Part 3

This is no question of party. It is a question of law and government. It is a question whether men shall be protected by law, or be left to the mercy of cyclones of anarchy and bloodshed. It is whether the Government or the mob shall rule this land; whether the promises solemnly made to us in the Constitution be manfully kept or meanly and flagrantly broken. Upon this vital point we ask the whole people of the United States to take notice that whatever of political power we have shall be exerted for no man of any party who will not, in advance of election, promise to use every power given him by the Government, State or National, to make the black man’s path to the ballot-box as straight, smooth and safe as that of any other American citizen.

POLITICAL AMBITION.

We are as a people often reproached with ambition for political offices and honors. We are not ashamed of this alleged ambition. Our destitution of such ambition would be our real shame. If the six millions and a half of people whom we represent could develop no aspirants to political office and honor under this Government, their mental indifference, barrenness and stolidity might well enough be taken as proof of their unfitness for American citizenship.

It is no crime to seek or hold office. If it were it would take a larger space than that of Noah’s Ark to hold the white criminals.

One of the charges against this convention is that it seeks for the colored people a larger share than they now possess in the offices and emoluments of the Government.

We are now significantly reminded by even one of our own members that we are only twenty years out of slavery, and we ought therefore to be modest in our aspirations. Such leaders should remember that men will not be religious when the devil turns preacher.

The inveterate and persistent office-seeker and office-holder should be modest when he preaches that virtue to others which he does not himself practice. Wolsey could not tell Cromwell to fling away ambition properly only when he had flung away his own.

We are far from affirming that there may not be too much zeal among colored men in pursuit of political preferment; but the fault is not wholly theirs. They have young men among them noble and true, who are educated and intelligent--fit to engage in enterprise of “pith and moment"--who find themselves shut out from nearly all the avenues of wealth and respectability, and hence they turn their attention to politics. They do so because they can find nothing else. The best cure for the evil is to throw open other avenues and activities to them.

We shall never cease to be a despised and persecuted class while we are known to be excluded by our color from all important positions under the Government.

While we do not make office the one thing important, nor the one condition of our alliance with any party, and hold that the welfare, prosperity and happiness of our whole country is the true criterion of political action for ourselves and for all men, we can not disguise from ourselves the fact that our persistent exclusion from office as a class is a great wrong, fraught with injury, and ought to be resented and opposed by all reasonable and effective means in our power.

We hold it to be self-evident that no class or color should be the exclusive rulers of this country. If there is such a ruling class, there must of course be a subject class, and when this condition is once established this Government of the people, by the people, and for the people, will have perished from the earth.

IN WASHINGTON, D. C., 1885.

On being introduced by Hon. B. K. BRUCE, on the occasion of the twenty-third anniversary of the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia, FREDERICK DOUGLASS spoke as follows:

FRIENDS AND FELLOW-CITIZENS: Your committee of arrangements were pleased to select me as your orator of the day, on an occasion similar to this, two years ago. At that time, while appreciating the honor conferred upon me, I ventured to express the wish that some one of the many competent colored young men of this city and District had been chosen to discharge this honorable duty in my stead. There were excellent reasons for that wish then, and there are even much better reasons for the same wish now. Time and cultivation have largely added to the number of those from whom a suitable selection might have been made, and one of these silent, yet powerful, agents whose mission it is to create and destroy all things mortal has left me much less desire for such distinguished service now than two years ago. Happily, however, the burden is not heavy or grievous, and the proper story of this occasion is simple, familiar, and easily told. In observing the anniversary of the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia, we attract the attention of the American people to one of the most important and significant events in their national history, and at the same time evince a grateful and proper sense of the wonderful changes for the better that have taken place in our condition, and in that of the country generally. Though in its immediate and legal operation this act of emancipation was local in its range as to territory, and limited in its application as to the number of persons liberated by it, morally it looms upon us as a grand, comprehensive, and far-reaching measure.

