“Our republic itself is a strong argument in favor of cosmopolitan nationality.... Let the Chinaman come; he will help to augment the national wealth. He will help to develop our boundless resources; he will help to pay off our national debt. He will help to lighten the burden of our national taxation. He will give us the benefit of his skill as a manufacturer, and as a tiller of the soil in which he is unsurpassed. Even the matter of religious liberty, which has cost the world more tears, more blood, and more agony than any other interest, will be helped by his presence. I know of no church more tolerant, of no priesthood, however enlightened, which could safely be trusted with the tremendous power which universal conformity would confer. We should welcome all men of every shade of religious opinion, as among the best means of checking the arrogance and intolerance which are the almost inevitable concomitants of general conformity. Liberty always flourishes best amid the clash and competition of rival religious creeds.”
Reference has already been made to Douglass’s services to the cause of female suffrage. His presence at nearly all of the anniversaries and other important gatherings of those who advocated the enfranchisement of women was expected and his utterances were warmly received.
In the matter of religion, Mr. Douglass was not strictly orthodox in his beliefs, although it will be remembered that during his enslavement he found much consolation in the Bible, and was for a time a Methodist exhorter. His religious views, as he grew older, underwent a radical change. He had no patience with hypocrites. He had seen and heard so much that was cruel, unjust, and almost fiendish under the name of religion, that his faith in sectarianism was badly shaken. In his early anti-slavery addresses, he indulged in many absurd parodies of the pious frauds whom he had known. However, he was not an atheist. He had a deep religious sense, but was more fully under the influence of the theological opinions of Theodore Parker than of any other school of religious thought. His best friends and associates were among the Unitarians, the Quakers, and others of liberal faith. His views on religion are finely expressed in a bit of correspondence published by Mr. Holland in his biography. In response to a cordial invitation to speak before the “Free Religious Association” in Boston, in 1874, he wrote:
“I cannot be present at your Free Religious Convention in Boston. This is, of course, of smaller consequence to others than to myself, for I should come more to hear than to be heard. Freedom is a word of charming sound, not only to the tasked and tortured slaves, who toil for an earthly master, but for those who would break the galling chains of darkness and superstition. Regarding the Free Religious movement as one for light, love, and liberty, limited only by reason and human welfare, and opposed to those who convert life and death into enemies of human happiness, who people the invisible world with ghastly taskmasters, I give it hearty welcome. Only the truth can make men free, and I trust that your convention will be guided in all its utterances by its light and feel its power. I know many of its good men and women, who are likely to assemble with you, and I would gladly share with them the burden of reproach which their attacks upon popular error will be sure to bring upon them.”
Extracts from letters to friends indicate still more clearly the deeper currents of his thought.
“I once had a large stock of hope on hand, but like the sand in the glass, it has about run out. My present solace is in the cultivation of religious submission to the inevitable, in teaching myself that I am but a breath of the infinite, perhaps not so much. I was very sorry not to be able to attend the Free Religious Convention. I shall, hereafter, try to know more of these people.... I sometimes, at long intervals, try my old violin; but after all the music of the past and of imagination is sweeter than any my unpracticed and unskilled bow can produce. So I lay my dear old fiddle aside, and listen to the soft, silent, distant music of other days which, in the hush of my spirit, I still find lingering somewhere in the mysterious depths of my soul.”
“I do not know that I am an evolutionist, but to this extent, I am one. I certainly have more patience with those who trace mankind upward from a low condition, even from the lower animals, than with those who start him at a point of perfection and conduct him to a level with the brutes. I have no sympathy with a theory that starts man in Heaven, and stops him in Hell.... An irrepressible conflict, grander than that described by the late William H. Seward, is perpetually going on. Two hostile and irreconcilable tendencies, broad as the world of man, are in the open field; good and evil, truth and error, enlightenment and superstition.”
One of the stirring incidents of this post-slavery period was the “exodus movement.” In the summer of 1879, great numbers of Negroes, as if by concerted action, began to emigrate from the South and the southwestern states toward the North and West. This movement was the first manifestation of discontent ever made by the colored people on a large scale. It was in no way due to politics, but was rather an effort to free themselves from the conditions under which they were compelled to work and live. Their economic state was bad, and there seemed to be little hope of improvement. The exodus grew to such an extent that it produced something like national alarm and there were grave apprehensions that much suffering would attend the efforts of the Negroes to escape from poverty and dependence. Mr. Douglass has given the following reasons for the dissatisfaction:
“Work as hard, faithfully, and constantly as they may, live as plainly and as sparingly as they may, they are no better off at the end of the year than at the beginning. They say that they are the dupes and victims of cunning and fraud in signing contracts which they cannot read and cannot fully understand; that they are compelled to trade at stores owned in whole or in part, by their employers; and that they are paid with orders and not with money. They say that they have to pay double the value of nearly everything they buy; that they are compelled to pay a rental of ten dollars a year for an acre of ground that will not bring thirty dollars under the hammer; that land-owners are in league to prevent land owning by Negroes; that when they work the land on shares, they barely make a living; that outside the towns and cities no provision is made for education, and, ground down as they are, they cannot themselves employ teachers to instruct their children.”
As a general rule, the colored people in the North looked upon the exodus hopefully. To them it was a sign of courage on the part of their Southern brethren, and a protest against bad treatment. Frederick Douglass, however, who was always expected to have an opinion and express it, deplored the “unintelligent and somewhat aimless running away from the ills they have to others they know not of.” He could see no salvation for the Negro in the Northern states. “For him, as a Southern laborer,” he said, “there is no competition or substitute,” and he insisted that the freedman is always to be “the arbiter” of Southern “destiny.” He held that the best place for the Negro to work out his salvation was at home. His arguments are condensed in the following extracts from his published views: