Today I visited the General Grant National Memorial, also known as “Grant’s Tomb.” It’s a grand mausoleum, where Grant and his wife are laid to rest. It’s located on the Upper West Side between Riverside Church and Riverside Park, at 122nd street. It’s operated by the National Park Service. Although it’s right on the bicycle route I took dozens of times over the years, today was only the second time I visited.
Coincidentally, my visit today corresponded with the 102nd birthday of the National Park Service, and in honor of the occasion there were bagpipers and an outdoor performance of Civil War tunes by Linda Russell. There’s a visitors center across the street and down the stairs, with exhibits, an excellent 20-minute film, a gift shop and restrooms. The park rangers are friendly and knowledgeable.
I was especially moved by my visit today, having recently completed a biography of Grant.
Here are some pictures from my visit — click to make them bigger:
It was what General Ulysses S. Grant did after the battle of The Wilderness that changed things. By May 1864, the Civil War had been going on for more than three years. The loss of life to this point had been more than anyone could have imagined. It was already apparent that the South was not going to be able to win the war, but the Confederates were trying to drag the war on longer, hoping to make the conflict so costly to the North that the voting public would tire of the war and throw Lincoln out of office, to be replaced by someone who would end the war. The stakes were enormous. More than just the preservation of the Union was at stake. Ending the war at this point would have re-enslaved the 3.5 million people who had been freed on January 1, 1863, by Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation.
President Grant, 1870 By Mathew Brady – Library of Congress, Public Domain
By this point Lincoln had already replaced his top generals numerous times. McClellan, Burnside, Hooker and Meade had all failed to prosecute the war with the urgency and vigor that Lincoln wanted. After Grant achieved key victories for the Union at Vicksburg and Chattanooga, Lincoln summoned him to the nation’s capital and named him Lieutenant General. Grant was the first since George Washington to hold the rank.
The Wilderness was Grant’s very first battle after being put in charge of all Union armies and his first faceoff with Confederate General Robert E. Lee. It did not turn out well for the Union. But unlike his predecessors who had all retreated north after suffering large casualties in battle, Grant decided to move his army farther south. There was to be no turning back this time. Grant was not one to make excuses, to blame others or to give up. Final victory was still a long way off, but Grant knew it was coming. It came the following spring, when Grant accepted Lee’s surrender at the home of Wilmer McClean, in the town of Appomattox Court House, Virginia.
After the war Grant stayed on as commander of the U.S. Army, serving under President Andrew Johnson. Grant served briefly as Secretary of War during Johnson’s dispute with Congress over the Tenure of Office Act. He was elected President in 1868 and then re-elected in 1872 by wide margins both times in both the popular and electoral votes. He never campaigned. In his first inaugural address, he called for the ratification of the 15th Amendment granting blacks the right to vote, and he spoke out for the rights of Native Americans. He stumbled early on with less-than-ideal cabinet appointments. Grant himself was not corrupt, but some of his cabinet secretaries became involved in various scandals, which got worse in his second term. One of Grant’s best picks was Hamilton Fish as Secretary of State, whom grant had plucked out of retirement. Fish had been governor of New York and a United States Senator and turned out to be an excellent Secretary of State. He served through both of Grant’s presidential terms.
During the late 1860s the Ku Klux Klan emerged. Grant recognized the KKK immediately for what it was — a domestic hate group intent on using terrorism to prevent blacks from exercising their rights as citizens to vote. Grant formed the Justice Department and directed it to fight the Klan. He went so far as to declare martial law and to use federal troops in parts of the South to enforce voting rights.
Here are some additional facts about Grant:
He married Julia Dent, and they had four children. Julia’s family owned slaves, but Grant’s family was anti-slavery and his parents boycotted the wedding.
He was born in Ohio. After marrying Julia he built a house near her family in Missouri, calling it “Hardscrabble.” They later moved to Galena, Illinois.
His given name was Hiram Ulysses Grant, but from birth he was called Ulysses. His mother got the name Ulysses from a French novel about the Greek general Ulysses. When Grant got to West Point with the initials H.U.G. on a trunk, he realized that was not going to work. There was too much teasing from the other cadets. The senator who had appointed Grant to West Point had used Ulysses Simpson Grant (Simpson was his mother’s maiden name) so he went with the initials U.S., which were interpreted as “United States” Grant, and, later, “Unconditional Surrender” Grant.