To appreciate its importance we must not consider it as a single independent act standing alone, nor as one pertaining to this District only, nor to the colored people only. We must regard it as a part of a series of splendid public measures, as one of so many steps in the national progress looking to one beneficent and glorious result, a large contribution to the honor and welfare of the whole country. It was the auspicious beginning of a great movement in the councils of the nation, made necessary by the war, and one which finally culminated in the complete and permanent abolition of slavery, not only in the District of Columbia, but in every part of the Republic. Thus viewed it was the one act which broke the gloomy spell that bound the nation in the bonds of servile, unnatural reverence and awe for slavery. It withdrew the sympathy of European nations from the rebellion; it brought the moral support of the civilized world to the loyal cause; it erased the foulest blot that ever stained our national escutcheon; it gave to the war for the Union a logical, humane, and consistent purpose; it solved a problem which was the standing grief of good men, and the perplexity of statesmen for ages; it gave courage and hope to our armies in the field; it weakened the rebellion; it raised the whole nation to a higher and happier plane of civilization, and placed the American people where they never were before, in a position where they could consistently and effectively preach liberty to all the nations of the world.

The 16th of April, the anniversary of this great act of the nation, strangely and erroneously enough has been considered simply as the colored man’s day only. The business of consecrating and preserving its memory has been, by common consent, relegated to him exclusively. But, in this, our fellow-citizens have been more generous to us than just to themselves. Colored men have very little more reason to hallow this day than have white men. If it brought freedom to us, it brought peace and safety to them, and hence they may well enough unite in this and similar celebrations, and regard the day as theirs as well as ours. No truth taught by our national history is more evident than this, that while slavery dominated the southern half of the Republic, and free institutions prevailed in the northern half, peace and harmony between the two sections were utterly and forever impossible. No man can serve two masters, and the attempt of our Government to do this was a stupendous failure. The union between liberty and slavery was a marriage without love, a house divided against itself; a couple unequally yoked together, held together by external force, not by moral cohesion; it brought happiness to neither, and misery to both.

Like any other embodiment of social and material interest peculiar to a given community, slavery generated its own sentiments, its own morals, manners, and religion; and begot a character in all around it in favor of its own existence.

In nearly everything indigenous and peculiar to society in the two sections, they were as separate and distinct as are any two nations on the globe. The longer they were thus linked together in the bonds of outward union, the more palpable became their points of difference, and the more passionate became their hostility to each other. Liberty became more and more the glory of the North, and slavery more and more the idol of the South. Not even the bonds of Christian fellowship were strong enough to hold together the churches of the two sections.

In view of this settled and growing antagonism, only one of three courses was opened to the nation: The first was to make the country all slaves, the second was to make it all free, and the third was to divide the Union, and let each section set up a government of its own--the one based upon the system of slavery, and the other based upon the principles of the Declaration of American Independence.

Thanks to the wisdom, loyalty, patriotism, courage, and statesmanship developed by the crisis, the nation rejected equally the idea of making the country all slaves, and permitting two separate nations, with hostile civilizations, side by side, with a chafing, bloody border between them, but chose to give us one country, one citizenship, and one liberty for all the people, and hence we are here this evening. There was never any physical reason for the dissolution of the Union. The geographical and topographical conditions of the country all served to unite rather than to divide the two sections. It was moral not physical dynamite that blew the two sections asunder.

We are told by the poet that--

“Lands intersected by a narrow frith, abhor each other; Mountains interposed make enemies of nations, Which else, like kindred drops, had mingled into one.”

But in this case there were neither friths nor mountains to separate the South from the North, or to make our Southern brethren hate the people of the North. The moral cause of trouble in the system of slavery being now removed, peace and harmony are possible, and, I doubt not, these blessings, though long delayed, will finally come. In calling attention to the event which makes this day precious we honor ourselves, and honor the noble and brave men who brought it about. We render our humble tribute of gratitude to-day, not only to those whose valor and whose blood on the battlefield brought freedom to the American slave; not only to the great generals who led our armies, but to our great statesmen as well who framed our laws; and not to these only, but also to the noble army of men and women which preceded both statesmen and warriors in the cause of emancipation, and made these warriors and statesmen possible. Neither would our gratitude forget those who supplemented the great act of emancipation by carrying the blessings of education to the benighted South, thus preparing the liberated freedman for the duties of citizenship.

I need not stop here to call the roll of any of these classes. The nation knows the debt it owes them, and will never forget them. We have but to mention the honored name of Abraham Lincoln in the Presidential chair, of Ulysses S. Grant in the field, at whose bedside a grateful nation now stands mute in sympathy and sad expectation; of William Lloyd Garrison in the columns of the _Liberator_, of Wendell Phillips on the rostrum, of Charles Sumner in the Senate, to cause a host of noble men and women to start up and pass in review before us.

