At a time when it is too easy to lapse into cynicism about the fate of our republic, it is bracing to read the words from two of the more notable speeches by the great African American orator Frederick Douglass. Although separated by twenty-five years that saw the promise of full equality for all Americans almost realized before being thwarted, both speeches testify to a hard-won and resilient faith in the American creed that we would now do well to remember.
Douglass (1818–1895), the man who had escaped enslavement in his native Maryland and become a leading abolitionist, statesman, and internationally recognized author, had good reasons to be sanguine in the first of those addresses. Only two decades earlier, he had heaped scorn on the emptiness of the ideals underwriting the American Constitution: How could they be squared with the brutal, dehumanizing fact of slavery? But “Our Composite Nationality” was delivered in Boston in 1869, four years after the Union had prevailed in the Civil War. The Thirteenth Amendment abolishing slavery had been ratified, and Congress had approved the Fourteenth Amendment guaranteeing citizenship and due process for former slaves. With movement toward ratification of Fifteenth Amendment protecting the voting rights of all citizens, the future on that December day seemed bright to Douglass.
Early in the speech, however, Douglass pointed out that his optimism was far from universal: “It is thought by many, and said by some, that this Republic has already seen its best days; that the historian may now write the story of its decline and fall.”
Douglass filed those Reconstruction-era doubters into two classes. One consisted of onlookers—European by implication—who were ideologically at odds with the American way of life and governance, those who, for example, “think the few are made to rule, and the many to serve; who put rank above brotherhood, and race above humanity.” Dim auguries from this quarter were to be expected, Douglass suggested, and he was confident that “the American people can easily stand the utterances” of such distant prophets of doom.
Far more worrisome to Douglass were those “among ourselves who turn the most hopeful portents into omens of disaster, and make themselves the ministers of despair.” With his trademark wit, Douglass called these men “croakers by nature,” adding that they have a perverse “taste for funerals, and especially national funerals.” Yet these scoffers could not simply be laughed off. Unlike the other class, they were Douglass’s fellow citizens and thus capable of affecting popular opinion. Although he never named them directly, Douglass, I strongly suspect, had newspaper pundits in mind here. As one British journalist observed in 1869, Americans were “newspaper-reading animals,” and among the staples of their print diet were the prognostications of editorial writers. In a bravura display of his oratorical powers, Douglass highlighted how such ministers of despair had fallen, like a raving Lear, into a cadence of nevers:
Like the raven in the lines of Edgar A. Poe, they have learned two words, and those are, “never more.” They usually begin by telling us what we never shall see. Their little speeches are about as follows: You will never see such statesmen in the councils of the Nations as Clay, Calhoun and Webster. You will never see the South morally reconstructed and our once happy people again united. You will never see this Government harmonious and successful while in the hands of different races. You will never make the negro work without a master, or make him an intelligent voter, or a good and useful citizen. This last never is generally the parent of all the other little nevers that follow.