On this day in 1895, the great abolitionist Frederick Douglass attended a meeting of the National Council of Women, went home to Anacostia, Washington, D.C., and fell dead of a heart attack. In a letter to his family three days later, the council—an organization that is celebrating the 130th year of its founding next month—concluded:
The highest honor which we can show to the memory of him who has passed from the visible world to the world invisible — and to you whose longing eyes are straining into the impenetrable darkness to follow him — is to contemplate his life as an inspiration, and to respond to his example by an answering devotion to human liberty and to human equality.
Born a slave, after his escape from bondage Douglass made it his daily purpose to fight for an America where neither race nor gender could be used to deny someone full participation as a citizen. When he died, only half that goal had been reached, with women’s enfranchisement still 25 years away. And although the Constitution had been amended 25 years previously to give black men full citizenship, due process and equal protection under the laws—including the right to vote—this enfranchisement and much else in that equal protection guarantee were well on their way to being buried when Douglass went to his grave. Jim Crow was being built brick by brick into an edifice that would guarantee the sovereignty of white supremacy in its most rigorous form for another 70 years. Echos of that time reverberate powerfully in our own era.
In December 1866, whenThe Atlantic magazine published the piece written by Douglass that I’ve excerpted below, black Southerners were being ravaged by terrorist dead-enders. Between late 1865 and the elections of 1868, these terrorists, many organized by masked men of the Ku Klux Klan, murdered more than a thousand black people and their white allies, often in broad daylight.
Douglass here argues for a radical Republican response, ensuring equal protection by force and “reconstructing” Southern state governments in a way that enshrines this equality, stating that “no republic is safe that tolerates a privileged class, or denies to any of its citizens equal rights and equal means to maintain them.”
The next year, Congress passed the Military Reconstruction Act of 1867. This provided for federal troops to occupy the South and mandated that black people’s civic rights must be enshrined in new constitutions before the former Confederate states could be admitted back into the Union.
[Some additional paragraph breaks have been included in these excerpts from the original essay to improve readability.]
RECONSTRUCTION
[...] 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. [...]
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. 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.