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NOT COMPLAINING OF THE PAST, SIMPLY
ASKING FOR A BETTER FUTURE
An Appeal to Congress for Impartial
Suffrage
It follows the full text transcript of
Frederick Douglass' An Appeal to Congress for
Impartial Suffrage, as it was published in the
Atlantic Monthly 19 - January 1867.
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A very limited
statement of the argument for impartial
suffrage, |
and for including
the negro in the body politic, would require
more space than can be reasonably asked here. It
is supported by reasons as broad as the nature
of man, and as numerous as the wants of society.
Man is the only government-making animal in the
world. His right to a participation in the
production and operation of government is an
inference from his nature, as direct and
self-evident as is his right to acquire property
or education. It is no less a crime against the
manhood of a man, to declare that he shall not
share in the making and directing of the
government under which he lives, than to say
that he shall not acquire property and
education.
The fundamental and unanswerable
argument in favor of the enfranchisement of the
negro is found in the undisputed fact of his
manhood. He is a man, and by every fact and
argument by which any man can sustain his right
to vote, the negro can sustain his right
equally. It is plain that, if the right belongs
to any, it belongs to all. The doctrine that
some men have no rights that others are bound to
respect, is a doctrine which we must banish as
we have banished slavery, from which it
emanated. If black men have no rights in the
eyes of white men, of course the whites can have
none in the eyes of the blacks. The result is a
war of races, and the annihilation of all proper
human relations.
But suffrage for the negro, while easily
sustained upon abstract principles, demands
consideration upon what are recognized as the
urgent necessities of the case. It is a measure
of relief,--a shield to break the force of a
blow already descending with violence, and
render it harmless. The work of destruction has
already been set in motion all over the South.
Peace to the country has literally meant war to
the loyal men of the South, white and black; and
negro suffrage is the measure to arrest and put
an end to that dreadful strife.
Something then, not by way of argument, (for
that has been done by Charles Sumner, Thaddeus
Stevens, Wendell Phillips, Gerrit Smith, and
other able men,) but rather of statement and
appeal.
For better or for worse, (as in some of the old
marriage ceremonies,) the negroes are evidently
a permanent part of the American population.
They are too numerous and useful to be
colonized, and too enduring and
self-perpetuating to disappear by natural
causes. Here they are, four millions of them,
and, for weal or for woe, here they must remain.
Their history is parallel to that of the
country; but while the history of the latter has
been cheerful and bright with blessings, theirs
has been heavy and dark with agonies and curses.
What O'Connell said of the history of Ireland
may with greater truth be said of the negro's.
It may be "traced like a wounded man through a
crowd, by the blood." Yet the negroes have
marvelously survived all the exterminating
forces of slavery, and have emerged at the end
of two hundred and fifty years of bondage, not
morose, misanthropic, and revengeful, but
cheerful, hopeful, and forgiving. They now stand
before Congress and the country, not complaining
of the past, but simply asking for a better
future. The spectacle of these dusky millions
thus imploring, not demanding, is touching; and
if American statesmen could be moved by a simple
appeal to the nobler elements of human nature,
if they had not fallen, seemingly, into the
incurable habit of weighing and measuring every
proposition of reform by some standard of profit
and loss, doing wrong from choice, and right
only from necessity or some urgent demand of
human selfishness, it would be enough to plead
for the negroes on the score of past services
and sufferings. But no such appeal shall be
relied on here. Hardships, services, sufferings,
and sacrifices are all waived.
It is true that
they came to the relief of the country at the
hour of its extremest need. It is true that, in
many of the rebellious States, they were almost
the only reliable friends the nation had
throughout the whole tremendous war. It is true
that, notwithstanding their alleged ignorance,
they were wiser than their masters, and knew
enough to be loyal, while those masters only
knew enough to be rebels and traitors. It is
true that they fought side by side in the loyal
cause with our gallant and patriotic white
soldiers, and that, but for their help,--divided
as the loyal States were,--the Rebels might have
succeeded in breaking up the Union, thereby
entailing border wars and troubles of unknown
duration and incalculable calamity. All this and
more is true of these loyal negroes. Many daring
exploits will be told to their credit. Impartial
history will paint them as men who deserved well
of their country. It will tell how they forded
and swam rivers, with what consummate address
they evaded the sharp-eyed Rebel pickets, how
they toiled in the darkness of night through the
tangled marshes of briers and thorns, barefooted
and weary, running the risk of losing their
lives, to warn our generals of Rebel schemes to
surprise and destroy our loyal army. It will
tell how these poor people, whose rights we
still despised, behaved to our wounded soldiers,
when found cold, hungry, and bleeding on the
deserted battle-field; how they assisted our
escaping prisoners from Andersonville, Belle
Isle, Castle Thunder, and elsewhere, sharing
with them their wretched crusts, and otherwise
affording them aid and comfort; how they
promptly responded to the trumpet call for their
services, fighting against a foe that denied
them the rights of civilized warfare, and for a
government which was without the courage to
assert those rights and avenge their violation
in their behalf; with what gallantry they flung
themselves upon Rebel fortifications, meeting
death as fearlessly as any other troops in the
service. But upon none of these things is
reliance placed. These facts speak to the better
dispositions of the human heart; but they seem
of little weight with the opponents of impartial
suffrage.