Like Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis, Zachary Taylor, Franklin Pierce and many others, Grant served in the Mexican American War. He was a quartermaster.
Several of the groomsmen in Grant’s wedding later fought against him as officers in the Confederate army.
Later in life, Grant became friends with Mark Twain.
As my cousin Lisa would be pleased to know, Grant loved horses! One of his favorites was named Cincinnati.
After Grant left office, he and Julia went on a grand overseas tour, traveling extensively throughout Europe, the Middle East and the Orient. Upon returning to the United States, he would have run for President again in 1880, but the Republicans nominated James A. Garfield instead. Grant eventually retired to New York City. He and one of his sons later invested with a Bernie Maddow-type swindler, and Grant lost all his money. He spent the final part of his life writing his memoirs, which, thanks to the help of Mark Twain, netted enough money for Julia to live on after his death. He died of throat cancer just days after finishing the manuscript. Today he and Julia rest in a massive mausoleum in New York City.
“American Ulysses: A Life of Ulysses S. Grant,” by Ronald C. White (pictured, the book I read) is one of two major biographies of Grant published recently. The other is by Ron Chernow. Both are what are often called rehabilitative, meaning the authors go back and re-examine a person’s reputation that has fallen over the years. Some historians have looked down upon Grant for a number of offenses, both real and imagined. Among them are that he was not as smart as Lee (Grant graduated 21st out of 39 in his class at West Point, while Lee graduated 2nd). Others have postulated that Grant was too indifferent to the large number of troops who were killed, and that he was a drunk. White argues forcibly against these accusations.
Having thoroughly enjoyed White’s previous biography of Lincoln, I decided to read his telling of Grant’s life story as well, and I was richly rewarded. “American Ulysses” was a page-turner, with many helpful maps, photographs and illustrations. He also presents Grant as a complete human being, describing his family life and even the books he read and the things he said to his friends and colleagues. And yes, I cried in the end!
In reading this book I got to know the general quite well. I can therefore say confidently that had a President Grant been in office when a group of white supremacists held a “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, last year, the response from the White House would have been quite different.
There were 11 articles of impeachment against Andrew Johnson, our nation’s 17th President, who went on trial in the Senate back in 1868. Articles 1 through 9 dealt with the Tenure of Office Act. Article 10 dealt with speeches Johnson had given in which he was accused of bringing disgrace upon Congress, and Article 11 was a “catch-all” that incorporated allegations from all the other articles.
Andrew Johnson was a Democrat who became president in April 1865, after President Abraham Lincoln, a Republican, was assassinated just one month into his second term and just five days after Lee’s surrender to Grant that effectively ended the Civil War. Andrew Johnson was not vice president during Lincoln’s first term. Hannibal Hamlin was. But leading up to the 1864 presidential election, the Republicans decided to dump Hamlin from the ticket in favor of Andrew Johnson, who was a Senator from Tennessee. Andrew Johnson had stood out from all the other Southern Democrats because he had stayed loyal to the Union during the war. The goal therefore was to have a “national unity” ticket. But Andrew Johnson did not bring unity to the country. Just the opposite. At the inauguration in March 1865, Lincoln delivered a beautiful address calling for our nation to heal. But Andrew Johnson appeared to be drunk. He was disrespectful, and he insulted cabinet members and embarrassed himself.
Andrew Johnson was also a racist to his core. He infuriated the Republican-dominated Congress by acting on his own rather than through the legislative process on Reconstruction. He wanted to welcome the rebel states back quickly, and he wanted to empower the former Confederates to continue their cruel oppression of those whom they had enslaved. He vetoed legislation passed by Congress, but most of his vetoes were overridden. Congress also passed, by overriding yet another veto, the Tenure of Office Act, which was the legal noose with which they intended to hang Andrew Johnson. The law stated that the president needed Senate approval to fire a cabinet secretary. Congress accused Andrew Johnson of violating the law when he tried to remove Edwin Stanton as secretary of war. Gotcha! It was a dumb law that was later repealed, but it formed the basis for what would become the impeachment of Andrew Johnson.
