He plunged into his work and almost immediately into difficulties. The New Era was not his own paper. It was the national organ of the Colored National Labor Union, and Douglass soon found he was not in step with the union leaders. The only one he knew personally was George Downing of Rhode Island. Even Downing seemed to have developed strange, new ideas.
James H. Morris was an astute and courageous reconstruction leader of North Carolina who saw politics and labor in clear alliance.
“What the South needs is a thorough reconstruction of its classes,” he argued, “and that’s a long way from being a sharp division of white and black.”
“With the ballot the Negro has full citizenship. He can make his way.” Douglass did not grasp the significance of organized labor.
“The unions have been shutting out the black man’s labor all these years.”
“White workers had to learn.”
It must be remembered that by adoption Douglass was New England and Upper New York. Puritan individualism with all its good and bad qualities had sunk deep. He had himself fought for Irish cottiers and British labor, but could not at this time envision black and white workers uniting against a common enemy in the United States.
After a series of what he called “bewildering circumstances,” he purchased the paper and turned it over to Lewis and Frederic, his two printer sons. After a few years they discontinued its publication. The “misadventure” cost him from nine to ten thousand dollars.
Meanwhile, in another world—a world of international intrigue and power politics that took little account of Frederick Douglass—events were shaping themselves “according to plan.” United States expansionists waited until President Grant took office and renewed their efforts to strengthen our hand in the Caribbeans.
The islands of the Caribbean Sea were heavy with potential wealth. Fortunes lay in the rich, black soil; cheap labor was there in the poor, black peoples who had been brought from Africa to work the islands. The key was Santo Domingo—the old Saint Domingue at which Spain, France and Great Britain had clutched desperately.