It is true that a strong plea for equal suffrage
might be addressed to the national sense of
honor. Something, too, might be said of national
gratitude. A nation might well hesitate before
the temptation to betray its allies. There is
something immeasurably mean, to say nothing of
the cruelty, in placing the loyal negroes of the
South under the political power of their Rebel
masters. To make peace with our enemies is all
well enough; but to prefer our enemies and
sacrifice our friends,--to exalt our enemies and
cast down our friends,--to clothe our enemies,
who sought the destruction of the government,
with all political power, and leave our friends
powerless in their hands,--is an act which need
not be characterized here. We asked the negroes
to espouse our cause, to be our friends, to
fight for us, and against their masters; and
now, after they have done all that we asked them
to do,--helped us to conquer their masters, and
thereby directed toward themselves the furious
hate of the vanquished,--it is proposed in some
quarters to turn them over to the political
control of the common enemy of the government
and of the negro. But of this let nothing be
said in this place. Waiving humanity, national
honor, the claims of gratitude, the precious
satisfaction arising from deeds of charity and
justice to the weak and defenseless,--the appeal
for impartial suffrage addresses itself with
great pertinence to the darkest, coldest, and
flintiest side of the human heart, and would
wring righteousness from the unfeeling
calculations of human selfishness.
For in respect to this grand measure it is the
good fortune of the negro that enlightened
selfishness, not less than justice, fights on
his side. National interest and national duty,
if elsewhere separated, are firmly united here.
The American people can, perhaps, afford to
brave the censure of surrounding nations for the
manifest injustice and meanness of excluding its
faithful black soldiers from the ballot-box, but
it cannot afford to allow the moral and mental
energies of rapidly increasing millions to be
consigned to hopeless degradation.
Strong as we are, we need the energy that
slumbers in the black man's arm to make us
stronger. We want no longer any heavy- footed,
melancholy service from the negro. We want the
cheerful activity of the quickened manhood of
these sable millions. Nor can we afford to
endure the moral blight which the existence of a
degraded and hated class must necessarily
inflict upon any people among whom such a class
may exist. Exclude the negroes as a class from
political rights,--teach them that the high and
manly privilege of suffrage is to be enjoyed by
white citizens only,-- that they may bear the
burdens of the state, but that they are to have
no part in its direction or its honors,--and you
at once deprive them of one of the main
incentives to manly character and patriotic
devotion to the interests of the government; in
a word, you stamp them as a degraded caste,--you
teach them to despise themselves, and all others
to despise them.
Men are so constituted that
they largely derive their ideas of their
abilities and their possibilities from the
settled judgments of their fellow-men, and
especially from such as they read in the
institutions under which they live. If these
bless them, they are blest indeed; but if these
blast them, they are blasted indeed. Give the
negro the elective franchise, and you give him
at once a powerful motive for all noble
exertion, and make him a man among men. A
character is demanded of him, and here as
elsewhere demand favors supply. It is nothing
against this reasoning that all men who vote are
not good men or good citizens. It is enough that
the possession and exercise of the elective
franchise is in itself an appeal to the nobler
elements of manhood, and imposes education as
essential to the safety of society.
