell, assembled in Coushatta to induce Republican officeholders to resign and leave the state. Despite promises of protection, six cooperative white Republicans—four of whom were relatives of Twitchell—were robbed and murdered on 31 August. An equal or greater number of blacks were killed in the area at the same time. Twitchell won reelection in 1875, but within months was ambushed, maimed for life, and driven from the state. Tunnell, Crucible of Reconstruction, 196–208; Trefousse, Historical Dictionary of Reconstruction, 53. fifty
at Grant parish;⁶The Grant Parish event grew out of the disputed Louisiana gubernatorial election of 1872. William P. Kellogg, the Republican candidate, and John McEnery, his Democratic opponent, each claimed the executive office, assembled their own legislatures, and conducted state functions until President Grant upheld the Kellogg regime in May. This chaos produced catastrophe. When Kellogg appointed replacements for the Democratic sheriff and judge of Grant Parish, an armed body of African Americans entrenched around the courthouse in Colfax to enforce the decision. After a three-week standoff, a white posse attacked on 13 April 1873 and killed indiscriminately. At one point, around 50 blacks were systematically murdered after being induced to lay down their arms with promises of safety. Accounting for the deaths of at least 105 African Americans—some sources claim 200 or more—the Colfax Massacre was the most lethal single day of racial violence in the bloody Reconstruction era. Tunnell, Crucible of Reconstruction, 170–71, 189–93; Foner, Reconstruction, 437; Trefousse, Historical Dictionary of Reconstruction, 48. a half hundred in Vicksburg;⁷Throughout the summer of 1874, militia groups bearing diverse names formed around Vicksburg, Mississippi, all committed to ending Republican rule and reinstating white supremacy. In December, members of these groups forced the black sheriff, Peter Crosby, and other Republican officials to resign and leave town. Finding neither federal nor state support at Jackson, the state capital, Crosby hastily formed a militia of rural freedmen to march on Vicksburg to enforce his right to stay in office. Heavily outgunned by whites, sixty to eighty African Americans were killed—perhaps as many as two hundred—over several days. In early 1875, President Grant dispatched federal troops to restore Crosby to office, but only temporarily. Over the next year, similar paramilitary groups used violence and intimidation in the countryside and at the polls to remove Crosby and most other Republicans from office throughout the state. Mark Wahlgren Summers, The Ordeal of the Reunion: A New History of Reconstruction (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2014), 356–57; Foner, Reconstruction, 558; Dray, Capitol Men, 190-93. and not a single murderer
punished. In view of such a state of facts, the words of those resolutions
are almost contemptibly tame and heartless. The negro is docile, amiable,

and slavery may have made him servile, but ‘a man’s a man for a’ that,’⁸Douglass quotes a line from Robert Burns’s “For A’ That and A’ That.” Smith, Complete Works of Burns, 92.
and because he is a man, he may be stung by oppression to despair and
crime.

