“I’m sorry—but I’m going to be late. We must go. Let’s continue our visit on the way.” Trevigne welcomed the interruption.
“I’ll send you over in the carriage. And do not worry,” Pinchback lifted himself from the easy chair with languid grace. “The session will not begin on time.”
But the session of the convention had begun when Douglass reached the hall. The efficient secretary was calling the roll.
The convention was not going very well. Division in the Republican ranks grew deeper and broader every day. Douglass blamed Charles Sumner and Horace Greeley who “on account of their long and earnest advocacy of justice and liberty to the blacks, had powerful attractions for the newly-enfranchised class.” He ignored the persistent influence of the National Labor Union and its economic struggle. Douglass pointed to what the Republican party had done in Louisiana—to the legislators he had met. Six years later he was to hear all of them labeled “apes,” “buffoons,” and “clowns.” He was to see the schools Dunn had labored so hard to erect burned to the ground; the painstaking, neat accounts of Dubuclet blotted and falsified; the studied, skilful tacts of Pinchback labeled “mongrel trickery.”
There were those in New Orleans who saw it coming.
“Warmoth,” they warned him, “is the real master of Louisiana. And he represents capital, whose business it is to manipulate the labor vote—white and black.”
“The Republican party is the true workingmen’s party of the country!” thundered Douglass. And what he did was to steer the convention away from unionism to politics—not seeing their interrelation.
And so, as white labor in the North moved toward stronger and stronger union organization, it lost interest in, and vital touch with, the millions of laborers in the South. When the black night came, there was no help.
But all this was later. Douglass returned to Washington singing the praises of Louisiana—its rich beauties and the amazing progress the people were making. He congratulated himself that he had succeeded “in holding back the convention from a fatal political blunder.” His story was carried by the New York Herald—and pointedly omitted from the columns of the Tribune.
He found a letter awaiting him from Harvard: when was he sending on his newspaper files? There was some question of getting them catalogued before summer. Yes, he must attend to that—soon. And he laid the letter to one side.