Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1892)/Chapter 46
CHAPTER V.
PRESIDENT CLEVELAND'S ADMINISTRATION.
THE last year of my service in the comfortable office of Recorder of Deeds for the District of Columbia, to which aspirants have never been few in number or wanting in zeal, was under the early part of the remarkable administration of President Grover Cleveland. It was thought by some of my friends, and especially by my Afro-American critics, that I ought instantly to have resigned this office upon the incoming of the new administration. I do not know how much the desirableness of the office influenced my opinion in an opposite direction, for the human heart is very deceitful, but I took a different view in this respect from my colored critics. The office of Recorder, like that of the Register of Wills, is a purely local office, though held at the pleasure of the President, and it is in no sense a federal or political office. The Federal Government provides no salary for it. It is supported solely by fees paid for work actually done by its employees for the citizens of the District of Columbia. While these citizens, outside the eager applicants for the place, made no complaint of my continuance in the office, I saw no reason to retire from it. Then, too, President Cleveland did not appear to be in haste or to desire my resignation half as much as some of my Afro-American brethren desired me to make room for them. Besides, he owed his election to a peculiar combination of circumstances favorable to my remaining where I was. He had been supported by Republican votes as well as by Democratic votes. He had been the candidate of civil-service reformers, the fundamental idea of whom is that there should be no removal from an office the duties of which have been fully and faithfully performed by the incumbent. Being elected by the votes of civil-service reformers, there was an implied political obligation imposed upon Mr. Cleveland to respect the idea represented by the votes of these reformers. During the first part of his administration, the time in which I held office under him, the disposition on the part of the President to fulfil that obligation was quite manifest, and the feeling at the time was that we were entering upon a new era of American politics, in which there would be no removals from office on the ground of party politics. It seemed that for better or for worse we had reversed the practice of both parties in our political history, and that the old formula, "To the victor belong the spoils," was no longer to be the approved rule in politics. Then again I saw that there was less reason for resigning because of the election of a President of a different party from my own, when the political status of the people of the District of Columbia was considered. These people are outside of the United States. They occupy neutral ground and have no political existence. They have neither voice nor vote in all the practical politics of the United States. They are hardly to be called citizens of the United States. Practically they are aliens; not citizens, but subjects. The District of Columbia is the one spot where there is no government for the people, of the people, and by the people. Its citizens submit to rulers whom they have had no choice in selecting. They obey laws which they had no voice in making. They have a plenty of taxation, but no representation. In the great questions of politics in the country they can march with neither army, but are relegated to the position of neuters.
I have nothing to say in favor of this anomalous condition of the people of the District of Columbia, and hardly think that it ought to be or will be much longer endured; but while it exists it does not appear that the election of a President of the United States should make it the duty of a purely local officer, holding an office supported, not by the United States, but by the disfranchised people of the District of Columbia, to resign such office. For these reasons I rested securely in the Recorder's office until the President, whether intentionally or not, had excited the admiration of the civil-service reformers by whom he was elected, after which he vigorously endeavored to conform his policy to the opposing ideas of the Democratic party. Having received all possible applause from the reformers, and thus made it difficult for them to contradict their approval and return to the Republican party, he went to work in earnest at the removal from office of all those whom he regarded as offensive partisans, myself among the number. Seldom has a political device worked better. In face of all the facts, the civil-service reformers adhered to their President. He had not done all they had hoped for, but he had done what they insisted was the best that he could do under the circumstances.
In parting with President Grover Cleveland, it is due to state that, personally, I have no cause of complaint against him. On the contrary, there is much for which I have reason to commend him. I found him a robust, manly man, one having the courage to act upon his convictions, and to bear with equanimity the reproaches of those who differed from him. When President Cleveland came to Washington, I was under a considerable cloud not altogether free from angry lightning. False friends of both colors were loading me with reproaches. No man, perhaps, had ever more offended popular prejudice than I had then lately done. I had married a wife. People who had remained silent over the unlawful relations of the white slave masters with their colored slave women loudly condemned me for marrying a wife a few shades lighter than myself. They would have had no objection to my marrying a person much darker in complexion than myself, but to marry one much lighter, and of the complexion of my father rather than of that of my mother, was, in the popular eye, a shocking offense, and one for which I was to be ostracized by white and black alike. Mr. Cleveland found me covered with these unjust, inconsistent, and foolish reproaches, and instead of joining in with them or acting in accordance with them, or in anywise giving them countenance as a cowardly and political trickster might and probably would have done, he, in the face of all vulgar criticism, paid me all the social consideration due to the office of Recorder of Deeds of the District of Columbia. He never failed, while I held office under him, to invite myself and wife to his grand receptions, and we never failed to attend them. Surrounded by distinguished men and women from all parts of the country and by diplomatic representatives from all parts of the world, and under the gaze of the late slaveholders, there was nothing in the bearing of Mr. and Mrs. Cleveland toward Mrs. Douglass and myself less cordial and courteous than that extended to the other ladies and gentlemen present. This manly defiance, by a Democratic President, of a malignant and time-honored prejudice, won my respect for the courage of Mr. Cleveland. We were in politics separated from each other by a space ocean wide. I had done all that I could to defeat his election and to elect Mr. James G. Blaine, but this made no apparent difference with Mr. Cleveland. He found me in office when he came into the Presidency, and he was too noble to refuse me the recognition and hospitalities that my official position gave me the right to claim. Though this conduct drew upon him fierce and bitter reproaches from members of his own party in the South, he never faltered or flinched, and continued to invite Mrs. Douglass and myself to his receptions during all the time that I was in office under his administration, and often wrote the invitations with his own hand. Among my friends in Europe, a fact like this will excite no comment. There, color does not decide the civil and social position of a man. Here, a white scoundrel, because he is white, is preferred to an honest and educated black man. A white man of the baser sort can ride in first-class carriages on railroads, attend the theaters and enter the hotels and restaurants of our cities, and be accommodated, while a man with the least drop of African blood in his veins would be refused and insulted. Nowhere in the world are the worth and dignity of manhood more exalted in speech and press than they are here, and nowhere is manhood pure and simple more despised than here. We affect contempt for the castes and aristocracies of the old world and laugh at their assumptions, but at home foster pretensions far less rational and much more ridiculous.
