December 2023 Issue
The Annotated Frederick Douglass
Introduction and Annotations by David W. Blight
In 1866, the famous abolitionist laid out his vision for radically reshaping America in the pages of The Atlantic.
Editor’s Note: This article is part of “On Reconstruction,” a project about America’s most radical experiment.
In his third autobiography, Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, while reflecting on the end of the Civil War, Douglass admitted that “a strange and, perhaps, perverse feeling came over me.” Great joy over the ending of slavery, he wrote, was at times “tinged with a feeling of sadness. I felt I had reached the end of the noblest and best part of my life; my school was broken up, my church disbanded, and the beloved congregation dispersed, never to come together again.” In recalling the postwar years, Douglass drew from a scene in a Shakespearean tragedy to express his memory of that moment: “ ‘Othello’s occupation was gone.’ ” In Othello, Douglass perceived a character, the former high-ranking general and “moor of Venice,” who had lost authority and professional purpose. Douglass harbored a special affinity for this most famous Black character in Western literature, whose mental collapse and horrible end lingered as a warning in a famous speech: “O, now, for ever / Farewell the tranquil mind! Farewell content!”
In 1866, Douglass took up his pen to try to capture this moment of transformation, both for himself and for the United States. For the December issue of this magazine that year, in an essay simply titled “Reconstruction,” Douglass observed that “questions of vast moment” lay before Congress and the nation. Nothing less than the essential results of the “tremendous war,” he writes, were at stake. Would the war become “a miserable failure … a scandalous and shocking waste of blood and treasure,” or a “victory over treason,” resulting in a newly reimagined nation “delivered from all contradictions and … based upon loyalty, liberty, and equality”? In this inquiry, Douglass’s new role as a conscience of the country became clarified. His leadership had always been through words and persuasion, written and oratorical. How, now that the war was over, would he employ his incomparable voice?
From the beginning, Reconstruction had faced three paramount questions: Who would rule in the South (defeated ex-Confederates or the victorious North?); who would rule in Washington, D.C. (Congress or the president?); and what were the meanings and dimensions of Black freedom? As of his writing in December, Douglass declared that nothing could yet be “considered final.” After ferocious debates, Congress had enacted the Civil Rights Act of 1866 and passed the Fourteenth Amendment, the latter still subject to ratification by three-quarters of the state legislatures. Violent anti-Black riots had occurred in Memphis and New Orleans that spring and summer, killing at least 48 people in the first city and at least 38 in the second. Much had been done to secure emancipation, but all remained in abeyance, awaiting legislation, human persuasion, and acts of political will.
As Douglass was writing, two visions of Reconstruction vied for national dominance in the fall elections. President Andrew Johnson, a Democrat from Tennessee, favored a policy of a lenient restoration, a plan that allowed for no Black civil and political rights and admitted the southern states back into the Union as quickly as possible. The Republican leadership of the House and the Senate, however, demanded a slower, harsher, and more transformative Reconstruction, a process that would establish state governments in the South that were more democratic. Black civil and political rights and enforcement mechanisms in federal law formed the backbone of these “Radical Republican” regimes.
Douglass was at this juncture a Radical Republican in the spirit of Thaddeus Stevens, the congressman from Pennsylvania who led the effort to impeach Johnson. Like Stevens, Douglass argued vehemently that Johnson had to be countered and thwarted by any legal means necessary or the promise of emancipation would fail. Douglass believed at the end of 1866 that, though only at its vulnerable beginning, the United States had been reinvented by war and by new egalitarian impulses rooted in emancipation. His essay is, therefore, full of radical brimstone, cautious hope, and a thoroughly new vision of constitutional authority. In careful but clear terms, he described Reconstruction as a revolution that would “cause Northern industry, Northern capital, and Northern civilization to flow into the South, and make a man from New England as much at home in Carolina as elsewhere in the Republic.” In short, he sought an overturning of history, the expansion of human rights forged from the fact of African American freedom—and from an idealism that soon would be sorely tested. Revolutions may or may not go backwards, but they surely give no rest to those who lead them.
RECONSTRUCTION by FREDERICK DOUGLASS
The assembling of the Second Session of the Thirty-ninth Congress may very properly be made the occasion of a few earnest words on the already much-worn topic of reconstruction.
