And then it got personal. Real personal. Chaput explains:
we know exactly who he's talking about.
And when Douglass goes on to say:
I went especially, however, with that word of Mr. Phillips, which is the criticism of Gen. Banks and Gen. Banks’ policy. I hold that that policy is our chief danger at the present moment; that it practically enslaves the Negro, and makes the Proclamation of 1863 a mockery and delusion. What is freedom? It is the right to choose one’s own employment. Certainly it means that, if it means anything; and when any individual or combination of individuals undertakes to decide for any man when he shall work, where he shall work, at what he shall work, and for what he shall work, he or they practically reduce him to slavery. [Applause.] He is a slave.
We know exactly what Douglass is talking about.
21st century conservatives, of course, excise the specific historical context of Douglass’ words; the Banks-Lincoln reconstruction policy in Louisiana, the Emancipation Proclamation, and black (male) suffrage and choose to run with the portion of the paragraph beginning with "What is freedom?" as a (conservative) justification of everything from the meeting of "freedom" to the demonization of all manner of social programs to the supposed pernicious influence and interference of government in people's lives.
When Justice Clarence Thomas used the Douglass quote in his dissent from the majority in Grutter v. Bollinger, he drained Douglass' statement to the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society of all meaning and context. Given what Thomas's ultimate dissenting argument is, given that Thomas makes repeated references to "racial discrimination" in his Grutter V. Bollinger dissent, Douglass' simple short statement in his 1866 Atlantic essay, Reconstruction, would have sufficed:
Fortunately, the Constitution of the United States knows no distinction between citizens on account of color.
And while that statement, too, would be taken out of context, at least it has the added value of actually being somewhat consistent with Douglass' views on the Constitution.
21st century conservatives seem to love Frederick Douglass.
And now, the current occupant of the Oval Office dares to utter Mr. Douglass’ name.
If Donald Trump Wants to utter Mr. Douglass’ name and if 21st century conservatives want to quote from What The Black Man Wants, then there needs be a reconciliation of Republican and conservative views with this statement from that very same speech:
I believe that when the tall heads of this Rebellion shall have been swept down, as they will be swept down, when the Davises and Toombses and Stephenses... there will be this rank undergrowth of treason...You will see those traitors, handing down, from sire to son, the same malignant spirit which they have manifested, and which they are now exhibiting, with malicious hearts, broad blades, and bloody hands in the field, against our sons and brothers. That spirit will still remain; and whoever sees the Federal Government extended over those Southern States will see that Government in a strange land, and not only in a strange land, but in an enemy’s land.
Not only has the “malignant spirit” of “this rank undergrowth of treason” been handed down through generations; it was harnessed in the ugliest of ways by the 21st century Republican Party and Donald Trump, so much and so effectively that what Douglass called this “undergrowth of treason” now occupies the White House in the 21st century.
And I don’t think that even Frederick Douglass could have admitted to the literal possibility that “this rank undergrowth of treason” would have included the giving and accepting of “aid and comfort” to and from a foreign power such that a foreign power could have any influence on this country’s national elections.
The story of our inferiority is an old dodge, as I have said; for wherever men oppress their fellows, wherever they enslave them, they will endeavor to find the needed apology for such enslavement and oppression in the character of the people oppressed and enslaved.
African Americans “living in hell” as they dodge bullets on the way to and from the corner store?
“Bad hombres?”
A “nasty woman?”
That playbook is old.
Let’s not forget the very specific subject matter of Douglass’ What The Black Man Wantsspeech; the connection between emancipation and suffrage.
I can well imagine Mr. Douglass’ own views to Mr. Trump’s megalomanical claims that millions of people (undocumented immigrants, dead, and otherwise) voted illegally or otherwise “hung out” on voter rolls as if they were a street corner and committed an almost nonexistent crime called voter fraud.
Of course, the 21st century Republican Party has been in the forefront of voter suppression campaigns in quite a few states throughout the country so, in the case of baseless voter fraud claims, the current occupant of The Oval Office has been more of a follower rather than a leader.
Yes, even the current occupant of Number One Observatory Circle can be criticized.
Many African Americans are (rightly in my view) criticizing Mr. Pence’s need to mention President Lincoln during Black History Month, at all.
While there are a variety of things, positive and negative, that one can say about President Lincoln, there is one fact about the 16th President of the United States that is irrefutable.
President Lincoln took an assassin’s bullet three days after stating, in his final public address, that blacks and Creoles in Louisiana should be given the right to vote; a proposal that, if followed upon and enacted, would have meant “nig*er citizenship” according to Lincoln’s assassin, John Wilkes Booth.
21st century voter suppression has the backing of large majorities of white evangelical Christians like Mr. Pence; a first or second cousin of a brand of Christianity that Frederick Douglass recognized and criticized in his day:
What I have said respecting and against religion, I mean strictly to apply to the slaveholding religion of this land, and with no possible reference to Christianity proper; for, between the Christianity of this land, and the Christianity of Christ, I recognize the widest, possible difference--so wide, that to receive the one as good, pure, and holy, is of necessity to reject the other as bad, corrupt, and wicked. To be the friend of the one, is of necessity to be the enemy of the other. I love the pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ: I therefore hate the corrupt, slaveholding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land. Indeed, I can see no reason, but the most deceitful one, for calling the religion of this land Christianity. I look upon it as the climax of all misnomers, the boldest of all frauds, and the grossest of all libels.
Frederick Douglass, Appendix to Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave. Written by Himself (1845)
No amount of selective quotation by 21st century conservatives can minimize or alter the radical impact of Frederick Douglass's activism on the behalf of black American citizens (or all American citizens, for that matter) then or now.
I am pretty confident that were Frederick Douglass able to time travel into the 21st century and to look at the Republican Party, he wouldn't recognize it.
Frederick Douglass would recognize 21st century conservatives and Republicans exactly as they are.
Frederick Douglass would recognize the 45th President of the the United States as exactly who he is and would name it.
In fact, Mr. Douglass already named it. All of it. Long ago.