¶ Intro / Opening
Pushkin.
¶ Introduction to Reconstruction and Frederick Douglass's Emergence
Hey, Hey, revisionist history listeners, It's finally happening. One of the most exciting projects I've ever been part of at Pushkin our collaboration with Barack Obama on the story of one of the most consequential and overlooked periods in American history, the years after the Civil War, known as Reconstruction, when after tearing itself apart over slavery, the United States tried to put itself back together. It's easily one of the
most traumatic eras in American history. The South is a smoking ruin, consumed by violence and chaos in the aftermath of the war. There are millions of people in the South who just a few years before were treated as property,
who are now asking to be treated as people. The politics, the economics, the morality of the Republic is up in the air, and Reconstruction is the time when the country struggles to meet those challenges and both succeeds and spectacularly fails in ways that would have consequences for the next one hundred and fifty years. The series is called Reconstruction The Unfinished Promise, an eight part podcast hosted by me in collaboration with Barack Obama. I'm going to play the
first episode for you now. You can find the rest of the series on Audible or wherever you get podcasts. After the War.
Douglas is such a fascinating character.
Frederick Douglas perhaps America's most famous abolitionist leader, a person who is a child escaped from slavery, who went on to become a global spokesperson for freedom. When I sat down with President Barack Obama, he really wanted to talk about this larger than life man.
Douglas is constantly battling between a desperate belief that the better angels of our nature will win out. He has seen this possibility of genuine equality, but he has also seen the very worst right. He himself has experienced slavery. He has watched slave catchers grab people and haul them away, and he has witnessed equivocation and cowardice and betrayal.
I am stuck by that same thing that he sees the best. And he also is clear eyed about who we are and what we're capable of. And this is why I think he belongs in that kind of pantheon. A founding father. Frederick Douglas is a founding father.
He really is.
He really is.
I said that not only because it's true, but because Douglas is one of those people who should have been crushed by history. Instead, for a long time he bent it to his will. The movement to end slavery did not begin with Frederick Douglas. That movement existed before the
United States did. A year before the Declaration of Independence, Philadelphia Quakers founded the nation's first anti slavery society, and from the beginning of the Transatlantic slave trade, enslaved people organized revolutions and plotted escapes, and the abolition movement churned out fiery figures that are now well known. Harriet Tubman and sojournal Truth, William Lloyd Garrison, and David Walker, the
radical John Brown. But certainly Frederick Douglas was best known in his own time, both in the US and abroad. And so we begin our series with Douglas in the opening days of recon Instruction in eighteen sixty five. He's a man who thinks he's just completed his life's work, but he's about to discover that his work has just begun by Malcolm Gladwell. And this is Reconstruction, the Unfinished Promise.
One of our editors, Ky write has been obsessed with Douglas for years, and particularly with the evolution of the man's politics.
Can you help people understand just how big a deal Frederick Douglas is at this stage in history. I mean, like today he would have a billion Instagram followers, like the most streamed podcasting history.
Right.
Kai called up David Blight, who is the Frederick Douglas expert. Blight wrote a Pulitzer Prize winning biography of Douglas. He's such a fan that when he spoke with Kai, he was wearing a T shirt with a porch of Douglas on it. I'm going to let the two of them tell the story of this influential activists second chapter.
¶ Lincoln's Assassination and Johnson's Troubled Presidency
And it's interesting to think about. Yeah, he'd be he need to be the guest on every major podcast, or he'd be doing his own He's a very big deal. At the end of the war, his image was everywhere. He really couldn't go anywhere without being recognized. Part of it was the hair.
Think about the term hair on fire. It's a shock of hair alliance made.
Part of it was just his presence and the voice, almost a shouting kind of baritone voice.
I know of no country where the conditions for affecting great changes are more favorable than here in these United States.
I found all kinds of stories in the press of people reciting the first time they saw Douglass. To a certain degree, he became a kind of wonder of America.
The reception so to mister Frederick Douglas, the celebrated Frederick Douglas, has been lionized in this city for several days, notwithstanding the severe rainstorm last evening, Frederick Douglas drew out an immense audience.