To appreciate the full force of this argument,
it must be observed, that disfranchisement in a
republican government based upon the idea of
human equality and universal suffrage, is a very
different thing from disfranchisement in
governments based upon the idea of the divine
right of kings, or the entire subjugation of the
masses. Masses of men can take care of
themselves. Besides, the disabilities imposed
upon all are necessarily without that bitter and
stinging element of invidiousness which attaches
to disfranchisement in a republic. What is
common to all works no special sense of
degradation to any. But in a country like ours,
where men of all nations, kindred, and tongues
are freely enfranchised, and allowed to vote, to
say to the negro, You shall not vote, is to deal
his manhood a staggering blow, and to burn into
his soul a bitter and goading sense of wrong, or
else work in him a stupid indifference to all
the elements of a manly character. As a nation,
we cannot afford to have amongst us either this
indifference and stupidity, or that burning
sense of wrong. These sable millions are too
powerful to be allowed to remain either
indifferent or discontented. Enfranchise them,
and they become self-respecting and
country-loving citizens. Disfranchise them, and
the mark of Cain is set upon them less
mercifully than upon the first murderer, for no
man was to hurt him. But this mark of
inferiority--all the more palpable because of a
difference of color--not only dooms the negro to
be a vagabond, but makes him the prey of insult
and outrage everywhere. While nothing may be
urged here as to the past services of the negro,
it is quite within the line of this appeal to
remind the nation of the possibility that a time
may come when the services of the negro may be a
second time required. History is said to repeat
itself, and, if so, having wanted the negro
once, we may want him again. Can that
statesmanship be wise which would leave the
negro good ground to hesitate, when the
exigencies of the country required his prompt
assistance? Can that be sound statesmanship
which leaves millions of men in gloomy
discontent, and possibly in a state of
alienation in the day of national trouble? Was
not the nation stronger when two hundred
thousand sable soldiers were hurled against the
Rebel fortifications, than it would have been
without them? Arming the negro was an urgent
military necessity three years ago,--are we sure
that another quite as pressing may not await us?
Casting aside all thought of justice and
magnanimity, is it wise to impose upon the negro
all the burdens involved in sustaining
government against foes within and foes without,
to make him equal sharer in all sacrifices for
the public good, to tax him in peace and
conscript him in war, and then coldly exclude
him from the ballot-box?
Look across the sea. Is Ireland, in her present
condition, fretful, discontented, compelled to
support an establishment in which she does not
believe, and which the vast majority of her
people abhor, a source of power or of weakness
to Great Britain? Is not Austria wise in
removing all ground of complaint against her on
the part of Hungary? And does not the Emperor of
Russia act wisely, as well as generously, when
he not only breaks up the bondage of the serf,
but extends him all the advantages of Russian
citizenship? Is the present movement in England
in favor of manhood suffrage--for the purpose of
bringing four millions of British subjects into
full sympathy and co-operation with the British
government--a wise and humane movement, or
otherwise? Is the existence of a rebellious
element in our borders--which New Orleans,
Memphis, and Texas show to be only disarmed, but
at heart as malignant as ever, only waiting for
an opportunity to reassert itself with fire and
sword--a reason for leaving four millions of the
nation's truest friends with just cause of
complaint against the Federal government? If the
doctrine that taxation should go hand in hand
with representation can be appealed to in behalf
of recent traitors and rebels, may it not
properly be asserted in behalf of a people who
have ever been loyal and faithful to the
government? The answers to these questions are
too obvious to require statement.
Disguise it as
we may, we are still a divided nation. The Rebel
States have still an anti-national policy.
Massachusetts and South Carolina may draw tears
from the eyes of our tender-hearted President by
walking arm in arm into his Philadelphia
Convention, but a citizen of Massachusetts is
still an alien in the Palmetto State. There is
that, all over the South, which frightens Yankee
industry, capital, and skill from its borders.
We have crushed the Rebellion, but not its hopes
or its malign purposes. The South fought for
perfect and permanent control over the Southern
laborer. It was a war of the rich against the
poor. They who waged it had no objection to the
government, while they could use it as a means
of confirming their power over the laborer. They
fought the government, not because they hated
the government as such, but because they found
it, as they thought, in the way between them and
their one grand purpose of rendering permanent
and indestructible their authority and power
over the Southern laborer. Though the battle is
for the present lost, the hope of gaining this
object still exists, and pervades the whole
South with a feverish excitement. We have thus
far only gained a Union without unity, marriage
without love, victory without peace. The hope of
gaining by politics what they lost by the sword,
is the secret of all this Southern unrest; and
that hope must be extinguished before national
ideas and objects can take full possession of
the Southern mind. There is but one safe and
constitutional way to banish that mischievous
hope from the South, and that is by lifting the
laborer beyond the unfriendly political designs
of his former master. Give the negro the
elective franchise, and you at once destroy the
purely sectional policy, and wheel the Southern
States into line with national interests and
national objects. The last and shrewdest turn of
Southern politics is a recognition of the
necessity of getting into Congress immediately,
and at any price. The South will comply with any
conditions but suffrage for the negro. It will
swallow all the unconstitutional test oaths,
repeal all the ordinances of Secession,
repudiate the Rebel debt, promise to pay the
debt incurred in conquering its people, pass all
the constitutional amendments, if only it can
have the negro left under its political control.
