Impact Of Frederick Douglass On African Americans

In 1872, Frederick Douglass captured the essence of black Americans’ relationship to the party of Abraham Lincoln when he said, for blacks, “the Republican party is the ship, all else is the sea.” Douglass, the ex-slave, orator, and publisher, who worked tirelessly to abolish slavery, and then later, to secure suffrage for black Americans, was perhaps the most respected black man in America after the Civil War and was widely regarded as the leader of his race. Having counseled Lincoln during the war, Douglass supported Lincoln’s Republican party after the war, endorsing General Ulysses S. Grant for president in 1868. The importance of Douglass’s association with the Republicans grew after 1870, however, when ratification of the Fifteenth

Douglass implored blacks to remain faithful to Grant and the Republicans. “[W]hatsoever may be the faults of the Republican party,” he stated, “it has within it the only element of friendship for the colored man’s rights.” He continued, proclaiming he would rather “put a pistol to my head and blow my brains out, than to lend myself in any wise to the destruction or defeat of the Republican party.” As Douglass later noted in his autobiography, he saw “no path out of the Republican party” that did not lead blacks “away from our friends and directly to our

In that span, blacks paid their debt to Abraham Lincoln, their Great Emancipator, by loyally voting for his party in local, state, and national elections. During Reconstruction, Republicans rewarded that loyalty by pressing for civil rights legislation and other protections for black citizens. They secured passage of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments, as well as the Civil Rights Act of 1875, which sought to protect blacks’ access to public accommodations; and it was President Grant who successfully – although only temporarily – destroyed the Ku Klux Klan and its efforts to intimidate and disfranchise black voters. However, in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, Republican enthusiasm for black causes appeared to wane. Following a disputed election in 1876, the Republicans acquiesced to the Democrats’ demand for removal of Union troops from the South in exchange for the election of Rutherford Hayes. This “compromise” left southern blacks without federal protection and at the mercy of white “Redeemer” governments that quickly gained power. Moreover, a handful of congressional Republicans often joined with the Democrats to stifle legislative proposals seeking to provide aid to education or to enforce voting rights for blacks. Despite this, blacks remained loyal to the Republicans – if not out of enthusiasm for the party’s record on