You came to America from Europe, for example, touring the country. You wanted to see Niagara Falls, you wanted to see New York City, Washington, d c. A few other things. But if possible, especially if you came out of reform traditions, try to see Frederick Douglass.
But in the spring of eighteen sixty five, this world famous man who has spent literally his entire life working to abolish slavery, at the moment of his triumph, he's in a funk. He's kind of a guy who's lost for purpose.
Right, he is loss for purpose at the very end of the words the way he described it. And he drew right from one of his favorite moments in Shakespeare. He said, a fellow's occupation is gone.
I feel as though I have reached the end of the noblest and best part of my life. My school is broken up, my church disbanded.
He didn't know, He didn't know where to go. He didn't quite know what to do. Douglas see, he's one of the rare, rare radical reformers in history who lives to see his cause triumph in the middle of his life. He's only forty some years old, and he will face the challenge the rest of his life to sustain the victory of emancipation, the great transition from slavery to freedom. But no one knows, No one really knows yet where
any of this is going. What he was certain of kai is that the Confederate South was not going away. He kept warning, he warns, They're still there. The slave holding spirit he always is warning, is still out there.
This ghost haunting the United States. I can't overemphasize how fast history moved. In eighteen sixty five. The war ends in April, and in less than a week Abraham Lincoln is assassinated. That obviously catches the whole world off guard. But for Frederick Douglas, who again is already disoriented by the fact that he's just witnessed the completion of his whole life's mission, I just I can't imagine how he processed Lincoln's death.
Douglas was horrified, and there are many ways to understand that. He goes back to Rochester at the news of Lincoln's assassination, and a huge crowd had gathered in the central Square of Rochester, New York, where he lived, and Douglas went and joined the crowd, and there were some speakers, and the crowd called for him. And it's a very moving statement he made.
It is a day for silence and meditation, for grief and tears. Yet I feel that though Abraham Lincoln dies, the Republic lives.
He said at that moment he had never felt a kinship for his fellow Americans, and by that I think he met white people. He'd never felt such a kinship as he did through Lincoln's death.
Just think about these two men. Here's Douglas, a formerly enslaved child who now commanded the attention of the President of the United States.
During the war.
He was able to look Lincoln in the eye and challenge him to do more, not only in slavery, but to arm black men in the fight to save the Union. And here's Lincoln standing astride history, trying to save the Union and gradually realizing that Douglas was right. The only way forward for the United States was to abolish slavery. Both Lincoln and Douglas are legendary pragmatists, cerebral by nature, but each of them see the national story in fully
¶ Carl Schurz's Mission to the Post-War South
biblical terms. They're ready to partner in this divine task of rebuilding the United States. And then bang, partnership is snuffed out in one gunshot on Easter weekend, no less, just days after the end of the war. And the man who rises into the presidency as a result of that gunshot, he is There's no a Lincoln.
Andrew Johnson is an interesting character. He was literally the polar opposite of Lincoln.
Manisha Sinha is chair of the history department at the University of Connecticut, and she has written a great deal about Lincoln's successor, Andrew Johnson, America's troubled seventeenth president.
She's an advisor on our series.
Johnson seems to have been a person who really sort of lacked political skills. You know, he's petty, he's mean, he's vindictive, he's abusive, he's a drunk. He's not a great character to inhabit the office of the President of the United States.
But Lincoln had picked Andrew Johnson as his vice president in eighteen sixty four as a show of national unity because Johnson was a Southern Democrat instead of a Northern Republican. The first sign of trouble came on Lincoln in Johnson's inauguration day.
There is a story that Andrew Johnson was a little schnocker on some brandy or bourbon or something, because he had a horrific toothache that day. Now he might have been sipping for other reasons, who knows, but he was not entirely sober at his inauguration as vice president of the United States. Now, at that point, what Douglas and others knew about Andrew Johnson. He's obviously from Tennessee. He's from East Tennessee. You know, there's an old saying about Johnson.