Now a word to Faneuil Hall⁹Faneuil Hall was built as a gift to the city of Boston by the wealthy merchant Peter Faneuil (1700–43) in 1742. Primarily intended as a market house, it also contained a spacious second-floor meeting hall where civic gatherings, banquets, and ceremonies were held. During the years of controversy with Great Britain that led to the American Revolution, Faneuil Hall hosted so many important revolutionary meetings that nineteenth-century citizens of Boston proclaimed it the “Cradle of Liberty.” The hall’s symbolism drew political and social activists to use it for meetings and conventions throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Douglass is chiding the hypocrisy of all those who took part in an indignation meeting held at Faneuil Hall on 15 January 1875 to protest the federal government’s actions in Louisiana. Smaller and less enthusiastic than a similar meeting in New York on 11 January—President Grant had delivered a well-received address explaining his administration’s actions on 13 January—the gathering was largely notable for its harsh treatment of Wendell Phillips, who spoke in defense of the government’s continued action to protect the lives and civil rights of African Americans and their white allies in the South. Ironically, Phillips had launched his career as an abolitionist speaker in the hall in 1837. Then, he had persuaded the crowd of the righteousness of his position, but now he was heckled off the stage. New York Tribune, 12, 16 January 1875; New York Times, 14 January 1875; New York Herald, 15, 16 January 1875; Jesse H. Jones, ed., Wendell Phillips’ Last Battle and One of His Greatest Victories, Being the Speech of Wendell Phillips in Faneuil Hall on the Louisiana Difficulties (Boston, 1897); Stewart, Wendell Phillips, 308–10; Foner, Reconstruction, 554; “Faneuil Hall,” nps.gov. and Cooper Institute.¹⁰The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, commonly referred to as the Cooper Institute in the nineteenth century, was founded as a school for workingmen and workingwomen by the wealthy industrialist Peter Cooper (1791–1883) in New York City in 1859. The institution quickly gained a national reputation for the free public access to its Great Hall, which hosted scientific courses, cultural lectures, and significant addresses by notable personalities on important social and political issues. Here, Douglass is sharply rebuking the leaders of a mass meeting held at the Great Hall on 11 January 1875 to express indignation over the intrusion of federal troops into the Louisiana legislature to halt a Democratic coup on 4 January. Throughout the protracted proceedings, “this act of military despotism” was repeatedly denounced as a harbinger of the permanent destruction of federalism, the constitutional balance between state and national authority. Little mention was made of the violent outrages perpetrated against Louisiana Republicans over recent months, or of the lawlessness inherent in the attempted Democratic takeover of the legislature. Perhaps most galling to Douglass was the participation of several prominent Republicans in the largely Democratic event. William Cullen Bryant, the nationally recognized poet, longtime editor of the New York Evening Post, and renowned abolitionist and social egalitarian, played a major role in calling and organizing the indignation meeting and delivered one of its key addresses. This was a cruel irony for Radical Republicans like Douglass, for it was Bryant who had invited Abraham Lincoln to Cooper Union in February 1860 and introduced him, whereupon he delivered the antislavery speech that propelled him to the presidency. Despite Douglass’s assertions, in the closing remarks of this editorial, of continued confidence in the Republican party, he had to know that the defection of progressives like Bryant from the party’s Reconstruction efforts foreshadowed their impending collapse. New York Times, 8, 9, 11, 12 January 1875; Brooks D. Simpson, The Reconstruction Presidents (Lawrence, Kans., 1998), 176–77; “Cooper Union, History,” cooper.edu; William Cullen Bryant, “Mr. Lincoln and New York,” mrlincolnandnewyork.org. I think it strange
that while Ku Klux and White League¹¹The White League was a terrorist organization in Louisiana dedicated to the overthrow of Republican rule and the reestablishment of white supremacy. It was founded in Opelousas in April 1874 after a call for the formation of a “white man’s party” had swept newspapers around the state the previous month. During the summer, dozens of branches formed throughout the state, drawing members from all segments of the white population. Over the next two years, the White Leagues terrorized and murdered African Americans and white Republican officials and committed voting fraud in order to bring most parishes under Democratic control. When the state government was fully back in the hands of Democrats in 1877, the organization disbanded, its mission accomplished. Tunnell, Crucible of Reconstruction, 193–94; Foner, Reconstruction, 550; Trefousse, Historical Dictionary of Reconstruction, 255; Oscar H. Lestage, Jr., “The White League in Louisiana and Its Participation in Reconstruction Riots,” Louisiana Historical Quarterly, 18: 615–95 (July 1935).11 have been burning school houses,