Seldom has any legislative body been the subject of a solicitude more intense, or of aspirations more sincere and ardent. There are the best of reasons for this profound interest. Questions of vast moment, left undecided by the last session of Congress, must be manfully grappled with by this. No political skirmishing will avail. The occasion demands statesmanship.1
1—Douglass imagines here the coming of radical Reconstruction. The ascendant Radicals were a generation of politicians who had forged an antislavery party in the 1850s, created a stronger centralized national state in order to fight and win the Civil War, believed in energetic uses of federal power, felt themselves responsible for emancipation, and now sought to forge the remaking of the United States based on human equality and competitive capitalism. Their vision derived from years of advocacy for free labor and combined a mixture of idealism, pragmatism, and northern self-interest. The new nation-makers seized their historical moment. As Thaddeus Stevens put it, “The whole fabric of southern society must be changed, and never can it be done if this opportunity is lost.”
Whether the tremendous war so heroically fought and so victoriously ended shall pass into history a miserable failure, barren of permanent results,—a scandalous and shocking waste of blood and treasure,—a strife for empire, as Earl Russell characterized it, of no value to liberty or civilization,—an attempt to re-establish a Union by force, which must be the merest mockery of a Union,—an effort to bring under Federal authority States into which no loyal man from the North may safely enter, and to bring men into the national councils who deliberate with daggers and vote with revolvers, and who do not even conceal their deadly hate of the country that conquered them; or whether, on the other hand, we shall, as the rightful reward of victory over treason,2 have a solid nation, entirely delivered from all contradictions and social antagonisms, based upon loyalty, liberty, and equality, must be determined one way or the other by the present session of Congress.
2—Here Douglass implicates the people put quickly back in power by President Johnson’s 1865 lenient plan of “restoration.” In southern whites’ choice to enact Black Codes, which restricted all elements of the freedmen’s lives, and to send numerous Confederates to be seated in Congress in December 1865, Douglass perceived the same “deadly hate” at the root of the proslavery revolution of 1861. To him, the risk in this pivotal crisis was losing the reality and meaning of emancipation.
The last session really did nothing which can be considered final as to these questions. The Civil Rights Bill and the Freedmen’s Bureau Bill and the proposed constitutional amendments, with the amendment already adopted and recognized as the law of the land, do not reach the difficulty, and cannot, unless the whole structure of the government is changed from a government by States to something like a despotic central government, with power to control even the municipal regulations of States, and to make them conform to its own despotic will. While there remains such an idea as the right of each State to control its own local affairs,—an idea, by the way, more deeply rooted in the minds of men of all sections of the country than perhaps any one other political idea,—no general assertion of human rights can be of any practical value. To change the character of the government at this point is neither possible nor desirable. All that is necessary to be done is to make the government consistent with itself, and render the rights of the States compatible with the sacred rights of human nature.3
3—Throughout his public life, since his first days as an abolitionist in 1841, Douglass had been a fierce proponent of natural rights, here referred to as “human rights.” According to that tradition, all people drew from nature the rights to life, liberty, property, popular sovereignty, and revolution—rights enshrined in the Declaration of Independence. Douglass employs natural rights to launch his attack on the “states’ rights” doctrine. In his view, Americans had planted their ideas about rights so deeply in the notion of shared power and localism that they were too often helpless to advance the cause of increased liberty. Douglass all but prays here for the use of federal power to restrict—if not crush—the power of states.
Slavery, like all other great systems of wrong, founded in the depths of human selfishness, and existing for ages, has not neglected its own conservation. It has steadily exerted an influence upon all around it favorable to its own continuance. And to-day it is so strong that it could exist, not only without law, but even against law. Custom, manners, morals, religion, are all on its side everywhere in the South; and when you add the ignorance and servility of the ex-slave to the intelligence and accustomed authority of the master, you have the conditions, not out of which slavery will again grow, but under which it is impossible for the Federal government to wholly destroy it, unless the Federal government be armed with despotic power, to blot out State authority, and to station a Federal officer at every cross-road. This, of course, cannot be done, and ought not even if it could. The true way and the easiest way is to make our government entirely consistent with itself, and give to every loyal citizen the elective franchise,—a right and power which will be ever present, and will form a wall of fire for his protection.4
4—Douglass saw speech, the written word, and the vote as equally sacred forms of human expression. He saw the franchise as a protector, a guardian of all other rights. He actually had wished for a more forceful occupation of the former Confederacy by federal troops, but because “despotic power, to blot out State authority” would never realistically work, he considered the vote the sacred mechanism of group and individual self-preservation. Douglass thus conceived of the vote not merely as an individual right, held in one’s conscience, but as a weapon of collective action that must be maximized and safeguarded above all other liberties.