Quote Old Andy never went back on his raisin, which means he knew where he was from. He was a damn good stump speaker. You know he could jump on a wagon and get the farmers cheering about something. He's a former slaveholder that was known, who never believed in secession, which is why he stayed in the Union. He was the only senator from a seceded state to stay in
the Union, which is what got him on Lincoln's ticket. Which, by the way, I've always said this to all my dear friends who are Lincoln scholars, why don't you ever talk about that. That's one of Lincoln's biggest mistakes.
It's a horrible, horrible it's a horrible choice.
I mean politically at the moment, it's it's a unity, it's a reunion ticket for this symbolism of the Southerner who stayed in the Union. He's a unionist he really was, but a former slaveholder, racist to in his bones, and a fervent states rights advocate. Of course, nobody expected presidents to be shot.
Andrew Johnson takes over the presidency at the start of the remarkable era that historians now call reconstruction.
We get to use the word unprecedented sometimes because it fitness uh. The country had never been in this situation. The end of a massive civil war. America was now being reinvented. But how what would it do? Who were the freed people? How would they be defined?
Frederick Douglas couldn't have felt Andrew Johnson was fit to lead the nation through this conversation, But Douglas did have a clear idea about how to answer that crucial question of reconstruction.
Slavery is not abolished until the black man has the ballot.
We need voting rights first and foremost, and the Republicans who controlled Congress mostly agreed that's where Lincoln had been headed.
Lincoln when he died, one of the last speeches he made was to say black men who are educated and who have served in the Union Army should get the right to vote. So that's like the first public endorsement a black citizenship.
But Andrew Johnson, he wanted nothing to do with black civil rights political rights. He to the extent we can understand him, he wanted black people to become a kind of an American serfdom. They would remain agricultural workers, they
¶ Journey Through a Shattered Confederacy
would stay in the South, they would be a backbone of the economy. To the extent Andrew Johnson thought much about all of that. That's as far as he ever wanted to go.
He did think a great deal about how to handle the Confederacy. Remember, the Confederate states left the Union, they succeeded and took up arms against the United States, and their leaders, many of whom had been members of Congress before the war, were actual literal traders. So one of the big questions of reconstruction was how to bring these states and their traitorous political leaders back into the fold. Johnson, he had been a senator from a Confederate state at
the start of the war. He just personally refused to secede. So now he's president and he wants to traders back in.
They would be immediately readmitted to the Union. He would accept some disenfranchisement of ex Confederates, but even that he had an alternative plan for which was to require them to apply to him personally for pardons. And that is existence well, that whole staff of people working for the executive branch just processing pardons for ex Confederates. They would literally line up at the White House or executive building
nearby to get their pardons. Johnson liked the idea. See Johnson was Johnson had the self image of a poor boy. His poor boy from East Tennessee Hill country, and he did grow up with not much, although he had owned some slaves, and he was proud to tell you that. But he liked the idea of the old planter class, which he was not from having a kind of coward him. So, yeah, that sounds familiar too, doesn't The guy with the sense of grievance is going to make everybody who might have
looked down on him come and bend their knee. He loved it.
And meanwhile, black people have to get caught in the middle.
Of the Black people ain't even gonna be allowed in the middle of it.
Whatever Andrew Johnson may be, he is no friend of our race.
So Douglas sees Andrew Johnson and now he's.
Got his new vocation.
Now he has found his calling in opposition essentially to Andrew Johnson.
Oh yeah, and what a great foil.
David Blight and Ky Write will be back to talk more about this coming showdown. But first I'm taking us to meet the man who really got it underway. Remember, Frederick Douglas and Andrew Johnson both need public opinion on their side. After the war. Douglas argues that the federal government has an obligation to the newly freed people of the South. It must not only protect them, but give them the right to vote. President Johnson disagrees. He doesn't
think the federal government should do much of anything. In fact, he's busy pardoning Confederates. But Johnson is only president by dint of a terrible tragedy. His power is tenuous. He needs some ammunition for his arguments, so he sends a
¶ Schurz's Damning Report and Johnson's Denial
man you've probably never heard of on a historic mission. It's a mission that will become hugely consequential for reconstruction, just not in the way Andrew Johnson hopes. This is our dude, right. So, in my many years in New York City, I have come walked past this monument many times. We're in the corner of one hundred and sixteenth Street on Morningside Drive, on the edge of Columbia University, on the border between Columbia and Morningside Park, one of the
crown jewels of Manhattan. And there is this statue which I have passed and it has never occurred to me to stop and wonder who it is. And it's this actually quite imposing statue of a man in what looks like a man in his sixties or seventies, wearing a kind of long imposing cloak, holding onto his hat and a very determined look on his face. And it says Karl Schurt's a defender of liberty and a friend of
human rights. So this statue dates to nineteen thirteen. At the dedication ceremony for this statue, just to choke, the one who led the movement to get a built said, this day will not end the memory of Carl. Does anyone remember Carl Schertz today? I don't think so. I've never seen anyone standing in front of that statue. The man actually seems lost to history, like a lot of
what happened in the Reconstruction era. At the end of the Civil War, Carl Schertz was in the vanguard of American politics, one of the people who had rallied around Abraham Lincoln and the Republican Party to save the Union.