But I drop this brief reference to the history and personnel of the anti-slavery movement, and will speak of matters nearer our times and equally pertinent to this occasion. Those who abolished slavery did their work, and did it well. They served their day and generation with wisdom, courage, and fortitude, and are an example to this and coming generations. They bravely upheld the principles of liberty and justice, and it will go well with this nation and with us if we in our time, and if those who are to come after us in theirs, shall adhere to and uphold these same principles with equal zeal, courage, fidelity, and fortitude. One generation cannot safely rest on the achievements of another, and ought not so to rest.

Hitherto there has been little variety in the thoughts, resolutions, and addresses presented for consideration on occasions similar to this. Each celebration has been almost a _fac-simile_ of its predecessors. The speeches have been little more than echoes of those made before, because the conditions of their utterances have been so uniform, and all one way. To-day, however, conditions are changed, or appear to be changed. We do not stand where we stood one year ago. We are confronted by a new Administration. The term of twenty-four years of steady, unbroken, successful Republican rule is ended. The great Republican party that carried the country safely through the late war against the rebellion, emancipated the slave, saved the Union, reconstructed the government of the Southern States, enfranchised the freedmen, raised the national credit, improved the currency, decreased the national debt, and did more for the honor, prosperity, and glory of the American people than was ever done before in the same length of time by any party in any country under similar circumstances, has been defeated, humiliated, and driven from place and power.

For the first time since the chains fell from the limbs of the slaves of the District of Columbia; for the first time since slaves were raised from chattels to men; for the first time since they were clothed with the dignity of American citizenship they find themselves under the rule of a political party which steadily opposed their every step from bondage to freedom, and this fact may well enough give a peculiar coloring to the thoughts and feelings with which this anniversary of emancipation is celebrated.

The great question of the hour respects the true significance of this change in the national front. What does it portend? How will it affect our relations to the people and government of this country? How was this stupendous change brought about, and, in point of fact, it may be asked with some propriety if there has really been any serious change made in our condition by this change in the relations of parties?

To the eye of the colored man the change, or apparent change, in the political situation is very marked, and wears a very sinister aspect. He has so long been accustomed to think the Republican party the sheet-anchor of his liberty, the star of all his hopes, that he can see nought but ill in the ascendancy of the Democratic party. He addresses it much as did Hamlet his father’s ghost:

“Tell why thy canonized bones, hearsed in death, Have burst their cerements; why the sepulchre. Wherein we saw thee quietly inurn’d, Hath oped his ponderous and marble jaws to cast thee up again. What may this mean, that thou, dead corpse, Again in complete steel, revisit’st thus the glimpses of the moon, Making night hideous, and we, poor fools of nature, So horridly to shake our disposition With thoughts beyond the reaches of our souls?”

It is, perhaps, too early to determine the full significance of the return of the Democratic party to power, or to tell just how that return to power came about. One thing must be admitted, and that is that the power and vitality of the Democratic party have been vastly underrated. It has indulged in vices and crimes enough to have killed a dozen ordinary parties, and yet it lives. At times it has really seemed to be dead. Some said it had died by opposing the war for the Union, but it was not so. We thought the life had gone out of it when it took our late friend, Horace Greely, for its candidate for the Presidency and adopted a Republican platform, but it was not so.

It was the same old party in a new dress, and time has shown that it was as full of life and power as ever. The fact is, it was never either honestly dead or securely buried. Even when it slept it had one eye open, and saw better with that one eye than did the Republican party with its two. Our mistakes concerning it have been made abundantly clear by the late election and the dazzling splendor of the recent inauguration. We thought the Democratic party dead when it was alive, and the Republican party alive and strong when it was half dead. Long continuance in power had developed rival ambitions, personal animosities, factional combinations in the Republican party that were fatal to its success and even endangered its life.

One great lesson taught by Republican defeat is familiar to all. It is the folly of relying upon past good behavior for present success. Parties, like men, must act in the living present or fail. It is not what they have done or left undone in the past that turns the scale, but what they are doing, and mean to do now. The result shows that neither the past good conduct of the Republican party nor the past bad conduct of the Democratic party has had much to do with the late election.

Americans have too little memory for good or bad political conduct. The people have said in the late election, “We care nothing for your past; but what is your present character and work?” And in rendering judgment they have said, “We see little ground for preferring one to the other.”

