Frederick Douglass in Brooklyn. Frederick Douglass

What will be done with the four or five millions of colored people in the United States? The Copperheads may sneer at the question as a nigger question, and seek to degrade it by miscalling and mispronouncing [the word Negro], but in doing so they only degrade themselves. [Cheers.] They talk about the Union as it was and about the Constitution as it is, and pretend to ignore the great question of the day. Nevertheless the Negro will come out; despite all the dust and smoke thrown in his face, the Negro looms up as the pivot upon which the life or death, the salvation and prosperity, or the rain of the republic depend. [Cheers.]

      The term, Negro, is at this hour the most pregnant word in the English language. The destiny of the nation has the Negro for its pivot, and turns upon the question as to what shall be done with him. Peace and war, union and disunion, salvation and ruin, glory and shame all crowd upon our thoughts the moment this vital word is pronounced.

      You and I have witnessed many attempts to put this Negro question out of the pale of popular thought and discussion, and have seen the utter vanity of all such attempts. It has baffled all the subtle contrivances of an ease-loving and selfish priesthood, and has constantly refused to be smothered under the soft cushions of a canting and heartless religion. It has mocked and defied the compromising cunning of so-called statesmen, who would have gladly postponed our present troubles beyond our allotted space of life and bequeath them as a legacy of sorrow to our children. But this wisdom of the crafty is confounded and their counsels brought to naught. A divine energy, omniscient and omnipotent, acting through the silent, solemn and all-pervading laws of the universe, irresistible, unalterable and eternal, has ever more forced this mighty question of the Negro upon the attention of the country and the world.

      What shall be done with the Negro? meets us not only in the street, in the church, in the senate, and in our state legislatures; but in our diplomatic correspondence with foreign nations, and even on the field of battle, where our brave sons and brothers are striking for liberty and country, or for honored graves.

      This question met us before the war; it meets us during the war, and will certainly meet us after the war, unless we shall have the wisdom, the courage, and the nobleness of soul to settle the status of the Negro, on the solid and immovable bases of eternal justice.

      I stand here tonight therefore, to advocate what I conceive to be such a solid basis, one that shall fix our peace upon a rock. Putting aside all the hay, wood and stubble of expediency, I shall advocate for the Negro, his most full and complete adoption into the great national family of America. I shall demand for him the most perfect civil and political equality, and that he shall enjoy all the rights, privileges and immunities enjoyed by any other members of the body politic. [Cheers.] I weigh my words and I mean all I say, when I contend as I do contend, that this is the only solid, and final solution of the problem before us. It is demanded not less by the terrible exigencies of the nation, than by the Negro himself for the Negro and the nation, are to rise or fall, be killed or cured, saved or lost together. Save the Negro and you save the nation, destroy the Negro and you destroy the nation, and to save both you must have but one great law of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity for all Americans without respect to color. [Cheers.]

      Already I am charged with treating this question, in the light of abstract ideas. I admit the charge, and would to heaven that this whole nation could now be brought to view it in the same calm, clear light. The failure so to view it is the one great national mistake. Our wise men and statesmen have insisted upon viewing the whole subject of the Negro upon what they are pleased to call practical and common sense principles, and behold the results of their so-called practical wisdom and common sense! Behold, how all to the mocker has gone.

      Under this so-called practical wisdom and statesmanship, we have had sixty years of compromising servility on the part of the North to the slave power of the South. We have dishonored our manhood and lied in our throats to defend the monstrous abomination. Yet this greedy slave power, with every day of his shameless truckling on our part became more and more exacting, unreasonable, arrogant and domineering, until it has plunged the country into a war such as the world never saw before, and I hope never will see again.

      Having now tried, with fearful results, the wisdom of reputed wise men, it is now quite time that the American people began to view this question in the light of other ideas than the cold and selfish ones which have hitherto enjoyed the reputation of being wise and practicable, but which are now proved to be entirely and absolutely impracticable.

      The progress of the nation downward has been rapid as all steps downward are apt to be.

      First. We found the Golden Rule impracticable.

      Second. We found the Declaration of Independence very broadly impracticable.

      Third. We found the Constitution of the United States, requiring that the majority shall rule, is impracticable.

      Fourth. We found that the union was impracticable.

      The golden rule did not hold the slave tight enough. The Constitution did not hold the slave tight enough. The Declaration of Independence did not hold the slave at all, and the union was a loose affair and altogether impracticable. Even the Democratic Party bowed and squatted lower than all other parties, became at last weak and impracticable, and the slaveholders broke it up as they would an abolition meeting. [Cheers.] Nevertheless: I am aware that there are such things as practicable and impracticable, and I will not ignore the objections, which may be raised against the policy which I would have the nation adopt and carry out toward my enslaved and oppressed fellow countrymen.

      There are at least four answers, other than mine, floating about in the public mind, to the question what shall be done with the Negro.

      First. It is said that the white race can, if they will, reduce the whole colored population to slavery, and at once make all the laws and institutions of the country harmonize with that state of facts and thus abolish at a blow, all distinctions and antagonisms. But this mode of settling the question, simple as it is, would not work well. It would create a class of tyrants in whose presence no man’s liberty, not even the white man’s liberty would be safe. The slaveholder would then be the only really free man of the country—all the rest would be either slaves, or be poor white trash, to be kept from between the wind and our slaveholding nobility. The non-slaveholder would be the patrol, the miserable watchdog of the slave plantation.[52]

      Second. The next and best defined solution of our difficulties about the Negro is colonization, which proposes to send the Negro back to Africa where his ancestors came from. This is a singularly pleasing dream. But as was found in the case of sending missionaries to the moon, it was much easier to show that they might be useful there, than to show how they could be got there. It would take a larger sum of money than we shall have to spare at the close of this war, to send five millions of American-born people, five thousand miles across the sea.

      It may be safely affirmed that we shall hardly be in a condition at the close of this war to afford the money for such costly transportation [cheers], even if we could consent to the folly of sending away the only efficient producers in the largest half of the American union.

      Third. It may be said as another mode of escaping the claims of absolute justice, [that] white people may emancipate the slaves in form yet retain them as slaves in fact just as General Banks is now said to be doing in Louisiana,[53] or then may free them from individual masters, only to make them slaves to the community. They can make of them a degraded caste. But this would be about the worst thing that could be done. It would make pestilence and pauperism, ignorance and crime, a part of American institutions. It would be dooming the colored race to a condition indescribably wretched and the dreadful contagion of their vices and crimes would fly like cholera and small pox through all classes. Woe, woe! to this land, when it strips five millions of its people of all motives for cultivating an upright character. Such would be the effect of abolishing slavery, without conferring equal rights. It would be to lacerate and depress the spirit of the Negro, and make him a scourge and a curse to the country. Do anything else with us, but plunge us not into this hopeless pit.

      Fourth. The white people of the country may trump up some cause of war against the colored people, and wage that terrible war of races which some men even now venture to predict, if