From the start, the trial itself turned into a bit of a circus. The Republicans were disorganized, and their legal case was ill conceived. The Democrats, meanwhile, used all manner of crazy tricks to delay and obstruct the proceedings. It got really ugly. They argued that Salmon P. Chase, Chief Justice of the United States, who presided over the trial, should not be allowed to make judicial rulings. And when witnesses were finally called, the Democrats objected to everything and the result was that after each question, the entire Senate had to vote up or down on whether or not a witness could answer. This made everything take forever. Opening and closing arguments also took forever. In the early days of the trial the galleries were packed with visitors. But the speeches were so long-winded that people quickly got bored.
The Senate voted on Article 11 first. After Johnson was acquitted by a single vote, the House managers, the prosecutors of the trial, called for adjournment to re-strategize. After a break that lasted 10 days, the Senate voted next on Articles 2 and then 3, with the same results. The House managers then abandoned their effort altogether. The Senate never voted on Article 1, or on Articles 4 through 10.
Later that year, Ulysses S. Grant was elected our nation’s 18th president.
“Impeached: The Trial of President Andrew Johnson and the Fight for Lincoln’s Legacy,” by David O. Stewart
All this is described in great detail in “Impeached: The Trial of President Andrew Johnson and the Fight for Lincoln’s Legacy,” a book by David O. Stewart. This is one of many books on the impeachment of Johnson. Other books cover the impeachment proceedings against Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton, and many other books cover the impeachment cases against all three. I really liked Stewart’s book on Johnson’s impeachment. I found it to be comprehensive, and even a bit suspenseful. The author shows that the trial was both a judicial proceeding and a political exercise. He also explains that impeachment is rooted in British law and had been included in the U.S. Constitution as a stopgap measure against tyrannical rule. (Note: At the time our founding fathers wrote the Constitution, there were no political parties!) I think the author of this book did a good job of placing the impeachment into the context of the times. Our country had never been so divided, and the whole matter was tragic. A quote from the book: “Andrew Johnson was an unfortunate president, an angry and obstinate hater at a time when the nation needed a healer. Those who opposed him were equally intemperate in word and deed. It was an intemperate time.”
Here are a few more notes on the impeachment of Andrew Johnson:
There was no Vice President at this time, so had Andrew Johnson been convicted in the Senate and removed from office, Benjamin Wade of Ohio, as President Pro Tem of the Senate, would have become president. In the time leading up to and during the trial, those seeking government jobs inundated Wade with requests.
The author makes a strong case that many of the Senators who voted to acquit had been bribed.
The two Senators from Michigan voted to convict.
Republicans from the House led by Thaddeus Stevens and Benjamin Butler acted as prosecutors. Stevens was an elderly, fire-breathing, anti-slavery “radical.”
This had been the third attempt to impeach Andrew Johnson. There was also a fourth attempt, which went nowhere.
Before Johnson, the only other president to face the possibility of impeachment had been John Tyler. It would not happen again until Nixon, who resigned before a House vote on impeachment. Clinton was also impeached but was acquitted in his Senate trial, which was presided over by Chief Justice William Rehnquist. Clinton faced two articles of impeachment, for lying to a grand jury and for obstruction of justice.
Impeachment might happen again. In my view, having read about the trial of Andrew Johnson and how that all unfolded, getting to two-thirds (67 votes) in the Senate to oust the current president seems far from likely.
If I’m going to cry while reading a presidential biography, that usually happens when I get to the end. This book, by Howard Means, brought tears to my eyes at the beginning. It opens with a vivid, minute-by-minute description of the events of April 14 and 15, 1865. The assassination of Abraham Lincoln by the vile racist John Wilkes Booth was part of a conspiracy, with Booth as the ringleader, in which Vice President Andrew Johnson, Secretary of State William H. Seward, and General Ulysses S. Grant were all to be killed on the same night.
Lee had surrendered to Grant at Appomattox just days earlier, on April 9, effectively ending the Civil War, but the conspirators had somehow hoped that decapitating the leadership of the U.S government would throw everything into chaos, thus enabling the South to reignite the war. It was a far-fetched idea, which did not work out as planned and had disastrous consequences for everyone.
