Life and Times of Frederick Douglass

Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 1881

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Part 3, Chapters 5-7Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 3: “Third Part”

Part 3, Chapter 5 Summary: “President Cleveland’s Administration”

Douglass finds President Grover Cleveland to be a “robust, manly man” with “the courage to act upon his convictions”—exactly the sort of person Douglass admires (453). Cleveland is a Democrat and Douglass a Republican, so the admiration is purely personal yet well founded. Following the death of his first wife, Anna Murray, in 1882, Douglass two years later married a white woman, Helen Pitts. This “shocking offense” leaves Douglass “ostracized by white and black alike” (453), though not by President Cleveland, who, at age 49, made an unconventional marriage of his own by wedding 21-year-old Frances Folsom.

Cleveland won the presidency in 1884 thanks largely to the rot and drift inside the Republican Party. For nearly eight years of Republican administrations under Rutherford B. Hayes and Chester A. Arthur, “the spirit of slavery and rebellion increased in power and advanced toward ascendancy” (454), interrupted only by the brief and hopeful interlude of James Garfield’s evanescent moment. President Cleveland himself represented neither slavery nor rebellion, but his Democratic Party most certainly did, and the Freedmen knew it.

Part 3, Chapter 6 Summary: “The Supreme Court Decision”

In 1883, the Supreme Court struck down the Civil Rights Act of 1875, in effect prohibiting the federal government from enforcing the equal-rights protections guaranteed by the 14th Amendment. It was the latest, and would not be the last, in a series of shameful opinions handed down by the high court during the second half of the 19th century:

Whatever this Supreme Court may have been in the past, or may by the Constitution have been intended to be, it has, since the days of the Dred Scott decision, been wholly under the influence of the slave power, and its decisions have been dictated by that power rather than by what seemed to be sound and established rules of legal interpretation (457).

The bulk of this chapter consists of a speech Douglass gave at Lincoln Hall in Washington, DC, before an audience of distraught citizens, Black and white:

The cause which has brought us here to-night is neither common nor trivial. Few events in our national history have surpassed it in magnitude, importance and significance. It has swept over the land like a cyclone, leaving moral desolation in its track. This decision belongs with a class of judicial and legislative wrongs by which we have been oppressed (459).

Part 3, Chapter 7 Summary: “Defeat of James G. Blaine”

This brief chapter, three paragraphs in length, argues that Republicans lost the presidency in 1884 because they turned their backs on Black people in hopes of attracting a share of the Southern white vote: “The life of the Republican party lay in its devotion to justice, liberty, and humanity,” and no permanent good ever follows when “a party abandons its righteous principles to win favor of the opposing party” (470-71).

Part 3, Chapters 5-7 Analysis

Having established the hopes first raised and then dashed by the Garfield interlude, and having lamented the waning of Republican courage under the administrations of Hayes and Arthur, Douglass in these three chapters identifies two consequences of Republican drift, one unexpected and the other catastrophic.

The loss of the presidency in 1884 came as an unexpected yet well-earned rebuke to a Republican Party that lacked a Lincoln, a Grant, or even a Garfield to keep it grounded in its identity as the party of freedom. Grover Cleveland was no lackey of the slave power, but he was a Democrat, and former slaves knew that the Democrats were the party of the master class.

To the Black people of the United States, in particular the Freedmen of the South, Cleveland’s election to the presidency paled in significance next to the catastrophic 1883 Supreme Court decision that struck down the 1875 Civil Rights Act. With former slaveholders wresting control of Southern state and local governments, and with the federal government abandoning its commitment to both the letter and the spirit of the Constitution’s Reconstruction Era amendments, the Freedmen once again stood friendless and vulnerable.