The proposition is as modest as that made on the
mountain: "All these things will I give unto
thee if thou wilt fall down and worship me."
But why are the Southerners so willing to make
these sacrifices? The answer plainly is, they
see in this policy the only hope of saving
something of their old sectional peculiarities
and power. Once firmly seated in Congress, their
alliance with Northern Democrats re-established,
their States restored to their former position
inside the Union, they can easily find means of
keeping the Federal government entirely too busy
with other important matters to pay much
attention to the local affairs of the Southern
States. Under the potent shield of State Rights,
the game would be in their own hands. Does any
sane man doubt for a moment that the men who
followed Jefferson Davis through the late
terrible Rebellion, often marching barefooted
and hungry, naked and penniless, and who now
only profess an enforced loyalty, would plunge
this country into a foreign war to-day, if they
could thereby gain their coveted independence,
and their still more coveted mastery over the
negroes? Plainly enough, the peace not less than
the prosperity of this country is involved in
the great measure of impartial suffrage. King
Cotton is deposed, but only deposed, and is
ready to-day to reassert all his ancient
pretensions upon the first favorable
opportunity. Foreign countries abound with his
agents. They are able, vigilant, devoted. The
young men of the South burn with the desire to
regain what they call the lost cause; the women
are noisily malignant towards the Federal
government. In fact, all the elements of treason
and rebellion are there under the thinnest
disguise which necessity can impose.
What, then, is the work before Congress? It is
to save the people of the South from themselves,
and the nation from detriment on their account.
Congress must supplant the evident sectional
tendencies of the South by national dispositions
and tendencies. It must cause national ideas and
objects to take the lead and control the
politics of those States. It must cease to
recognize the old slave-masters as the only
competent persons to rule the South. In a word,
it must enfranchise the negro, and by means of
the loyal negroes and the loyal white men of the
South build up a national party there, and in
time bridge the chasm between North and South,
so that our country may have a common liberty
and a common civilization. The new wine must be
put into new bottles. The lamb may not be
trusted with the wolf. Loyalty is hardly safe
with traitors.
Statesmen of America! beware what you do. The
ploughshare of rebellion has gone through the
land beam-deep. The soil is in readiness, and
the seed-time has come. Nations, not less than
individuals, reap as they sow. The dreadful
calamities of the past few years came not by
accident, nor unbidden, from the ground. You
shudder to-day at the harvest of blood sown in
the spring-time of the Republic by your patriot
fathers. The principle of slavery, which they
tolerated under the erroneous impression that it
would soon die out, became at last the dominant
principle and power at the South. It early
mastered the Constitution, became superior to
the Union, and enthroned itself above the law.
Freedom of speech and of the press it slowly but
successfully banished from the South, dictated
its own code of honor and manners to the nation,
brandished the bludgeon and the bowie-knife over
Congressional debate, sapped the foundations of
loyalty, dried up the springs of patriotism,
blotted out the testimonies of the fathers
against oppression, padlocked the pulpit,
expelled liberty from its literature, invented
nonsensical theories about master-races and
slave-races of men, and in due season produced a
Rebellion fierce, foul, and bloody.
This evil principle again seeks admission into
our body politic. It comes now in shape of a
denial of political rights to four million loyal
colored people. The South does not now ask for
slavery. It only asks for a large degraded
caste, which shall have no political rights.
This ends the case. Statesmen, beware what you
do. The destiny of unborn and unnumbered
generations is in your hands. Will you repeat
the mistake of your fathers, who sinned
ignorantly? or will you profit by the
blood-bought wisdom all round you, and forever
expel every vestige of the old abomination from
our national borders? As you members of the
Thirty-ninth Congress decide, will the country
be peaceful, united, and happy, or troubled,
divided, and miserable.
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