But, fellow-citizens, it is consoling to think that this change in the political front justly implies no real change for the worse in the moral convictions of the American people. On the great questions that divided the parties during the periods of war and reconstruction there has been no change whatever. Upon all the great measures of justice, liberty, and civilization, originated and carried through Congress by the Republican party, I believe the heart of the nation to be still safe and sound. If the measures then in controversy between the parties were now submitted to the American people, I fully believe they would sustain them one and all by an overwhelming vote.

The trouble was that the Republican party in the late campaign forgot for the moment its high mission as the party of great moral ideas, and sought victory on grounds far below its ordinary level. It made national pelf more important and prominent than national purity. It made the body more important than the soul; national prosperity more important than national justice. There was no square issue made up between the parties. One talked in favor of the tariff and the other did not talk against it. Both together beat the air and raised a dust, confused counsel, blinded the voters, and rendered victory a thing of chance rather than a thing of choice. The Republican party was not more surprised by defeat than the Democratic party was astonished by victory. Twelve hundred votes would have changed the result; so that nothing for the future can be safely predicted upon the election either way. It does not imply that the Democratic party is in power to stay, or that the Republican party is out of power to stay, or that new parties are to arise and take the place of the old.

While it was painfully evident that the Republican party, during the late canvass, had little or nothing to say against the outrages committed upon the newly enfranchised people of the South, it was equally plain that the Democratic party had nothing to say in defense of these outrages. Yet it is not strange, in view of the history of the two parties, that much alarm was felt by colored people all over the South when they first learned that the great Republican party was defeated and that the Democratic party was soon to administer the National Government.

Ignorant as the colored people of the South have been, and may still be, about other matters of national importance, they have always been intelligent enough as to the character and relations of political parties. They have never been mistaken as to the historical difference between the party which gave them liberty and the party which sought to continue their enslavement. They had known the Democratic party long and well and only as the party of the old master class. They naturally held the triumph of that party as a victory of the old master class. In the panic of the moment they saw in it a possible attempt to rehabilitate the old order of government in the South, in which they would be greatly oppressed if not enslaved.

In the joy and exultation of the old master class over the defeat of the Republican party, and over the return of the old Democratic party to power, they read what they thought their doom. Jealous of their newly gained liberty, as well they might be, feeling themselves in peril and left naked to their enemies, their fears amounted to agony. But, thanks to the kind assurances promptly given by the President-elect and by other Democrats in high places, this alarm was transient, and has now given way in some measure to a feeling of confidence and security.

How long this feeling of confidence and security will last, however, will depend upon the future policy of the present administration. The inaugural address of President Cleveland was all that any friend of liberty and justice could reasonably ask for the freedmen. It was a frank and manly avowal, worthy of the occasion. It accepted their citizenship as a fact settled beyond debate, and as a subject which ought to attract attention only with a view to the improvement of their character and their better qualification by education for the duties and responsibilities of citizens of the Republic.

No better words have dropped from the east portico of the Capitol since the inauguration days of Abraham Lincoln and Gen. Grant. I believe they were sincerely spoken, but whether the President will be able to administer the government in the light of those liberal sentiments is an open question. The one-man power in our government is very great, but the power of party may be greater. The President is not the autocrat, but the executive of the nation. But, happily, the executive is yet a power, and may be able to obtain the support of the co-ordinate branches of the government in so plain a duty as protecting the rights of the colored citizens, with those of all other citizens of the Republic. For one, though Republican I am, and have been, and ever expect to be, though I did what I could to elect James G. Blaine as President of the United States, I am disposed to trust President Cleveland. By his words, as well as by his oath of office, solemnly subscribed to before uncounted thousands of American citizens, he is held and firmly bound to execute the Constitution of the United States in the fullness of its spirit and in the completeness of its letter, and thus far he has shown no disposition to shrink from that duty.

The Southern question is evidently the most difficult question with which President Cleveland will have to deal. Hard as it may be to manage his party on the civil service question, where he has only to deal with hungry and thirsty office-seekers, nineteen out of every twenty of whom he must necessarily offend by failing to find desirable places for them, he will find it incomparably harder to meet that party’s wishes in dealing with the Southern question. There are several methods of disposing of this Southern question open to him, and there are lions in the way, whichever method he may adopt.