The Lincolns had invited Grant and his wife to accompany them to Ford’s Theater that fateful night, and their attendance together had even been published in newspapers. But the Grants declined the invitation at the last minute and departed by train on a family trip to New Jersey. Booth was a well-known actor who was able to gain access to the theater. He also knew the exact moments during “Our American Cousin” when the audience would laugh, thus helping him sneak into the presidential box to fire the fatal bullet. Meanwhile George Atzerodt, the guy who was supposed to kill Johnson at his room at Kirkwood House, did not show up. He spent time that night on a barstool and either got drunk and forgot, or simply chickened out. The author speculates that had Atzerodt found the courage to attack the belligerent Johnson that night, the confrontation would not have ended well for the attempted assassin.
Lewis Powell, however, did in fact show up to kill Seward, who had recently been in a carriage accident and was recuperating at home in bed. Powell showed up at the house and told family members that he was delivering medicine. When Seward’s son Frederick refused to let him upstairs, Powell pistol whipped him and stormed into the Secretary of State’s room. His gun had jammed, so he pulled a knife and stabbed Seward, in a grisly attack with blood everywhere, before fleeing on horseback. By some miracle, Seward survived the assassination attempt.
All this takes place in the first (and best) chapter of “The Avenger Takes His Place: Andrew Johnson and the 45 Days That Changed the Nation.” The title is taken from a line in a poem by Herman Melville, written in that era, which evokes the feelings many had at the time. Despite the “malice toward none” and “charity for all” that Lincoln had promised in his second inaugural, many wanted to see the South punished after the war. These sentiments were very real, as the author of “The Avenger” describes, by citing personal letters written at the time, quotes from newspaper editorials — and even descriptions of what preachers were saying to congregants in their sermons in churches.
While this book was definitely insightful, especially in describing the mood of the country at the time of Lincoln’s assassination and its aftermath, I still feel I could learn more about the 17th president — especially his dealings with Congress and his impeachment trial in the Senate. This book by Means is the second one I have read about Andrew Johnson. The other was by Annette Gordon-Reed. Both Means and Gordon-Reed make frequent references to an earlier biography, by Hans L. Trefousse, a copy of which I recently found at The Strand bookstore here in NYC. But I subsequently moved on to Ronald C. White’s excellent biography of Grant (with yet another book review coming very soon), and I am now taking a detour by reading the biography of yet another famous general. So I will return to Andrew Johnson at another time.
This was just fantastic. Renee Fleming of opera fame is in it. Joshua Henry was spectacular as Billy. So was Lindsay Mendez as Carrie. My favorite was Amar Ramasar as Jigger. (He was oh-my-god hot!) This was really well done. Great singing, great dancing. My favorite number was Blow High Blow Low a Whaling We Will Go.
The reason I live in NYC is to experience evenings like this.
The effort to impeach him failed. More on that in a moment.
Andrew Johnson was a Democratic senator from Tennessee when the Southern states moved to secede in 1861. He delivered a fiery pro-Union speech on the floor of the Senate, speaking over the course of two days. His words were widely published in newspapers, and he became quite popular among the Unionists in the North. In the South he was villianized. Tennessee seceded with the other Southern states, but there were strong pockets of pro-Union resistance there, especially in the eastern part of the state. When the Union achieved battlefield victories in Tennessee, Lincoln appointed Andrew Johnson military governor.
By 1864, the Civil War was entering its fourth year. The death toll was continuing to rise and there was no end in sight. Many were growing tired of the conflict, and it was looking like Lincoln was going to be defeated for re-election by George B. McClellan, the general he had fired for delaying too much. It was under these circumstances that Hannibal Hamlin, Lincoln’s vice president during his first term, a fellow Republican from Maine, was dumped from the ticket and replaced by Andrew Johnson. The pro-Union southern Democrat. They ran on the “National Union Party.” Later that year, after General Ulysses S. Grant won important victories in Virginia and General William Tecumseh Sherman took Atlanta, the tide turned once and for all in the Union’s favor and Lincoln was easily re-elected, with Andrew Johnson as his new vice president.
In his second inaugural in March 1865, Lincoln was magnanimous, offering some of the most eloquent words ever spoken by an American. But moments earlier, the incoming vice president appeared to be drunk, and he gave an incoherent, rambling speech in which he embarrassed himself and mortified everyone present. To everyone’s shock and horror, Lincoln was assassinated a month later, and Andrew Johnson became the 17th president of the United States. Unfortunately for the 3 million newly freed people of color, Andrew Johnson was a racist. Even by 19th Century standards, he was a racist.
