Three addresses on the relations subsisting between the white and colored people of the United States

by Frederick Douglass

“There is a tide in the affairs of men, which,
Taken at the flood, leads on to fortune.”

This tide is now rising at the feet of President Cleveland and his administration, and, as I have said, it remains to be seen if it will be wisely taken at the flood. Depend upon it, if the Democratic party does not avail itself of the colored man’s support the Republican party certainly will. That party is still the colored man’s party, and it will be all the more likely to consider the claims of the colored man, in view of its late defeat, and the causes by which that defeat was brought about. Twelve hundred more colored votes in the State of New York would have saved that party from defeat.

Unless the ballot is protected better than heretofore the Augusta speech of the Hon. James G. Blaine, delivered after the election, will be the keynote of the Republican campaign four years hence. There is only one way to prevent the success of the Republican party if that issue is permitted to be raised. The Northern people were sound for free soil; sound for free speech; sound for the Union; sound for reconstruction in other days, and they will be sound for justice and liberty and a free ballot to the newly enfranchised citizens when that issue shall be fairly presented as a living issue between the two contending parties.

The great mistake made by the leaders of the Republican party during the late canvass was the failure to recognize the facts now stated, and their refusal to act upon them. They had become tired of the old issues and wanted new ones. They made their appeal to the pocket of the nation, and not to the heart of the nation. They attended to the mint, anise, and cummin of politics, but omitted the weightier matters of the law—judgment, mercy, and faith. They were loud for the protection of things, but silent for the protection of men. These things they ought to have done, and not left the other undone.

The idea that righteousness exalteth a nation, and that sin is a reproach to any people, was, for a time, lost sight of. The all-engrossing thought of the campaign was a judicious, discriminating protective tariff. The great thing was protection to the wool of Ohio; to the iron of Pennsylvania, and to American manufactures generally. Little was said, thought, or felt about national integrity, the importance of maintaining good faith with the freedmen or the Indian, or the protection of the constitutional rights of American citizens, except where such rights were in no danger.

The great thing to be protected was American industry against competition with the pauper labor of Europe—not protection of the starving labor of the South. The body of the nation was everything; the soul of the nation was nothing. It did not appear from the campaign speeches that it was important to protect and preserve both, or that the body was not more dependent upon bread for life than was the soul dependent upon truth, justice, benevolence, and good faith for health and life. In the absence of these, the soul of the nation starves, sickens, and dies. It may not fall at once upon the withdrawal of these, but persistent injustice will, in the end, do its certain work of moral destruction. No nation, no party, no man can live long and flourish on falsehood, deceit, injustice, and broken pledges. Loyalty will perish where protection and good faith are denied and withheld, and nothing other that this should be expected, either by a party, a man, or by a government. On the other hand, where good faith is maintained, where justice is upheld, where truth and right prevail, the government will be like the wise man’s house in Scripture—the winds may blow, the rains may descend, the flood may come and beat upon it, but it will stand, because it is founded upon the solid rock of principle. I speak this, not only for the Republican party, but for all parties. Though I am a party man, to me parties are valuable only as they subserve the ends of good government. When they persistently violate the fundamental rights of the humblest and weakest in the land I scout them, despise them, and leave them.

We boast of our riches, power, and glory as a nation, and we have reason to do so. But what is prosperity, what is power, what is national glory, when national honor, national good faith, and national protection to the rights of our citizens are denied? Of what avail is citizenship and the elective franchise where a whole people are deliberately abandoned to anarchy by the Government under which they live, and told they must protect themselves from violence as best they may, for, practically, this is just what the American Government has said to the colored and white Republican voters of the South during the last eight years. Minister Lowell was accused of not protecting the rights of Irish-Americans in England, and our ships are just now ordered to Panama to look after the interests of American citizens in Central America. This is all right, but when and where have our army and navy gone to protect the rights of American citizens at home? To say, “I am a Roman citizen!” could once arrest the bloody scourge and cause the brutal tyrant to turn pale. But who cares now for the citizenship of any American Republican, black or white, in Mississippi or South Carolina? We are rich and powerful. But we should remember that the whole vast volume of human history is dotted all along with the wrecks of nations which have perished amid wealth, luxury, and splendor. What doth it profit a nation to gain the whole world if it shall lose its own soul? Henry Clay, in 1839, made an elaborate defence of the right to hold property in man. Two hundred years of legislation has sanctioned and identified negro slaves as property. When warned by anti-slavery men of the dreadful consequences of perpetuating slavery, he said that that warning had been given fifty years before, and that it had been answered by fifty years of unexampled prosperity. His idea was that if slavery were a curse God would not allow a nation that upheld it to prosper. The argument was sophistical, but it contained a great truth after all, and time only was required to verify it. He forgot that God reigns in eternity; that space is sometimes given for repentance. He did not remember, as Jefferson did, that God is just, and that His justice cannot sleep forever.

Had Mr. Clay lived to see, as we have seen, the union of his beloved country rent asunder at the centre, and hostile armies composed of his beloved countrymen on the field of battle, amid dust, smoke, and fire, blowing each other to pieces from the cannon’s mouth; had he seen five hundred thousand of the youth and flower of both sections of this land cut down by the sword and flung down into bloody graves; had he seen in the wake of this fratricidal war the smoldering ruins of noble towns and cities, and the nation staggering under a debt heavier than a mountain of gold; had he seen the sullen discontent and deadly hate which survived the war, and traced all these calamities and more, as he must do, to the existence of slavery, he would, in all the bitterness of his soul, have cursed the day when he poured out his eloquence in defence of that system which brought upon his country these accumulated horrors.

The lesson of this national experience is in place to-day, and it would be well for this nation to study and learn it. Look abroad! What rocks Europe to-day? What causes the Emperor of all the Russias to be uneasy on his pillow? What makes Austria tremble? Why does England start up frantically at midnight and search her premises? You know, and I know, that these countries have aggrieved classes among them who have just ground of complaint against their governments.

Now, fellow-citizens, let me speak plainly. This is an age when men go to and fro in the earth, and knowledge increases oppressed peoples all over the world are protesting with earthquake emphasis against all forms of injustice, some by one means and some by another. Examples, like certain diseases, are contagious. Railroads, steam navigation, electric wires, newspapers, and traveling emissaries are abroad. Can you be quite sure that the oppressed laborers in this country, white and colored, will not some day make common cause and learn some of the dangerous modes of protest against injustice adopted in other countries? I deal in no threats, for myself or for any of my countrymen, and am only for peaceful methods; but I say to all oppressors, “Have a care how you goad and imbrute the colored man of the South!” He is weak, but not powerless. He is submissive to wrongs, but not insensible to his rights. He is hopeful, but not incapable of despair. He can endure, but even to him may come a time when he shall think endurance has ceased to be a virtue. All the world is a school, and in it one lesson is just now being taught in letters of fire and blood, and that is, the utter insecurity of life and property in the presence of an aggrieved class. This lesson can be learned by the ignorant as well as by the wise. Who can blame the negro if, when he is driven from the ballot-box, the jury-box, and the schoolhouse, denied equal rights on railroads and steamboats, called out of his bed at midnight and whipped by regulators, compelled to live in rags and wretchedness, and his wages kept back by fraud, denied a fair trial when accused of crime, he shall imitate the example of other oppressed classes and invokes some terrible explosive power as a means of bringing his oppressors to their senses, and making them respect the claims of justice? This would indeed be madness, but oppression will make even a wise man mad.