If you think about it, this was a we saw them and talk about generations in politics, and this was a generation of political leaders. They won the Civil War, they mobilized as no one had ever imagined, and here they are in eighteen sixty five, victorious. It's a remarkable generation.
And Carl Schertz is right there in the middle of it. He's a German immigrant who fought and lost in movements against European monarchy before coming to America and joining Lincoln's political coalition. He sees the United States as a laboratory for democracy, as an example to the world, no more royalty, no more aristocracy, and no more slavery.
The awesome thing about shirts is, on the one hand, he's on kind of the side of liberal democracy for all these mass movements in the nineteenth century. He's like a street running across the nineteenth century.
Finally I found someone who's gotten into call shirts as much as I have John Grinspan, a historian at the Smithsonian Institute who studies the politics of the eighteen hundreds.
And the other thing is Carl Schurtz is incredibly kind of needling and pushy, and the Yiddish word nunik is the word I think of for him. He's such a difficult, sometimes annoying individual that it's fun to see the humanity
¶ Douglass Confronts the President and Calls for Reform
in somebody who's involved in all these kind of go arious movements.
It's the summer of eighteen sixty five, just a few months after the Civil war has ended, and after Lincoln has been killed, Andrew Johnson, the new president, asks Carl Schirtz to come to the White House. Shirts thinks here's an opportunity to shape the reconstruction effort that's just begun.
He sees some things he thinks Johnson is doing wrong, and he, in a maybe naive wa thinks he can go to Johnson and talk him into a better policy.
What follows is a little digression, but it's hard to resist, and it tells you something about how Americans were handling both the trauma of war and a president's assassination. On the way to Washington to see Johnson, call Shirts stays with friends in Philadelphia. The family had lost two sons in the war. Unlike so many others, they wanted to communicate with them through a seance. The night Shirts arrives, they invite him to join in. He wrote about it later.
One of the daughters, an uncommonly beautiful, intelligent, and high spirited girl of about fifteen, had shown remarkable qualities as a writing medium. When the circle was formed around the table, hands touching, a shiver seemed to pass over her fingers begun to twitch. She grasped a pencil held out to her, and as if obeying an irresistible impulse, she wrote in a jerky way the messages given her by the spirits.
He asks that the girl call up the spirit of Abraham Lincoln, who's just dead for a few months at that point, and he claims that at the seance, the spirit of Abraham Lincoln tells him that Johnson is going to send him on an important mission. It's classic Carl Shirts that he has Lincoln come back from behind the grave to give him a promotion.
But now after that side trip to the spirit world, he is a real president to meet. I asked historian Militia Sinha about that encounter. So Shirts goes to Washington, sits down with Johnson, or what does Johnson explicitly ask him to do?
So Johnson asks Shirts to go to the Southern States and says, I want you to report on the conditions in the South right now. And I think he wants to use Shirts. He wants to send Shirts to the South to report back to him. Hey, everything is fine, it's all hunky dory, and you know the South can rejoin the Union.
Oh so, from Johnson's perspective, he's looking He's looking for a kind of cover story. He thinks he thinks Shirts is going to come back with something that kind of justifies him, sort of washing his hands of the whole thing and moving on. Why does he think Shirts could would be such a willing dupe?