One of the invaluable compensations of the late Rebellion is the highly instructive disclosure it made of the true source of danger to republican government. Whatever may be tolerated in monarchical and despotic governments, no republic is safe that tolerates a privileged class, or denies to any of its citizens equal rights and equal means to maintain them. What was theory before the war has been made fact by the war.
There is cause to be thankful even for rebellion. It is an impressive teacher, though a stern and terrible one. In both characters it has come to us, and it was perhaps needed in both. It is an instructor never a day before its time, for it comes only when all other means of progress and enlightenment have failed. Whether the oppressed and despairing bondman, no longer able to repress his deep yearnings for manhood, or the tyrant, in his pride and impatience, takes the initiative, and strikes the blow for a firmer hold and a longer lease of oppression, the result is the same,—society is instructed, or may be.5
5—This wonderful sentence captures Douglass’s conception of history itself. He believed that cataclysms and transformations could instruct humankind, even if they ruined us to a degree. To Douglass, the Civil War had been a lesson in blood, a conflict he saw in Christian apocalyptic terms, a crisis of destruction and remaking with meaning. In retrospect, he wrote in 1881 that nations “are taught less by theories than by facts and events.” The hope energizing this 1866 essay is the idea that the nation now confronted a great, if difficult, education.
Such are the limitations of the common mind, and so thoroughly engrossing are the cares of common life, that only the few among men can discern through the glitter and dazzle of present prosperity the dark outlines of approaching disasters, even though they may have come up to our very gates, and are already within striking distance. The yawning seam and corroded bolt conceal their defects from the mariner until the storm calls all hands to the pumps. Prophets, indeed, were abundant before the war; but who cares for prophets while their predictions remain unfulfilled, and the calamities of which they tell are masked behind a blinding blaze of national prosperity?6
6—In his use of the maritime metaphor of unseen disaster at sea, and his suggestion that prophets are ignored or denounced until “calamities” strike, Douglass invites us into his thinking about history. It is waiting for us; it may break apart or flood the ship that has not been carefully inspected and repaired. And we usually never know which prophets are worth our attention until it is too late.
It is asked, said Henry Clay, on a memorable occasion, Will slavery never come to an end? That question, said he, was asked fifty years ago, and it has been answered by fifty years of unprecedented prosperity. Spite of the eloquence of the earnest Abolitionists,—poured out against slavery during thirty years,—even they must confess, that, in all the probabilities of the case, that system of barbarism would have continued its horrors far beyond the limits of the nineteenth century but for the Rebellion, and perhaps only have disappeared at last in a fiery conflict, even more fierce and bloody than that which has now been suppressed.
It is no disparagement to truth, that it can only prevail where reason prevails. War begins where reason ends. The thing worse than rebellion is the thing that causes rebellion. What that thing is, we have been taught to our cost. It remains now to be seen whether we have the needed courage to have that cause entirely removed from the Republic. At any rate, to this grand work of national regeneration and entire purification Congress must now address itself, with full purpose that the work shall this time be thoroughly done.7 The deadly upas, root and branch, leaf and fibre, body and sap, must be utterly destroyed. The country is evidently not in a condition to listen patiently to pleas for postponement, however plausible, nor will it permit the responsibility to be shifted to other shoulders. Authority and power are here commensurate with the duty imposed. There are no cloud-flung shadows to obscure the way. Truth shines with brighter light and intenser heat at every moment, and a country torn and rent and bleeding implores relief from its distress and agony.
7—In a speech Douglass wrote in late 1863 and delivered throughout 1864, “The Mission of the War,” he provided his fullest explanation of the meaning of the ongoing conflict. The challenge was to remake a “broken Constitution,” in the throes of a holy war, driven by “Divine forces.” The struggle had become an “Abolition war,” not a “war for the Union,” a fight to “reorganize the institutions of the country.” The quest for “National regeneration” gave the conflict its “sacred significance.” That speech even anticipated the purposes of radical Reconstruction. “We are in fact,” Douglass declared, “and from absolute necessity, transplanting the whole South with the higher civilization of the North.” And so here, in the 1866 essay, he employed an identical argument with equally apocalyptic demands.