I have spoken freely of the sensible and manly course of Mr. Cleveland, and shall perhaps, for this reason, be thought and described as having a leaning towards the Democratic party. No greater mistake could be made. No such inference should be drawn from anything that I have said. I am a Republican and am likely to remain a Republican, but I was never such a partisan that I could not commend a noble action performed by any man of whatever party or sect.
During the administration of Chester A. Arthur, as also during that of Rutherford B. Hayes, the spirit of slavery and rebellion increased in power and advanced towards ascendency. At the same time, the spirit which had abolished slavery and saved the Union steadily and proportionately declined, and with it the strength and unity of the Republican party also declined. The dawn of this deplorable action became visible when the Republican Speaker of the House of Representatives defeated the bill to protect colored citizens of the South from rapine and murder. Under President Hayes it took organic, chronic form, and rapidly grew in bulk and force. This well-meaning President turned his back upon the loyal state governments of the South, gave the powerful Post-Office Department into the hands of a Southern Democrat, filled the Southern States with rebel postmasters, went South, praised the honesty and bravery of the rebels, preached pacification, and persuaded himself and others to believe that this conciliation policy would arrest the hand of violence, put a stop to outrage and murder, and restore peace and prosperity to the rebel States. The results of this policy were no less ruinous and damning because of the good intention of President Hayes. Its effect upon the Republican spirit of the country was like the withering blast of the sirocco upon all vegetation within its reach. The sentiment that gave us a reconstructed Union on a basis of liberty for all people was blasted as a flower is blasted by a killing frost. The whole four years of this administration were, to the loyal colored citizen, full of darkness and dismal terror. The only gleam of hope afforded him was that the empty form, at least, of the Republican party was still in power, and that it would yet regain something of the strength and vitality that characterized it in the days of Grant, Sumner, and Conkling and the period of reconstruction. How vain was this hope I need not here stop to describe. Fate was against us. The death of Mr. Garfield placed in the Presidential chair Chester A. Arthur, who did nothing to correct the errors of President Hayes, or to arrest the decline and fall of the Republican party, but, on the contrary, by his self-indulgence, indifference and neglect of opportunity, allowed the country to drift (like an oarless boat in the rapids) towards the howling chasm of the slaveholding Democracy.
It was not "Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion" that defeated Mr. James G. Blaine, but it was Mr. Blaine who defeated himself. The foundation of his defeat was laid by his own hand in the defeat of the bill to protect the lives and political rights of Southern Republicans. Up to that hour the Republican party was courageous, confident and strong, and able to elect any candidate it might deem it wise to put in nomination for the Presidency; but from that hour it was smitten with moral decay; its courage quailed, its confidence vanished, and it has since hardly lived at all, but has been suspended, and has, comparatively, only lingered between life and death. The lesson taught by its example and its warning is, that political parties, like individual men, are only strong while they are consistent and honest, and that treachery and deception are only the sand on which political fools vainly endeavor to build. When the Republican party ceased to care for and protect its Southern allies, and sought the smiles of the Southern negro murderers, it shocked, disgusted, and drove away its best friends. The scepter of power could no longer be held by it, and it opened the way for the defeat of Mr. Blaine and the election of Mr. Cleveland.
Clinging in hope to the Republican party, thinking it would cease its backsliding and resume its old character as the party of progress, justice and freedom, I regretted its defeat and shared in some measure the painful apprehension and distress felt by my people at the South from the return to power of the old Democratic and slavery party. To many of them it seemed that they were left naked to their enemies; in fact, lost; that Mr. Cleveland's election meant the revival of the slave power, and that they would now be again reduced to slavery and the lash. The misery brought to the South by this widespread alarm can hardly be described or measured. The wail of despair from the late bondsmen was for a time deep, bitter and heartrending. Illiterate and unable to learn to read or to learn of any limit to the power of the party now in the ascendant, their fears were unmitigated and intolerable, and their outcry of alarm was like the cry of dismay uttered by an army when its champion has fallen and no one appears to take his place. It was well for the poor people in this condition that Mr. Cleveland himself kindly sent word South to allay their fears and to remove their agony. In this trepidation of the unlettered negro something is apparent aside from his ignorance. If he knew nothing of letters, he knew something of events and of the history of parties to them. He knew that the Republican party was the party hated by the old master class, and that the Democratic party was the party beloved of the old master class.