With the fall of slavery and the emancipation of the colored race the
heroic epoch of Douglass's career may be said to have closed. The text
upon which he so long had preached had been expunged from the national
bible; and he had been a one-text preacher, a one-theme orator. He
felt the natural reaction which comes with relief from high mental or
physical tension, and wondered, somewhat sadly, what he should do with
himself, and how he should earn a living. The same considerations,
in varying measure, applied to others of the anti-slavery reformers.
Some, unable to escape the reforming habit, turned their attention
to different social evils, real or imaginary. Others, sufficiently
supplied with this worlds goods for their moderate wants, withdrew
from public life. Douglass was thinking of buying a farm and retiring
to rural solitudes, when a new career opened up for him in the lyceum
lecture field. The North was favorably disposed toward colored men.
They had acquitted themselves well during the war, and had
shown becoming gratitude to their deliverers. The once despised
abolitionists were now popular heroes. Douglass's checkered past
seemed all the more romantic in the light of the brighter present,
like a novel with a pleasant ending; and those who had hung
thrillingly upon his words when he denounced slavery now listened with
interest to what he had to say upon other topics. He spoke sometimes
on Woman Suffrage, of which he was always a consistent advocate.
His most popular lecture was one on "Self-made Men." Another on
"Ethnology," in which he sought a scientific basis for his claim for
the negro's equality with the white man, was not so popular--with
white people. The wave of enthusiasm which had swept the enfranchised
slaves into what seemed at that time the safe harbor of constitutional
right was not, after all, based on abstract doctrines of equality of
intellect, but on an inspiring sense of justice (long dormant under
the influence of slavery, but thoroughly awakened under the moral
stress of the war), which conceded to every man the right of a voice
in his own government and the right to an equal opportunity in life
to develop such powers as he possessed, however great or small these
might be.
But Douglass's work in direct behalf of his race was not yet entirely
done. In fact, he realized very distinctly the vast amount of work
that would be necessary to lift his people up to the level of their
enlarged opportunities; and, as may be gathered from some of his
published utterances, he foresaw that the process would be a long one,
and that their friends might weary sometimes of waiting, and that
there would be reactions toward slavery which would rob emancipation
of much of its value. It was the very imminence of such backward
steps, in the shape of various restrictive and oppressive laws
promptly enacted by the old slave States under President Johnson's
administration, that led Douglass to urge the enfranchisement of the
freedmen. He maintained that in a free country there could be no safe
or logical middle ground between the status of freeman and that of
serf. There has been much criticism because the negro, it is said,
acquired the ballot prematurely. There seemed imperative reasons,
besides that of political expediency, for putting the ballot in his
hands. Recent events have demonstrated that this necessity is as great
now as then. The assumption that negroes--under which generalization
are included all men of color, regardless of that sympathy to which
kinship at least should entitle many of them--are unfit to have a
voice in government is met by the words of Lincoln, which have all the
weight of a political axiom: "No man can be safely trusted to govern
other men without their consent." The contention that a class
who constitute half the population of a State shall be entirely
unrepresented in its councils, because, forsooth, their will there
expressed may affect the government of another class of the same
general population, is as repugnant to justice and human rights as was
the institution of slavery itself. Such a condition of affairs has not
the melodramatic and soul-stirring incidents of chattel slavery, but
its effects can be as far-reaching and as debasing. There has been
some manifestation of its possible consequences in the recent
outbreaks of lynching and other race oppression in the South. The
practical disfranchisement of the colored people in several States,
and the apparent acquiescence by the Supreme Court in the attempted
annulment, by restrictive and oppressive laws, of the war amendments
to the Constitution, have brought a foretaste of what might be
expected should the spirit of the Dred Scott decision become again the
paramount law of the land.
On February 7, 1866, Douglass acted as chief spokesman of a committee
of leading colored men of the country, who called upon President
Johnson to urge the importance of enfranchisement. Mr. Johnson, true
to his Southern instincts, was coldly hostile to the proposition,
recounted all the arguments against it, and refused the committee
an opportunity to reply. The matter was not left with Mr. Johnson,
however; and the committee turned its attention to the leading
Republican statesmen, in whom they found more impressionable material.
Under the leadership of Senators Sumner, Wilson, Wade, and others, the
matter was fully argued in Congress, the Democratic party being in
opposition, as always in national politics, to any measure enlarging
the rights or liberties of the colored race.
In September, 1866, Douglass was elected a delegate from Rochester to
the National Loyalists' Convention at Philadelphia, called to consider
the momentous questions of government growing out of the war. While he
had often attended anti-slavery conventions as the representative of a
small class of abolitionists, his election to represent a large city
in a national convention was so novel a departure from established
usage as to provoke surprise and comment all over the country. On
the way to Philadelphia he was waited upon by a committee of other
delegates, who came to his seat on the train and urged upon him the
impropriety of his taking a seat as a delegate. Douglass listened
patiently, but declined to be moved by their arguments. He replied
that he had been duly elected a delegate from Rochester, and he would
represent that city in the convention. A procession of the members
and friends of the convention was to take place on its opening day.
Douglass was solemnly warned that, if he walked in the procession, he
would probably be mobbed. But he had been mobbed before, more than
once, and had lived through it; and he promptly presented himself at
the place of assembly. His reception by his fellow-delegates was not
cordial, and he seemed condemned to march alone in the procession,
when Theodore Tilton, at that time editor of the _Independent_, paired
off with him, and marched by his side through the streets of the
Quaker City. The result was gratifying alike to Douglass and the
friends of liberty and progress. He was cheered enthusiastically all
along the line of march, and became as popular in the convention as he
had hitherto been neglected.
A romantic incident of this march was a pleasant meeting, on the
street, with a daughter of Mrs. Lucretia Auld, the mistress who had
treated him kindly during his childhood on the Lloyd plantation. The
Aulds had always taken an interest in Douglass's career,--he had,
indeed, given the family a wide though not altogether enviable
reputation in his books and lectures,--and this good lady had followed
the procession for miles, that she might have the opportunity to speak
to her grandfather's former slave and see him walk in the procession.
In the convention "the ever-ready and imperial Douglass," as Colonel
Higginson describes him, spoke in behalf of his race. The convention,
however, divided upon the question of negro suffrage, and adjourned
without decisive action. But under President Grant's administration
the Fourteenth Amendment was passed, and by the solemn sanction of the
Constitution the ballot was conferred upon the black men upon the same
terms as those upon which it was enjoyed by the whites.