That's an interesting question. I think he's also calculating that he wants to send someone one who would be believable to the Radical Way and to the entire Republican Party.
In mid July, Carl Shurtz begins his fact finding mission. He boids a steamboat from Washington to the South Carolina Sea Islands. A US military officer takes him to a plantation near Beaufort, far down the eastern coast, just shy at the South Carolina Georgia border. Shirtz is excited by what he sees.
Fields free from wheats, the cotton plants healthy, The cornfields promised a rich shield everything, breathing thrift, order and prosperity. We passed by a large log house in which a colored preacher was exalting his congregation for it was Sunday.
This is an area where the Union Army, abolitionists free people themselves are experimenting in systems of free labor that would replace slavery. Freed people's idea of free labor who was linked to their own traditions of economic attime. They envisioned free labor as sometimes even ownership of land, but definitely control over who they labored for, how much they labored, and what they would get for it.
But this pleasant picture would not hold up for long. Schwartz leaves the Sea Islands and takes another boat to Charleston, South Carolina. That's where he starts to encounter the real
¶ Republican Triumph and the Legacy of Radical Reconstruction
devastation of the war.
He writes about how long it takes getting into Charleston before he sees a living creature. This city that was so kind of glamorous and sophisticated on the eve of the war now looks like it's just completely in ruins. He really sees the impact on urban civilian populations and the degree of destruction, and the degree of the word
he keeps using is sullenness. The degree of anger and resignation and frustration that he runs into among the kind of especially the white elite Southern population who previously had been so dominant in a place like Charleston, now will barely speak.
Schurtz travels further into South Carolina. He rides on miserable trains through ninety five degree heat. His mule drawn wagon breaks down. The roads are nothing with deep sand. He visits Columbia, the state capitol, and finds it reduced to what he calls a confused mass of charred ruins. He passes through the remains of General Sherman's infamous march and sees a broad black streak of desolation.
Reconstruction has barely begun. The war is in a sense over in that the major armies have surrendered and Jefferson Davis has been captured, but there's no sense of order or peace. There's just kind of degrees of chaos. And he Trat talks a lot as he travels to especially to kind of former Confederates and to white Southerners, and he gets a sense that there's a consensus that the Confederacy has lost and secession has failed, but there's no agreement on what should come next.
They want to.
Fight the war over again, and they are sure in five years we are going to have a war bigger than any we have seen.
Yet.
They are impatient to get rid of this damned military despotism they will show us what stuff Southern men are made of. Such is their talk.
Shirts makes his way to Savannah, Georgia. He finds a city still reeling from mob violence that broke out on Independence Day.
In Savannah. When they hold a Fourth of July celebration in eighteen sixty five, the war is over. It's a Fourth of July celebration that should be fairly patriotic. Basically, the only people that attender are Union soldiers and freed slaves, and they're attacked by an angry white mob.
Historian Minitia Sinha says Carl Schurtz wasn't the only person to witness this kind of thing. The patriotic holiday had become a flashpoint.
We see evidence coming from all over the South that the only people who want to celebrate the fourth of July are freed people. It's not Southern whites who are very silent and hate the Fourth of July. Interestingly enough, at that point, and black people really sort of seem to tie their demands and their freedom claims and their rights to the national government, to the Union army and to celebrating the nation.
Shirts then takes a train to Atlanta. He spends the weekend there and finds yet more lawlessness.
The planters in that region seem to have combined to keep the Negroes in their former state of subjection and to kill those that refuse to submit.
There's a regular drumbeat at this time of open, regular violence against African Americans four willion slaved people across the South. One scar at the time estimates that there's a murder a day happening somewhere, and Enshirt sees a lot of it.
The demoralization of the people is frightful to behold in its manifestations. Travelers are frequently attacked on the public highways. Cotton is stolen in enormous quantities, horses and mules are run off whenever they are not watched with the utmost care, and the perpetrators are almost never arrested and punished.
I'd say the general direction of the whole trip is as he moves further south and certainly further west, he runs into more and more chaos, and more and more violence, and more and more kind of evil plans by former confederates to do whatever they can to get as close to re enslaving people as possible.
