Frederick Douglass on the Disfranchisement of Blacks in the South | by Lucas More

In a short but poignant letter written in 1888, Frederick Douglass shares his concern about the suppression of black voting with Robert Adams (1816–1900), a white abolitionist whom he had known for over forty years. Adams and his wife, née Lydia Ann Stowe, lived in Fall River, Massachusetts, about fifteen miles from New Bedford, where Douglass had found refuge as an escaped slave. Fall River was the home of abolition societies and a way station of the Underground Railroad for fugitive slaves fleeing to Canada. It was also one of several port towns that thrived on textile mills, an industry that pitted profit against humanity, as these communities earned their living from the commerce in cotton. 

Douglass had previously expressed gratitude to Robert Adams in a March 1888 letter, sharing that upon arriving in Fall River in 1841, “I had not fully realized the possibility that a white man could recognize a colored man as a man and a brother but I saw such recognition in your face and have ever since, in sunshine and in storm, felt safe in your friendship.” 1 Other noteworthy black activists hosted by the Adamses included Sojourner Truth and Harriet Tubman. 

In his December 1888 letter, Douglass worries about the scare tactics being used by whites who fear that being outnumbered by blacks at the polls—or “negro supremacy”— would threaten their rights by the exercise of mere majority might. He called it a “humbug” or empty bluster, aimed at exploiting white insecurity in the face of black freedom. 2 Almost twenty years had passed since the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment, which supposedly guaranteed that the right to vote “shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” One can imagine Douglass’s frustration at having to defend black enfranchisement so many years after the Civil War and the abolition of slavery. Douglass liked to declare, “There was a right side in the late war!” Surely the victors would not treat their enemies better than the blacks who came to their aid upon emancipation!

 It was during the war, after Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, that Douglass first called for the vote. As he saw the end of the war approaching, he believed that the urgency to secure equal rights for the freedmen would soon wane as the memory of the war faded from view. He therefore called for the vote for blacks. Without it, Douglass predicted that blacks would not be able to defend their freedom, becoming in essence the slaves of the community after being the slaves of individuals. His fears came true. Early in Reconstruction, blacks in the South exercised the vote. But when former Confederates resumed control of state government, they employed legal tactics and social intimidation to rob black Americans of their constitutional rights. 

In calling out “the clamour raised for the disfranchisement of the colored voters of the South,” Douglass may have been referring to an essay published by Senator Wade 

Hampton in June 1888. Entitled “What Negro Supremacy Means,” it argued that South Carolina and other southern states had enough experience with blacks controlling state and local politics during Reconstruction to conclude that white submission to black rule would produce moral, social, and commercial ruin. It was a widespread sentiment among white southerners, most of whom despised what they called the “bayonet rule” of the federal government and viewed as the imposition of unqualified and corrupt black politicians during Reconstruction. Where blacks were a majority and the vote required no property or literacy qualification, “negro domination” was sure to prevail. 

Douglass found this ironic turn of events a repeat of the race card played in earlier times by those who decried emancipation for fear of a race war, with “negroes going to cut their masters throats,” especially in areas where enslaved blacks outnumbered free whites. The fact that whites had long outnumbered blacks throughout the American colonies and states was lost on southern whites. They somehow forgot that white Americans, for many a generation, had used their strength of numbers to enslave most blacks and deny free blacks the full rights and privileges of American citizenship. If the federal government proved unwilling or unable to enforce the Reconstruction Amendments, blacks in the South would remain subject to “the old master class,” which led Douglass in April 1888 to denounce the “so-called emancipation as a stupendous fraud.” 

A month before Douglass wrote his letter to Adams, former US senator Benjamin Harrison of Indiana was elected president. Harrison had called for “a pure ballot,” echoing the Republican Party platform as it endorsed “the supreme and sovereign right of every lawful citizen, rich or poor, native or foreign born, white or black, to cast one free ballot in public elections, and to have that ballot duly counted.” Douglass himself had lambasted southern Democrats for “outrages committed upon our political rights, by means of bull-dozing and Kukluxing, Mississippi plans, fraudulent counts, tissue ballots and the like devices.” 3 At the age of 70, he had campaigned for the Republican ticket in several states that fall, maintaining a hectic speaking schedule that lasted until the day he died on February 20, 1895. 

In 1889 President Harrison appointed Douglass minister to Haiti and Santo Domingo (the present-day Dominican Republic). An outspoken defender of voting rights and education for black Americans, Harrison proved unable to get Congress to pass laws securing civil rights for blacks. The collaboration of blacks and whites to promote the rights for all Americans, symbolized by this December 1888 letter of Frederick Douglass to Robert Adams, continued for more than seventy-five years before Congress passed the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965. 

Transcript of a letter from Frederick Douglass to Robert Adams, December 4, 1888 

Dec. 4 1888 

My dear Robert Adams. 

Thanks for the paper containing an account of the Fall [R]iver Aldermanic reunion. I was glad to observe the part you were able to take in that pleasant occasion. I was also glad to see that your Brother Charles was also there. 

I am a good deal disturbed just now by the clamour raised for the disfranchisement of the colored voters of the South. The cry about negro supremacy is like the old cry you and I so often heard in the old time about the negroes going to cut their masters throats. Its all humbug– There is nothing in it. Kind regards to Mrs Adams and yourself in which Mrs Douglas[s] joins me. Yours very truly Fredk. Douglass 

1. Frederick Douglass to Robert Adams, March 23, 1888, Rare Books, Boston Public Library.
2. Frederick Douglass to Robert Adams, December 4, 1888, The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, GLC04997.
3. Frederick Douglass, “Parties Were Made for Men, Not Men for Parties,” in The Frederick Douglass Papers Series One: Speeches, Debates, and Interviews, ed. John W. Blassingame and John R. McKivigan, vol. 5: 1881–1895 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 107.