Lee had just surrendered to Grant, meaning it was time to figure out how to put the country back together again. Congress was ready to work with the new president, but Andrew Johnson wanted to do it his own way. He was stubborn and did not want to listen or collaborate. Earlier, Andrew Johnson had led everyone to believe that he was going to be harsh on the secessionists and punish them. But he ended up issuing broad amnesty and offering thousands of pardons. Meanwhile he offered nothing, literally nothing, for the formerly enslaved, who had literally nothing and were desperately in need of some assistance, an education, and most importantly some land to farm. Congress passed a Freedmen’s Bureau Bill and a Civil Rights Bill, which Andrew Johnson vetoed. His vetoes were then overridden by Congress. This became a pattern. Congress kept passing laws, Andrew Johnson kept vetoing, and Congress kept overriding.
It got really nasty between Congress and the president. So nasty that Andrew Johnson became the first American president to face an impeachment trial in the Senate. Congress had passed a law called the Tenure of Office Act, requiring the president to get Senate approval before firing any cabinet secretaries. Andrew Johnson challenged this law by firing Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, which set up a huge battle of wills and all sorts of drama. There were 11 articles of impeachment, nine of which had to do with the Tenure of Office Act.
In the end Andrew Johnson survived by a single vote. But it was 1868 already, and his presidency was almost over anyway.
Here are a few more facts about Andrew Johnson:
Born in a log cabin!
He came from poverty. He looked at the Civil War as a class struggle between rich industrialists in the north aligned with plantation owners in the South, versus the common working (white) man.
He married Eliza McCardle, and they had several children. Eliza was frequently sick and almost never appeared at White House events as “first lady.” One of Johnson’s daughters served as hostess.
They were married by Mordecai Lincoln, a cousin of Abraham Lincoln!
He was a tailor. He was sometimes referred to as a “mudsill,” a derogatory term used against him because he once had a shop with a dirt floor.
He entered politics as an alderman and then mayor of Greenville, Tennessee. He subsequently was elected to the Tennessee state legislature, then to the U.S. House of Representatives, where he served four terms. When he was redistricted out of office, he ran for governor of Tennessee and won. He was elected to the United States Senate in 1857. In those days Senators were chosen by state legislatures, not by direct popular vote. When Tennessee seceded in 1861, Andrew Johnson remained in the Senate.
After his presidency he ran for the United States Senate from Tennessee and lost. Then he ran for the House and lost. Then he ran again for the Senate and this time he won. Six months later he died.
One more note: During the Andrew Johnson presidency, Secretary of State William H. Seward (who had served in the office under Lincoln and stayed on) purchased Alaska from Russia. So in addition to botching Reconstruction we can also thank Andrew Johnson for Sarah Palin.
This biography, “Andrew Johnson,” by Annette Gordon-Reed, part of the American Presidents Series, was clear and concise but, for me, just a bit too short. The books in the American Presidents Series are generally quite good, but they are limited to 200 pages or less. For such a consequential president I subsequently decided to add another volume to my reading list. But that will be a book report for another day.
I thought this was a really good production. Better than I was expecting, and definitely better than the reviews led me to believe it was going to be. This is an old play, set in 1968. Judy Garland was still alive when this play takes place. This is pre-Stonewall, when you could get arrested for dancing with another man in a bar or wearing drag in public. Texting had not yet been invented! People used the telephone to call each other. And rotary dial phones, at that!
These guys gave excellent acting performances. I thought Jim Parsons (the guy who plays Sheldon in Big Bang Theory), was really good. He injured his foot and had been performing in a walking cast, but he did not have the cast on yesterday, that I could tell. The only one I was disappointed in was Zachary Quinto, as Harold, which was really surprising to me because he played a bitchy gay guy so well in American Horror Story. I just didn’t buy into his portrayal, although he delivers some of the play’s funniest and best-timed lines, to great effect. I must mention that it was especially fun for me to see Matt Bomer (Donald) strip down and take a shower. And the Cowboy was hot in his tight jeans and boots. I thought the sexiest one was Andrew Rannells, as Larry.
