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januari
1867
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 marvellously 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 defenceless,--the appeal for impartial suffrage addresses itself
with great pertinency 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.
Frederick
Douglass
  
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