Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1892)/Chapter 44
CHAPTER III.
DOUBTS AS TO GARFIELD'S COURSE.
WHETHER President Garfield would have confirmed or disappointed my hopes had his life been spared by the assassin's bullet can, of course, never be known. His promise to break the record of former Presidents was plain, emphatic and hearty. Considering the strength of popular prejudice against the negro, the proposition to send a colored man to an admitted post of honor in a white nation was a bold one. While there was much in the history and generous nature of Mr. Garfield to justify hope, I must say that there was also something in his temperament and character to cause doubt and fear that his resolution in the end might be sicklied over with the pale cast of thought. Mr. Garfield, though a good man, was not my man for the Presidency. For that place I wanted a man of sterner stuff. I was for General Grant, and for him with all the embarrassment and burden of a "third term" attaching to his candidacy. I held that even defeat with Grant was better than success with a temporizer. I knew both men personally and valued the qualities of both. In the Senate Mr. Garfield was in his place. He was able in debate, amiable in disposition, and lovable in character, and when surrounded by the right influences would be sure to go right; but he did not, to my mind, have in his moral make-up sufficient "backbone" to fit him for the chief magistracy of the nation at such a time as was then upon the country. In this place, a clear head, quick decision and firm purpose are required. The conditions demanded stalwart qualities and he was not a stalwart. The country had not quite survived the effects and influence of its great war for existence. The serpent had been wounded but not killed. Under the disguise of meekly accepting the results and decisions of the war, the rebels had come back to Congress more with the pride of conquerors than with the repentant humility of defeated traitors. Their heads were high in the air. It was not they but the loyal men who were at fault. Under the fair-seeming name of local self-government, they were shooting to death just as many of the newly made citizens of the South as was necessary to put the individual States of the Union entirely into their power. The object which through violence and bloodshed they had accomplished in the several States, they were already aiming to accomplish in the United States by address and political strategy. They had captured the individual States and meant now to capture the United States. The moral difference between those who fought for the Union and liberty, and those who had fought for slavery and the dismemberment of the Union, was fast fading away. The language of a sickly conciliation, inherited from the administration of President Hayes, was abroad. Insolency born of slave mastery had begun to exhibit itself in the House and Senate of the nation. The recent amendments of the Constitution, adopted to secure the results of the war for the Union, were beginning to be despised and scouted, and the ship of state seemed fast returning to her ancient moorings. It was therefore no blind partiality that led me to prefer General Grant to General Garfield. The one might arrest the reaction and stay the hand of violence and bloodshed at the South; the other held out little promise of such a result. I had once seen the mettle of Mr. Garfield tried when it seemed to me he did not exhibit the pure gold of moral courage; when, in fact, he quailed under the fierce glance of Randolph Tucker, a returned slave-holding rebel. I can never forget the scene. Mr. Garfield had used the phrase "perjured traitors" as descriptive of those who had been educated by the Government and sworn to support and defend the Constitution and yet had betaken themselves to the battlefield and fought to destroy it. Mr. Tucker had resented these terms as thus applied, and the only defense Mr. Garfield made to this brazen insolence of Mr. Tucker was that he did not make the dictionary. This was perhaps the soft answer that turneth away wrath, but it is not the answer with which to rebuke effrontery, haughtiness and presumption. It is not the answer that Charles Sumner or Benjamin F. Wade or Owen Lovejoy would have given. Neither of these brave men would in such a case have sheltered himself behind the dictionary. In nature exuberant, readily responsive in sympathy, shrinking from conflict with his immediate surroundings, abounding in love of approbation, Mr. Garfield himself admitted that he had made promises that he could not fulfill. His amiable disposition to make himself agreeable to those with whom he came in contact made him weak and led him to create false hopes in those who approached him for favors. This was shown in a case to which I was a party. Prior to his inauguration he solemnly promised Senator Roscoe Conkling that he would appoint me United States Marshal for the District of Columbia. He not only promised, but did so with emphasis. He slapped the table with his hand when he made the promise. When I apologized to Mr. Conkling for the failure of Mr. Garfield to fulfill his promise, that gentleman silenced me by repeating with increasing emphasis, "But he told me he would appoint you United States Marshal of the District of Columbia." To all I could say in defense of Mr. Garfield, Mr. Conkling repeated this promise with increasing solemnity till it seemed to reproach me not less than Mr. Garfield; he for failing to keep his word and I for defending him. It need not be said to those who knew the character and composition of Senator Conkling that it was impossible for him to tolerate or excuse a broken promise. No man more than he considered a man's word his bond. The difference between the two men is the difference between one guided by principle and one controlled by sentiment.
Although Mr. Garfield had given me this cause to doubt his word, I still had faith in his promised new departure. I believed in it all the more because Mr. Blaine, then Secretary of State and known to have great influence with the President, was with him in this new measure. Mr. Blaine went so far as to ask me to give him the names of several colored men who could fill such places with credit to the Government and to themselves. All this was ended by the accursed bullet of the assassin. I therefore not only shared the general sorrow of the woe-smitten nation, but lamented the loss of a great benefactor. Nothing could be more sad and pathetic than the death of this lovable man. It was his lot while in full health standing at the gateway of a great office armed with power and supplied with opportunity, with high and pure purposes in life and with heart and mind cheerfully surveying the broad field of duty outstretched before him, to be suddenly and without warning cut down in an instant, in the midst of his years and in the fulness of his honors. There was no true man in the land who did not share the pain of the illustrious sufferer while he lingered in life, or who could refuse a tear when the final hour came when his life and suffering ended.