I’ve seen Boys on stage here in NYC twice before, plus the movie and even a “making of” documentary a few years back. It’s not the most uplifting work. In fact, when I had first seen the movie way back in the days before RuPaul and the TV show “Glee,” I found the characters rather sad and pathetic, behaving like self-loathing drama queens. They lash out at each other with bitchy put-downs, often referring to each other as “she.” Somehow, in this reworking, the creative team behind this production got it to work better. I didn’t walk out feeling so despondent. In fact, I was quite moved. This version has been shortened and revamped — turned into a one-act play. The cast this time is made up entirely of out gay actors. They made me laugh, and they made me cry. Judging by the reactions of the other audience members, I got the feeling that many were seeing “Boys in the Band” for the first time.
This is playing at the Booth Theater (named after the actor Edwin Booth, brother of John Wilkes!) After the performance Frank and I stood with a crowd of about 80 other fans in Shubert Alley to see the performers come out the stage door. We saw Tuc Watkins, Brian Hutchinson, Robin de Jesus and Matt Bomer emerge, and all were very courteous and gracious with the theatergoers, signing autographs and doing selfies with many. It amazes me how any actor can do this after every performance. Before the show, Frank saw Charlie Carver (who plays the cowboy) go in.
I don’t say this often about many Broadway shows, but if you get a chance to see this, definitely go!
Of all the atrocities of slavery — from being forced to work from sunup to sundown, six days a week, with no pay, for life; to being raped, beaten, branded, mutilated and tortured; and to being subjected to all manner of racial degradation and humiliation — none was more horrible than the forced separation from family members. This happened all the time. Young children were literally torn from the arms of their mothers, often never to be seen or heard from again. (Before he even learned to walk and talk, Frederick Bailey, who would later change his surname to Douglass, was taken from his mother to be raised by his grandmother. Later he was separated from his grandmother as well.) Every enslaved person lived in constant fear that a brother or sister, a parent or child, even a wife or husband, could be sold, at a moment’s notice, for any reason — or for no reason at all. Being sold south was the worst.
For many hundreds of years — from the moment settlers first came to the New World until the end of the Civil War — forced unpaid labor and human exploitation existed in this country. In “Generations of Captivity,” a comprehensive history of slavery in North America, author Ira Berlin describes the difference between free societies, societies with slaves, and slave societies — all of which existed at one time or another, and often simultaneously.
As the author explains, slavery often transformed itself, depending on what crops were being grown and where. In Virginia there was tobacco, and in South Carolina rice. Sugar was grown in the Caribbean, where conditions for the enslaved were most brutal and almost always resulted in death within a few short years. When planters in the tobacco-growing states realized their cash crop was too difficult to grow and that it depleted the soil too much, they gave up on it and switched over to grain crops, which were less labor intensive. But further south, a whole new generation of landowners started growing cotton, so vast numbers of enslaved people were forcibly migrated against their will to Mississippi, Louisiana and Texas. This great migration, similar to the Trail of Tears that the American Indians were subjected to, resulted in even more forced separation of family members.
Berlin writes that after the Civil War ended, most of the newly freed people immediately began searching for lost family members. Travel, word of mouth, even placing ads in newspapers were some of the methods used to help locate missing relatives. Sometimes those efforts were successful, many other times not. (In another book I read that Harriet Tubman, who had been separated from a sister before she escaped to the north and became a hero of the Underground Railroad, was never able to locate the sister even after slavery had been abolished.)
This book, “Generations of Captivity,” is one of many on the history of slavery. I learned so much from reading this, and I benefited from the helpful maps and tables included in it.
I just got back from the annual meeting of the Academy of General Dentistry, which was held this year in New Orleans. Dental Tribune published two editions of our at-show newspaper, “today,” at the event. One issue was done in advance, and the other on-site. I photographed many of the meeting’s participants, including a couple of DMDs from Pennsylvania, pictured above, and also on the cover of the live issue, shown here. If you click on the image of the “today” cover it will open up as a PDF via Dropbox.
My article from the meeting is posted to the Dental Tribune site here.
The meeting was held at the Hyatt Regency. We stayed in a trendy new hotel in the warehouse district, and I walked to the meeting each day through Lafayette Square, which is named for the Revolutionary War hero Lafayette but has a statue of Henry Clay in the center. (I got terribly confused by this.) Also in Lafayette Square there is a much less impressive statue of Benjamin Franklin. After the meeting I also walked around in the French Quarter and Jackson Square. It’s nice to tack on a bit of sightseeing on these work trips.
