Frederick Douglass on Reconstruction

        Following a bloody war that saw the death of over 600,000 Americans, a number that has yet to be eclipsed in United States military history, there was a time of hope. A time of hope for both those who had fought to see the nation put back together and for the African Americans whose fates were intertwined with the war’s outcome. For the African Americans who lived through slavery there was a belief that now they had the chance to truly be a part of the nation. During the war, one of the most well spoken and prominent members of the abolitionist community was a former slave named Frederick Douglass.
  Emerging from the war Douglass was hopeful that now his people could emerge from underneath the weight of slavery and take a role on the national stage. African Americans instead were greeted with the assassination of Lincoln and a new president in Andrew Johnson who was far less sympathetic with the plight of the blacks. Following the meeting of congress and seeing Johnson’s decision to overrule both the Civil Rights Act of 1866 the Freedmen’s Bureau Act, Douglass was worried about where his people now stood with a president who clearly did not have their interests at heart. For Douglass, there was some light at the end of the tunnel, because congress was unified in their stance against Johnson, and chose to force through both bills by overriding Johnson’s veto. In an eloquent essay written to the Atlantic in December of 1866, Fredrick Douglass penned his thoughts on the black’s current place in the nation. Douglass’s essay covers a few major topics that had to have been in the thoughts of those who were of the same mind as he was. The two that stood out to me were his issues with President Johnson and his call for voting rights for African Americans.
  Douglass speaks out about President Andrew Johnson, calling him treacherous. His two biggest issues with Johnson are his veto of the Civil Rights Bill and the Freedmen’s Bureau Act. Douglas also takes issue with the president using a presidential order to put into place state governments that were no different than the ones that the North had just fought to remove. Douglas stated that, “These pretended governments, which were never submitted to the people ... should now be treated according to their true character, as shams and impositions, and supplanted by true and legitimate governments, in the formation of which loyal men, black and white, shall participate.”
  But the most important at least in the eyes of Douglas was the need for African Americans to have the right to vote. In his essay Douglas insists that there’s no true way to protect the people of the south, including both loyal whites and blacks, unless they have the means to protect themselves. Douglas says, “The true way and the easiest way is to make our government entirely consistent with itself, and give to every loyal citizen the elective franchise,—a right and power which will be ever present, and will form a wall of fire for his protection.” I find this quote to be incredibly powerful. This is a man who had escaped slavery and had risen to become one of the top intellectuals of his time, but still he had no more say in the elective process than a dog walking the street. From Douglass’s standpoint, all these other freedoms and protections were secondary to the right to vote. It does beg to be questioned though, is Douglass in the right in this situation?  Do you need the right to vote to enact political change?  History shows that over the course of the next one hundred years that while African Americans received the right to vote in 1870, attitudes needed to change for the right to really mean anything.
  Throughout Douglas’s article, I believe there is a sense of both dread for what seems to be happening and still some hope of what could be if Congress can manage to do what he hopes for them to do, which in this case is to give African Americans voting rights.  Three years passed before Douglas got his wish, and in the short time that followed, African Americans saw an unprecedented amount of prosperity in the political sphere. Things did not stay this way long. Soon African Americans found that even though they had been given the right to vote, with the end of reconstruction and no one in the South to protect their rights, contrary to what Douglas believed, the wall of fire quickly burned out.

Douglas, Frederick. "Reconstruction." The Atlantic, December 1, 1866. Accessed April 25, 2013. http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1866/12/reconstruction/304561/?single_page=true