Schurtz finally reaches the end of his journey in New Orleans in September. He's been traveling for two months through a treacherous landscape. He is by now completely exhausted and miserable. He writes about sweltering nights in the wretched country taverns and about knights spend in desperate fights with ravenous swarms of mosquitoes. He gets dengey fever, or as he calls it, break bone fever, and he's just appalled by all that he has witnessed in the South.
This is the most shiftless, most demoralized people I have ever seen. If I can only make my main report, I shall open the eyes of the people of the North.
Shirts returns to Washington, DC. He's ready to write a report to the President documenting all the devastation and lawlessness he's seen. This is precisely the assignment Andrew Johnson had given him, and now Shirts has the evidence he needs to make the President face reality.
This reconstruction thing is not going to be fast, it's not going to be easy, and it's going to take effort on our part.
But Andrew Johnson is no longer interested in what Carl Schurtz has to say.
He doesn't want Shirts around anymore. He doesn't want Shirts involved anymore. He seems to regret ever giving him the position to begin with.
And he certainly doesn't want to publish a report. Schertz writes it anyway. He includes everything he has seen, organized by topic, the rampant violence against black people and the quote utter absence of national feeling among Southern whites. He calls for troops to stay in the South, for black suffrage to be a condition of any Confederate state's re
entry into the Union. He says there needs to be a reconstruction of the quote whole organism of Southern society to bring it in harmony with the rest of American society.
This is the.
Report he delivers to Andrew Johnson, and which he gives to Johnson's Republican enemies.
I think Johnson miscalculates enormously.
I mean, this is sort of a spectacular own goal by Johnson. He finds this guy, thinking this guy will be his kind of willing dupe. We'll go back and someone with some credibility with the abolitionists will go and give a nice whitewash for what's going on in the South. That will justify Johnson's own agenda. And the guy returns and he's not playing ball. He's determined to tell the truth. And now Johnson's stuck. He created this mess, from this political mess, for himself exactly.
And I think Johnson realizes then that Shirts's report and other such reports coming out of the South is going to result in the failure of his own restoration.
Plan, that plan being do as little as possible. Republicans ultimately forced the President to formally submit Carl Schurtz's report to Congress, thereby making it a fully public document. But the President attaches a note in which he tries desperately to obscure the facts. His damage control is kind of it's of audacious in his In his note, he says, perplexing questions were naturally to be expected. I love them the grammatical construction of this, You know, mistakes were made.
Perplexing questions were naturally to be expected from the great and sudden change in the relations between the two races. But systems are gradually developing themselves under which the freedmen will receive the protection to which he is justly entitled. And then he celebrates the spirit of nationality which is rapidly emerging. For the sectional animosity of the war. It's like it's one plus one is three.
Absolutely, And especially for Johnson to talk about free people, right, it is a bit in your faith, a bit rich, exactly in your face rich. And you know, but he really wants to tell nor that does Hey, the South is no longer bitter and they're not bitter against the Union or you that they have all accepted it. And in fact, Shout has just witnessed the precise opposite.
I think one hundred thousand copies of it go out, which is a huge number back then, and it shows up in basically all the newspapers, and by the end of the year, Shirtz's report is really influencing how people are thinking about reconstruction.
Carl Schurtz's report ended up being the most radical thing he ever did. He went on to have a successful career and then faded into obscurity, but his report on the condition of the South helped change the course of history because the Republicans in Congress immediately begin to challenge
Johnson's policies. They put forth their own bold ideas for how the country should be put back together and This sparks what is really the first big battle between the branches of American government, the White House versus Congress, who will have the last word on the direction.
Of the union.
The following year, eighteen sixty six is one of the most momentous years in American political history, and that's when Frederick Douglas steps back into the fray. Here, I'm going to turn our story back to our editor, Kai writ.
So you now have two starkly contrasting visions for how the country should be put back together. There's Andrew Johnson's approach, quick and easy, with everything essentially going.
Back to how it was before the war.
And then there's the approach Carl Schurtz advised in his report make black people full citizens with the right to vote, and use the military to enforce that right if need be. In January of eighteen sixty six, Congress convenes a set of hearings to debate the matter. They're considering a big, sprawling constitutional amendment that will settle things once.
