Frederick Douglass, a great abolitionist and orator who was born into slavery and successfully sought his own freedom, wrote this article for a national magazine in 1866. Congress had already passed (over conservative President Andrew Johnson’s vetoes) two measures designed to help protect the civil rights of the freedspeople from the depredations of their former enslavers: the Civil Rights Bill of 1866, which wrote protections of African Americans’ civil rights into law; and the Freedmen’s Bureau Bill, which extended the life of a federal agency designed to oversee the reconstitution of the southern labor system. At the same time, Congress had drafted the 14th Amendment, which was designed to ensure the constitutionality of the Civil Rights Act of 1866. The 14th Amendment was not ratified until 1868. The 15th Amendment, guaranteeing voting rights to all men, regardless of race, color, or previous condition of servitude was not proposed to Congress until February 26, 1869.
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Whether the tremendous war so heroically fought and so victoriously ended shall pass into history a miserable failure, barren of permanent results; . . . or whether, on the other hand, we shall, as the rightful reward of victory over treason, have a solid nation, entirely delivered from all contradictions and social antagonisms, based upon loyalty, liberty, and equality, must be determined one way or the other by the present session of Congress.
The last session [of Congress] really did nothing which can be considered final as to these questions. The Civil Rights Bill and the Freedmen’s Bureau Bill and the proposed constitutional amendments, with the amendment already adopted and recognized as the law of the land, do not reach the difficulty, and cannot, unless the whole structure of the government is changed from a government by States to something like a despotic central government, with power to control even the municipal regulations of States, and to make them conform to its own despotic will.
While there remains such an idea as the right of each State to control its own local affairs – an idea, by the way, more deeply rooted in the minds of men of all sections of the country than perhaps any one other political idea – no general assertion of human rights can be of any practical value. To change the character of the government at this point is neither possible nor desirable. All that is necessary to be done is to make the government consistent with itself, and render the rights of the States compatible with the sacred rights of human nature.
The arm of the Federal government is long, but it is far too short to protect the rights of individuals in the interior of distant States. They must have the power to protect themselves, or they will go unprotected, spite of all the laws the Federal government can put upon the national statute-book. . . .
The policy that emancipated and armed the negro – now seen to have been wise and proper by the dullest – was not certainly more sternly demanded than is now the policy of enfranchisement. If with the negro was success in war, and without him failure, so in peace it will be found that the nation must fall or flourish with the negro.
Fortunately, the Constitution of the United States knows no distinction between citizens on account of color. Neither does it know any difference between a citizen of a State and a citizen of the United States. Citizenship evidently includes all the rights of citizens, whether State or national. If the Constitution knows none, it is clearly no part of the duty of a Republican Congress now to institute one. The mistake of the last session was the attempt to do this very thing, by a renunciation of its power to secure political rights to any class of citizens, with the obvious purpose to allow the rebellious States to disfranchise, if they should see fit, their colored citizens. This unfortunate blunder must now be retrieved, and the emasculated citizenship given to the negro supplanted by that contemplated in the Constitution of the United States, which declares that the citizens of each State shall enjoy all the rights and immunities of citizens of the several States, so that a legal voter in any State shall be a legal voter in all the States.
Document 4.15.1: Excerpt from Frederick Douglass, “Reconstruction” (1866)