If time was at first needed, Congress has now had time. All the requisite materials from which to form an intelligent judgment are now before it. Whether its members look at the origin, the progress, the termination of the war, or at the mockery of a peace now existing, they will find only one unbroken chain of argument in favor of a radical policy of reconstruction. For the omissions of the last session, some excuses may be allowed. A treacherous President stood in the way; and it can be easily seen how reluctant good men might be to admit an apostasy which involved so much of baseness and ingratitude.8 It was natural that they should seek to save him by bending to him even when he leaned to the side of error. But all is changed now. Congress knows now that it must go on without his aid, and even against his machinations. The advantage of the present session over the last is immense. Where that investigated, this has the facts. Where that walked by faith, this may walk by sight. Where that halted, this must go forward, and where that failed, this must succeed, giving the country whole measures where that gave us half-measures, merely as a means of saving the elections in a few doubtful districts. That Congress saw what was right, but distrusted the enlightenment of the loyal masses; but what was forborne in distrust of the people must now be done with a full knowledge that the people expect and require it. The members go to Washington fresh from the inspiring presence of the people. In every considerable public meeting, and in almost every conceivable way, whether at court-house, school-house, or cross-roads, in doors and out, the subject has been discussed, and the people have emphatically pronounced in favor of a radical policy. Listening to the doctrines of expediency and compromise with pity, impatience, and disgust, they have everywhere broken into demonstrations of the wildest enthusiasm when a brave word has been spoken in favor of equal rights and impartial suffrage. Radicalism, so far from being odious, is now the popular passport to power. The men most bitterly charged with it go to Congress with the largest majorities, while the timid and doubtful are sent by lean majorities, or else left at home. The strange controversy between the President and Congress, at one time so threatening, is disposed of by the people. The high reconstructive powers which he so confidently, ostentatiously, and haughtily claimed, have been disallowed, denounced, and utterly repudiated; while those claimed by Congress have been confirmed.
8—Douglass writes following the spectacular failure of President Johnson’s “swing around the circle” campaign late that summer. For more than two weeks, Johnson made a whistle-stop tour of the Northeast and the Middle West, appealing to voters to reject Republicans as “traitors” and dangerous radicals, and demanding immediate “restoration” of the Union. Douglass accuses Johnson of attempting to steal the legislative powers of Congress and of soiling the meaning of the war. Thus, before Congress had even considered articles of impeachment for Johnson, Douglass here charted the broad path to that conclusion.
Of the spirit and magnitude of the canvass nothing need be said. The appeal was to the people, and the verdict was worthy of the tribunal. Upon an occasion of his own selection, with the advice and approval of his astute Secretary, soon after the members of Congress had returned to their constituents, the President quitted the executive mansion, sandwiched himself between two recognized heroes,—men whom the whole country delighted to honor,—and, with all the advantage which such company could give him, stumped the country from the Atlantic to the Mississippi,9 advocating everywhere his policy as against that of Congress. It was a strange sight, and perhaps the most disgraceful exhibition ever made by any President; but, as no evil is entirely unmixed, good has come of this, as from many others. Ambitious, unscrupulous, energetic, indefatigable, voluble, and plausible,—a political gladiator, ready for a “set-to” in any crowd,—he is beaten in his own chosen field, and stands to-day before the country as a convicted usurper, a political criminal, guilty of a bold and persistent attempt to possess himself of the legislative powers solemnly secured to Congress by the Constitution. No vindication could be more complete, no condemnation could be more absolute and humiliating. Unless reopened by the sword, as recklessly threatened in some circles, this question is now closed for all time.
9—During Johnson’s “swing around the circle,” the president flanked himself with Union officers while giving speeches, and embarrassed General Ulysses S. Grant by demanding that he appear with him on platforms.
Without attempting to settle here the metaphysical and somewhat theological question (about which so much has already been said and written), whether once in the Union means always in the Union,—agreeably to the formula, Once in grace always in grace,—it is obvious to common sense that the rebellious States stand to-day, in point of law, precisely where they stood when, exhausted, beaten, conquered, they fell powerless at the feet of Federal authority.10 Their State governments were overthrown, and the lives and property of the leaders of the Rebellion were forfeited. In reconstructing the institutions of these shattered and overthrown States, Congress should begin with a clean slate, and make clean work of it. Let there be no hesitation. It would be a cowardly deference to a defeated and treacherous President, if any account were made of the illegitimate, one-sided, sham governments hurried into existence for a malign purpose in the absence of Congress. These pretended governments, which were never submitted to the people, and from participation in which four millions of the loyal people were excluded by Presidential order, should now be treated according to their true character, as shams and impositions, and supplanted by true and legitimate governments, in the formation of which loyal men, black and white, shall participate.