And for all.
This is what will ultimately become the fourteenth Amendment to the US Constitution. And as all of this is consuming the national conversation, Frederick Douglas leads.
A delegation of black men to the White House.
They managed to get this appointment. They weren't invited.
David Blaite again, Douglas's biographer.
They went in with a prepared statement. They were able to get through part of their prepared state. They went there to lobby the President of the United States for the right to vote and protection and all the other rights. They got through part of their prepared statement, and Johnson interrupted them. He was not going to be preached to
by a bunch of black men. In fact, at one point he said, I especially don't want to be preached to by people like you, and he meant Douglas, who can round out periods and put in fancy words, wow, oh yeah.
People who know how to use their words. That I don't want to be.
Stopped you speak to me like that. Johnson held the floor for forty five minutes. Johnson went on and on and on, and part of Johnson's speech, which is what it was, this was not a discussion. He said, you know, I once owned slaves. I want you to know I owned slaves, but I never sold one. That's he said that to them. I guess believing that would not offend them. It's like, yeah, no, no, he's really it's amazing. It
got worse. Douglas would try to interrupt that, you know, like miss President may I, Miss President may I. And then Johnson finally just said no, you will not speak to me. And at some point there about fifty to fifty five minutes in, Douglas said, well, we're finished here. He asked his whole delegation to get up, and they walked out.
John and can barely disguised his own racism. He doesn't see Douglas the way Lincoln sees him as a black leader and as somebody who's putting forth some legitimate ideas about black rights and reconstruction. It's just the opposite. He sees. He demeans Douglas and he calls him the N word, and he says, oh, he cut my throat off, just like any other slave.
Douglas said he heard it. I've always imagined Douglas turning around looking at Andrew Johnson, you know, wishing he could, you know, take his teeth out, but probably just walked down and said, oh yeah. They went over to a hotel, they wrote up a statement, they published it immediately. The next morning in a Washington d c. Paper describing exactly what had happened. And then Douglas wrote a new speech.
Douglas always did this when something big happens, go to his desk, and he wouldn't know exactly what he thinks about some until he went to his desk and he wrote a new speech, and he called.
It Sources of Danger to the Republic.
And it's a barn burner. He just butchered Johnson in this speech.
I know of no greater misfortunes to individuals than an over confidence in their own perfections. And I know a fewer misfortunes that can happen to a nation greater than an over confidence in the perfection of its government.
Douglas opens this speech by warning, Look, don't think there's something divine or almighty about the institutions that support American democracy. Starting with the Constitution itself.
There were neither thunderings, nor lightnings, nor earthquakes, nor tempests, nor any other disturbance of nature when this great law was given to the world.
The Constitution is just a piece of paper, ideas on a page.
It is simply a human contrivance. It is the work of man and men struggling with many of the prejudices and infirmities common to man.
And it is time to deal with those prejudices. Douglas says, if you want this to be a democracy, it's got to be a real democracy.
Make it a government of the people, buy the people, and for the people, and for all the people, each.
For all, and all for each.
Blot out all discriminations against any person, theoretically or practically. Keep no man from the ballot box or jewelry box or the cartridge box.
Because of his color.
Exclude no woman from the ballot box because of her sex. Let the government of the country rest securely down upon the shoulders of the whole nation.
But really, in this speech, Douglas is here to talk about leadership. He says, yes, we must update the Constitution, But even then, no matter what is written in that document, our liberty actually depends on something more active that That is the lesson of the Civil War, He says, Imagine if Lincoln had not been president during the war, imagine the wartime commander in chief as the guy we got.
Now had that other embodiment of political treachery, meanness, baseness, ingratitude, the vilist of the vile, the basist of the base, the most execrable of the execrable of modern times. He who shall be nameless occupied the presidential chair. Your magnificent Republic might have been numbered with the things that were.
Douglas wants them to get rid of the veto. He wants them to limit presidents to one term, and he wants them to get rid of Johnson's ability to pardon Confederates for sure.
The president, he says, has too much power.
Mister Johnson has sometimes overstepped this power in certain conditions of his mind, which are quite frequent, and mistaken himself for the United States instead of the president of the United States.