murdering school mistresses, shooting down men in the streets of New
Orleans, you have remained silent as the tomb. You have had no word of
pity for the persecuted—none of rebuke for our murderers; but, strange to
say, just so often as Grant¹²Douglass is defending the recent actions of President Ulysses S. Grant to protect the lives of southern Republicans and sustain the policy of southern Reconstruction. In response to escalating violence perpetrated by Democratic paramilitary groups on African Americans and white Republicans through the summer and fall of 1874, Grant committed additional bodies of federal troops to restore order and preserve Republican regimes in Mississippi and Louisiana. In his Annual Address in December 1874, Grant defended his actions and renewed his commitment to protect the rights of African Americans. He also called on Congress to pass the Civil Rights Act and the accompanying Enforcement Bill pending before it. When near hysteria swept the North in response to federal intervention to thwart a Democratic coup in the Louisiana legislature, Grant issued a strong message to the Senate on 13 January 1875, in which he clearly articulated the continuing need for federal action to protect the rights of all men in the South. Although it was certainly heartening to Radicals like Douglass, Grant’s robust support for Reconstruction in 1874–75 proved too little, too late, since all southern states fell into Democratic hands after the fall elections of 1876. In truth, Grant lacked a consistent Reconstruction policy toward the South throughout his eight years in office, but not because of apathy or incompetence. With the best of intentions, he simultaneously sought to achieve irreconcilable goals: to protect black civil and political rights and also to conciliate white southerners. James D. Richardson, ed., Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents (Washington, D.C., 1903), 7: 296–99, 305–14; Simpson, Reconstruction Presidents, 135, 161–62, 166, 170–79; Calhoun, Presidency of Grant, 466–67, 470–73. and Sheridan¹³Philip Henry Sheridan (1831–1888) was a career U.S. Army officer and a significant Union general in the Civil War. A respected and trusted subordinate of Ulysses Grant during the war, after the conflict Sheridan was handpicked by Grant for several important assignments, including acting as military governor of the Fifth Military District (Texas and Louisiana) and pacifying the Plains Indians. By January 1875, Grant was equally enraged by the violence of the White Leagues and the graft and incompetence of Louisiana’s Republican officials, and so he sent Sheridan to New Orleans to take command of the Department of the Gulf and be his eyes and ears in the troubled region. Sheridan arrived on the night of 4 January, the very day when Colonel Philippe Régis de Trobriand had used federal troops to stop the Democratic seizure of the legislature. Hearing regular threats to kill Republican officials, Sheridan sensed New Orleans was on the verge of open rebellion. In several telegraphed reports to Secretary of War William Belknap, Sheridan insisted that order could be easily restored if the president or Congress would declare the leaders of the White League to be “banditti,” and thus subject to arrest by soldiers and trial by military courts. Belknap did not endorse this proposal, but assured Sheridan that he had the support of Grant and the cabinet. Accounts of this exchange provoked massive protest meetings across the North. Critics charged that Sheridan’s “banditti” reference demonstrated the military’s readiness to overthrow civilian rule and impose military despotism. Calls for Grant to officially censure Sheridan were widespread, but the president adamantly refused to rebuke his protégé. Summers, Ordeal of the Reunion, 358–61; Calhoun, Presidency of Grant, 24, 25, 27, 28, 468–73, 501; William L. Richter, “General Phil Sheridan, the Historians, and Reconstruction,” Civil War History, 33: 131–54 (June 1987). extend the arms of the Republic
to arrest and prevent the further shedding of blood, your eloquent voices
are heard in thundering tones of denunciation.

In view of the violence at the South, and the tones of many powerful presses in the country, I might be alarmed for the future, both for my
race and for the country, but there are grounds of hope, and I feel their
inspiration. The times are perilous, but there is a steady hand at the helm
of our ship of state and a strong-handed loyal crew on deck. The party of
freedom and progress is not yet disbanded, though traitors have endeavored to disband it. The loyal people, however much they may be divided
upon local issues, will, when the time comes for action, see to it that this
Government shall be kept in the hands of loyal men, while there is enough
of disloyalty at the South to require the presence of military force to stay
the hand of disloyal violence.

PLe: , 11 February 187.