Statue of Henry Clay in Lafayette Square, New Orleans.Lafayette Square, in New Orleans, is named for the Revolutionary War hero from France.Jackson Square in the French Quarter of New Orleans. (Photo by Fred Michmershuizen)
Had Frederick Douglass lived long enough to see a black man elected president, he would have been elated. Then, when he saw that racists had concocted a hateful conspiracy theory about that first black president’s birth certificate, Douglass would have been saddened but hardly surprised.
Frederick Bailey was born into slavery, but he escaped to freedom in the North and reinvented himself as Frederick Douglass — an activist, author, orator and public figure. He wrote three autobiographies, was editor of four different newspapers, gave countless speeches, and was a prolific writer. He got to know eight presidents (two of whom were assassinated).
Douglass grew up on a plantation on the Chesapeake Bay in Maryland. From an early age, it was apparent that he was gifted with a brilliant intellect. He was owned by Thomas Auld, who sent him to live with his brother, Hugh Auld, in Baltimore. It was Hugh’s wife who taught a young Frederick to read. Baltimore at the time was what Ira Berlin, in his book “Generations of Captivity,” would have called a society with slaves (as opposed to a free society or a slave society), meaning that free and enslaved blacks, and whites, often lived and worked together and intermingled with one another. An owner could rent out his slave or even send him to work for wages, keeping all or most of the wages for himself. In Baltimore Douglass was sent to work in the shipyards as a caulker, but after numerous disputes he was sent back to the plantation. It was from there that he escaped, by train, with Anna, a free black woman, whom he married and had children with. He and Anna went to Massachusetts and eventually settled in Rochester, N.Y. Years later, their home was destroyed by arson and Douglass moved his family to Washington, D.C.
Almost immediately after escaping to freedom, Douglass began working with abolitionists, of whom there were various factions and different schools of thought. He forged lifelong friendships — and rivalries — with many, including Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Harriett Beecher Stowe, Ida Wells and many others. Unlike many in the movement, Douglass thought that slavery could and should be ended from within the framework of the U.S. Constitution.
During the Civil War, Douglass helped recruit black soldiers for the Union Army. After the war, Douglass witnessed not only the abolishment of slavery but also the granting of citizenship and the right to vote for blacks under the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments to the constitution, respectively. But true racial equality, sadly, was elusive. Douglass watched with alarm as blacks in the South were terrorized by lynchings, and he witnessed the establishment of widespread and systematic voter disenfranchisement of blacks in the South, which would persist long after his death, well into the 1960s.
He died at home on February 20, 1895, when he was in his late 70s. Earlier that day, he had delivered a speech on women’s rights after being led to the podium by Susan B. Anthony.
Here are some additional facts about this important figure in American history:
He was tall, handsome and strong. When he was a slave, he proved to an overseer in a high-stakes wrestling confrontation that he could not be overpowered physically.
He crossed the Atlantic many times but never got seasick.
He had light-colored skin and frizzy hair, which eventually turned white.
He was quick to take offense at the most trivial of slights, usually when someone acted in a condescending manner toward him or his family.
He had the ability to mimic others, a talent he used to great effect during speeches in which he would mock slave owners and others.
On many occasions during his speeches, racists in the back of the room heckled him. Sometimes they threw rocks or rotten eggs at him.
He frequently worked within the system. President Grant appointed him on a mission to Santo Domingo. President Hayes appointed him marshal for the District of Columbia, and President Benjamin Harrison appointed him ambassador to Haiti. He was also named president of a bank for freedmen, which failed.
After Anna died, Douglass got married again, to a white woman named Helen Pitts. Together, they traveled extensively throughout Europe, even venturing as far as Greece and Egypt.
After reading most recently about Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee — men who fought to maintain a slave society — I wanted to read about someone who fought for racial justice and equality. I found the biography “Frederick Douglass” by William S. McFeely to be immensely enlightening. I finished it on the plane back from New Orleans, and the final pages brought tears to my eyes. Reading this well-researched book, I felt I got to know the subject as a human being. The author does not hold back in pointing out his subject’s mistakes and weaknesses, of which there were many. Most importantly, however, McFeely describes the lifelong quest of Frederick Douglass — to establish and maintain full legal, political and social equality for all, regardless of skin color. It’s work that remains, to this day, unfinished.