There's a line in it that gives me chills when I read it today. He says, our government may at some point be in the hands of a bad man.
When in the hands of a good man, it is all well enough.
We ought to have our government so shaped that even when it is in the hands of a bad man, we shall be safe.
Indeed, you know, can you imagine the first time I read that? I mean, it was well, I'd have read it before at some point, But you know, you can read a Douglas speech six times and find something new in it. But I used to ends. I used to end talks on Douglas with that during Trump's first term, then just end with that. I wouldn't mention Trump. I mean I didn't have to. You know, it was so poignant. But you know what he's saying there is we got
problems without our constitution. There are structural problems with it, but we still do depend on human character on some level. It's such a prescient warning for all sorts of political systems, all sorts of places in the world. Democracy is a great thing, but it first needs law and structure. But then in these people who believe in it, and one without the other probably won't work.
Frederick Douglas took this speech on the road campaigning for a bold new constitution, and Andrew Johnson barnstormed across the country with his own speech. It was an election year on top of everything else, so the president wanted voters to give him a new Congress, one that would support his vision for a quick and tidy reconstruction.
He even says the real traders to the Union were not the former Confederates, but they are the radical Republicans of the abolitionists. These are the real enemies to the Union. Johnson is stuck in this very rigid racist view, so he thinks the majority will support him because he can play the race guard, and he does that constantly. If you give black people rights, you're taking them away from whites.
He says that constantly, and he's stunned when northern whites do not get duped by his race guard because they're seeing what's happening in the South. So the sympathy is for freed people at that point. There is no sort of racial unity between northern whites and Southern whites. And this issue Johnson completely mistreats the political situation.
And it totally backfired on Jones. The Republicans overwhelming won those congressional off year elections both houses and returned a veto proof two thirds majority of both houses of Congress that next fall.
And for the next three years from eighteen sixty six to eighteen seventy, Congress passes law after law over andrew Johnson's vetos. They actually grow so tired of his obstruction that they impeach him in eighteen sixty eight. He's the first ever president to claim that dishonor Johnson survives by
a single vote, but it hardly matters. He's a lame duck president, a leader without a party, and with Johnson out of the way, Congressional Republicans radically redesigned the United States of America.
This would be a tremendous moment. It is kind of a refounding of the republic because suddenly you get this momentum for the first federal civil rights laws that are pasted to this type, the constitutional amendments, especially the Fourteenth Amendment.
The Fourteenth Amendment.
Establishing the idea of universal citizenship to anyone born in the United States, regardless of race or any other status, with equality before the law for all citizens, the Fifteenth Amendment establishing voting rights for black men at least, and civil rights laws that spell out how all these new rules are going to work.
The founding principles of an interracial democracy in the United States. It's really an exciting moment in American history.
Black Southerners leap at the opportunity as well.
They rush to the polls to vote. Thousands of black men.
Hold public office, and they helped create some of the most progressive state governments in the history of this country. States like South Carolina, create the first public slace schools, expand legal rights for women, abolished debtors, prisons, and so much more.
They did engineer a remaking in the United States. And it's the only time for that brief moment from essentially eighteen sixty six to sixty eight sixty nine seventy, that that moment when the term radical had a sort of consensus traction.
It's hard to matter in the United States. Radical was then.
In power for three years. Yeah, by the way, the greatest legacy of the original Republican Party. Try this on as an irony. They believed above all in activist aggressive use of federal power. I mean, look at the ways they had just used federal power. That period is the laboratory where an American government, the idea of government was reinvented, for better or worse. You can hate it, you can love it, you can like parts of it. But that's the ear you got to you want to understand rights
in America, you've got to go to reconstruction. You want to understand the role of government and society. Got to go to reconstruction. You want to talk about what governments other people and what people o their governments, you've got to go to reconstruction. You want to talk about race in America, you've got to go to reconstruction, because it kind of all starts there in the modern sense, and we relive it now every day, all the time.
All the time. I would add that if you want to understand education in America, you've got to go to reconstruction as well, because that's when public education as we know it was established and much of it, but the people who'd just recently been enslaved
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