Reckoning with Race. Gene Dattel
into racial second-class citizenship dominated the second phase of his life. The fiery orator and writer died in 1895, thirty years after the end of the war. His oratory and writing skills had not diminished, but his effectiveness had waned. With the end of slavery, Douglass found his rhetoric helpless in the face of white America, not just the South. His penetrating eyes and determination leap from the photographs and paintings of the younger man; a resignation born of frustration and disappointment seem to characterize the older giant of black history.
Frederick Douglass was clear about treatment of the freedmen. He thought that ensuring suffrage, civil rights, general property rights, and the end of discrimination would be sufficient protection. Douglass never espoused land reform. He advocated self-reliance and hard work, which together would bring land ownership. He emphatically viewed the South as the freedmen’s home. He knew all too well the Northern fear of “vagrancy, and criminality from the freedmen.”
Like many revolutionaries, Douglass lost his radical force after the revolution. Nowhere is this more explicit than in his role in the Freedmen’s Bank, an entity created within the Freedmen’s Bureau to help encourage thrift among the emancipated slaves. On March 3, 1865, the Freedmen’s Bureau, or as it was formally named, the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen and Abandoned Lands, was chartered by the federal government to act as a guardian for the freedmen in matters of education and relief, and protection in earning a living. The goals were to further an orderly transition to a free society and reestablish cotton production. Thus it was essential to safeguard the freedmen “from abuse . . . foil the selfish designs of northern speculators, and . . . transform the South from a plantation economy to an economy of small, family-owned farms.” The Freedmen’s Bureau was expressly designed to be temporary; it ceased to exist in 1869 except for responsibilities in education and payments to blacks who were Union Army veterans. Even these duties ended within a few years. President Lincoln had not given “much attention to the Freedmen’s Bureau.” Its basic purpose for “white America,” according to the historian William McFeeley, was to prevent the kind of black violence that had occurred with the end of slavery in the Caribbean.
The newly appointed commissioner of the Freedmen’s Bureau upon its creation was General Oliver Otis Howard, a fervently religious thirty-five-year-old from Maine who had lost an arm in combat and had never been an abolitionist. Howard, the battle-tested veteran, told a black audience in New Orleans, “You must begin at the bottom of the ladder and climb up.” He wanted blacks to “return to plantation labor . . . and work their way out of the wage earning class” to become landowners. In this approach he was merely echoing fears that freed slaves would be idle. He did not consider a black person equal “and never advocated equality,” McFeeley writes, “except by law and justice.” During the war, Union soldiers under the command of Generals Sherman and Howard had showed “contempt” for freedmen in South Carolina. After his bureau experience, the pious general was next assigned the task of chasing the Nez Perce Indians away from their homeland in the Wallowa Valley in Oregon. Howard, the well-intentioned Sunday school teacher, took his black servant, Washington Kemp, to Maine to become a landowning farmer. Instead Kemp became a “subsistence farmer,” known for his minstrel appearances throughout the state. Nonetheless Oliver Otis Howard’s name lives on in Howard University, the premier historically black college in America.
The auxiliary of the Freedmen’s Bureau, the Freedmen’s Bank, was chartered in 1865 with a main office in Washington, thirty-five branches, and an asset base of $3 million. The bank was established to foster savings habits among the freedmen. The founder, John W. Alvord, a Congregationalist minister and abolitionist, had no banking experience. The institution became riddled with mismanagement, fraud, and poor loans, all overseen by its white directors.
Frederick Douglass was appointed president of the failing bank in March 1874, in the financial institution’s dying days. Douglass had no chance of rescuing the bank, but he enjoyed the prestige of being called the “president of the Freedmen’s Bank.” The towering figure yielded to symbolism rather than substance. The former slave, in awe of the physical structure, was fooled.
[The building was] one of the most costly and splendid buildings of the time, finished on the inside with black walnut and furnished with marble counters. . . . I often peeped into its spacious windows, and looked down the row of its gentlemanly and elegantly dressed colored clerks with . . . their buttonhole bouquets in their coat-fronts. . . . I was amazed with the facility with which they counted money. . . . The whole thing was beautiful.
An icon of American history, Douglass marveled at his rise from impoverished slave to “President of a bank counting its assets by the millions.”
But he had not the slightest notion of the bank’s business and condition, and rather than trying to learn, he spent his time promoting civil rights legislation. The perils of having a political activist manage a business were thus on display. What was actually transpiring in these luxurious accommodations? A black cashier, “Daddy” Wilson, was the “figurehead used by the white financial committee to endorse” fraudulent business activity. The depression of 1873 aided the bank’s demise. It folded in July 1874, a few months after Douglass had been named president. Thousands of freedmen lost their savings when the bank met an ignominious death in bankruptcy.
No movie about Reconstruction will feature the debacle of the Freedmen’s Bank, but the impact was psychologically severe. W. E. B. Du Bois in 1901 highlighted the significance of the failure. “Not even ten years of slavery could have done as much to throttle the thrift of the freedmen,” wrote Du Bois, “as the mismanagement and bankruptcy” of the Freedmen’s Bank. Others have cited the formation of black banks as evidence of Du Bois’s exaggeration. Du Bois may have been hyperbolic, but there is a major lesson to be learned. Of 134 black banks formed between 1888 and 1934, seventy failed in the Depression of the 1930s, and only four were in existence in 1996, according to Juliet E. K. Walker’s The History of Black Business in America. A thriving, self-sufficient black business community could not survive outside the economic mainstream. Separatism, whether voluntary or involuntary, will not bring material success to a broad group.
Douglass advocated black advancement through farming. Fundamental and prescient was his understanding of white Northern antipathy toward blacks. He predicted the growth of black urban ghettos occasioned by a black migration to the North. The result, he wrote, would leave blacks “crowded into lanes and alleys, cellars and garrets, poorly provided with the necessities of life.”
As for the South, Douglass believed that there the black person held a monopoly on the labor supply. “He is there, as he is nowhere else, an absolute necessity,” Douglass wrote. The economics of the cotton field were never far from Douglass’s thoughts. “Neither the Chinaman, German, Norwegian, Swede,” he observed, “can drive [the African American] from the sugar and cotton fields. . . . The climate of the South makes such labor uninviting and harshly repulsive to the white man.”
Although Douglass emphasized suffrage, he knew, as did Booker T. Washington, that economic power was vital for black progress. The freedman’s labor in the cotton field was worth more than “sword, ballot-boxes or bayonets. It touches the heart of the South through its pockets.” But because the freedman was a captive, with no option to move north, blacks had no bargaining power. Had the white North been receptive to black migration, blacks might have had economic leverage; white Southerners would have had no choice but to acquiesce to black civil and economic rights. Such was not the case.
Douglass was drawn into two episodes of the black separatist quandary. First, in a variation of the colonization scheme, he was appointed in 1871 to visit Santo Domingo to explore annexation. In a broad sense, President Grant was not at all sure what to do about the freedmen. He thought that annexation of Santo Domingo would provide a safe haven for blacks who wished to leave the country. In effect, Grant recognized the nation’s inability to assimilate blacks. The Santo Domingo plan might have forced white Southerners to be more accommodating because of a labor shortage, but Grant was admitting that America could not absorb four million freedmen. He wanted to “secure a retreat for the portion of the laboring class of our former slave states, who find themselves under unbelievable pressure.” He continued:
The present difficulty in bringing all parts of the United States