10—The question of whether secession was constitutional was a central issue in determining the shape of Reconstruction. If, as President Abraham Lincoln stated during the war, the breaking of the Union was legally impossible, then the Confederate states had never really left. But Stevens and other Radical Republicans began to argue that the South had, in practice, formed a separate polity and engaged in insurrection—which meant that the North’s right as conquerors to reshape state governments and laws was absolute. The decision by a grand jury in May 1866 to charge Confederate President Jefferson Davis with treason began the proceedings that many hoped would settle the question.
It is not, however, within the scope of this paper to point out the precise steps to be taken, and the means to be employed. The people are less concerned about these than the grand end to be attained. They demand such a reconstruction as shall put an end to the present anarchical state of things in the late rebellious States,—where frightful murders and wholesale massacres are perpetrated in the very presence of Federal soldiers. This horrible business they require shall cease.11 They want a reconstruction such as will protect loyal men, black and white, in their persons and property; such a one as will cause Northern industry, Northern capital, and Northern civilization to flow into the South, and make a man from New England as much at home in Carolina as elsewhere in the Republic. No Chinese wall can now be tolerated. The South must be opened to the light of law and liberty, and this session of Congress is relied upon to accomplish this important work.
11—Already by late 1866, mob violence had become a shocking feature of Reconstruction in the South. Since the end of the war, southern whites had perpetrated both individual and mass murders of Black folk——especially those trying to exercise political or economic liberty. Black settlements were attacked; in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, 24 people were reportedly hanged from trees outside their cabins. In Texas alone, Freedmen’s Bureau agents estimated that of the nearly 1,000 people killed from 1865 to 1868, more than half of them were Black people who had been killed by white people. The violence was often “anarchical,” as Douglass indicates, but it was also highly organized at times, especially after the emergence of the Ku Klux Klan, in Tennessee in 1866. The toll of violence as a part of “normal politics” would grow even greater in the months before the election of 1868. Douglass’s essay is a frightful warning of violence in the future.
The plain, common-sense way of doing this work, as intimated at the beginning, is simply to establish in the South one law, one government, one administration of justice, one condition to the exercise of the elective franchise, for men of all races and colors alike. This great measure is sought as earnestly by loyal white men as by loyal blacks, and is needed alike by both. Let sound political prescience but take the place of an unreasoning prejudice, and this will be done.
Men denounce the negro for his prominence in this discussion; but it is no fault of his that in peace as in war, that in conquering Rebel armies as in reconstructing the rebellious States, the right of the negro is the true solution of our national troubles. The stern logic of events, which goes directly to the point, disdaining all concern for the color or features of men, has determined the interests of the country as identical with and inseparable from those of the negro.
The policy that emancipated and armed the negro—now seen to have been wise and proper by the dullest—was not certainly more sternly demanded than is now the policy of enfranchisement. If with the negro was success in war, and without him failure, so in peace it will be found that the nation must fall or flourish with the negro.12
12—For Douglass, Reconstruction was a revolution that must be sustained and codified in law. He makes a case here, as many times before, that the cause of Black freedom was the cause of the whole nation. For the next three years, Radicals like Douglass could fairly entertain that they were winning this revolution. But in the 1870s, a brutal reckoning ensued, in the form of the Democratic Party’s white-supremacist counterrevolution. Reconstruction, like so many other pivotal eras in history, became an arc of victory, retreat, and defeat.
Fortunately, the Constitution of the United States knows no distinction between citizens on account of color. Neither does it know any difference between a citizen of a State and a citizen of the United States. Citizenship evidently includes all the rights of citizens, whether State or national. If the Constitution knows none, it is clearly no part of the duty of a Republican Congress now to institute one. The mistake of the last session was the attempt to do this very thing, by a renunciation of its power to secure political rights to any class of citizens, with the obvious purpose to allow the rebellious States to disfranchise, if they should see fit, their colored citizens. This unfortunate blunder must now be retrieved, and the emasculated citizenship given to the negro supplanted by that contemplated in the Constitution of the United States, which declares that the citizens of each State shall enjoy all the rights and immunities of citizens of the several States,—so that a legal voter in any State shall be a legal voter in all the States.
This article appears in the December 2023 print edition with the headline “The Annotated Frederick Douglass.”
David W. Blight is the Sterling Professor of American History at Yale and the director of the university’s Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition. He is the author, most recently, of Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom.
Frederick Douglass was an orator, a writer, and a statesman. After escaping a life of bondage, he became a prominent advocate for the emancipation and civil rights of African Americans.
Article in The Atlantic: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2023/12/frederick-douglass-atlantic-reconstruction-essay/675485/