In honor of Black History Month, let’s read a letter to the editor of the Washington Star in 1877 written by Frederick Douglass.

He was responding to a controversy manufactured over his speech regarding a running question at the time of whether Washington, D.C. should remain the nation’s capital.

His letter is printed in full at the end of this post. Read it! Douglass was a brilliant writer.

What Was This Controversy?

In 1877 the US was continuing its rapid expansion through the West by launching wars on the Sioux, Nimiipuu, Apache, and other nations. The center of population of the country was moving away from the Atlantic coast, and a number of people argued that the US Capital should be moved from Washington, D.C. to a more central location. Railroad and steamboat travel was still haphazard and slow, and governing from Washington was inefficient.

Frederick Douglass gave a long speech in Baltimore addressing the issue. Long orations were a popular form of entertainment in the day, and Douglass was a star of the form. Douglass gave a long, balanced account of the positive and negative sides, detailing questionable parts of Washington’s history, but ultimately came down on the side of keeping Washington as the capital city. Nothing radical whatsoever.

However, cherry picked quotes from the speech describing only the criticism of Washington D.C. suddenly were widely circulated in the hostile press. Demands were made that Douglass be fired from his government position of US Marshal of the District of Columbia. Demands got so much publicity that Douglass felt it necessary to respond with his letter to the Washington Star.

What Was Really Going On?

Of course, people weren’t really upset about Washington, D.C.’s sullied honor. People constantly made fun of DC, then as now! Douglass noted that he had given the same speech in Washington itself in 1875 and nobody complained. Opponents simply wanted Douglass out. He was famous for having gone from an enslaved childhood, banned from the most basic education, to freeing himself and becoming a brilliant leader of the abolition and civil rights movement, writer and educator. And 1877 marked an ugly turning point against Reconstruction, and it was the start of a new wave of Jim Crow laws.

The 1876 election was highly contested, and it led to an ugly compromise in March 1877. Republican Rutherford Hayes was chosen as the winner, at the price of ending federal control over Southern states.

And now the opponents of Reconstruction wanted to take out African American leaders. Fair elections were quickly shut down across the South, with propaganda widely spread falsely accusing African American elected officials of being corrupt and stupid. Douglass was an appointed official and could not be voted out of office, and so leaders of the new wave of bigotry decided to attack him with smear campaigns like this. The paper thin quality of its evidence is an example of the stunning bad faith of anti-Reconstruction activists.

These types of attacks had followed Douglass since he first became famous. His opponents refused to concede that he could have written anything he said, and claimed that he was simply memorizing the words written for him by Whites in some sort of parlor trick. His legendary Autobiography was said to have been ghostwritten.

This letter is a great example of Douglass’s brilliance as a writer and thinker — he produced huge volumes of writing and this gives only a taste of what he could produce. And it’s a great explanation of how propagandists work, and a plea for people not to take an accusation of bad faith actors at face value without looking for the real context.

Read it!

To the Editor of the Washington Evening Star:

Sir: You were mistaken in representing me as being off on a lecturing tour, and, by implication, neglecting my duties as United States Marshal of the District of Columbia. My absence from Washington during two days was due to an invitation by the managers to be present on the occasion of the inauguration of the International Exhibition in Philadelphia.

After speaking of the power of the sentiment of patriotism I held this language: “In the spirit of this noble sentiment I would have the American people view the national capital. It is our national center. It belongs to us, and whether it is mean or majestic, whether arrayed in glory or covered with shame, we cannot but share its character and its destiny. In the remotest section of the Republic, in the most distant parts of the globe, amid the splendors of Europe or the wilds of Africa, we are still held and firmly bound to this common center. Under the shadow of Bunker Hill monument, in the peerless eloquence of his diction, I once heard the great Daniel Webster give welcome to all American citizens, assuring them that wherever else they might be strangers, they were all at home there. The same boundless welcome is given to all American citizens by Washington. Elsewhere we may belong to individual states, but here we belong to the whole United States. Elsewhere we may belong to a section, but here we belong to a whole country, and the whole country belongs to us. It is national territory, and the one place where no American is an intruder or a carpetbagger. The newcomer is not less at home than the old resident. Under its lofty domes and stately pillars, as under the broad blue sky, all races and colors of men stand upon a footing of common equality.

“The wealth and magnificence which elsewhere might oppress the humble citizen has an opposite effect here. They are felt to be a part of himself and serve to ennoble him in his own eyes. He is an owner of the marble grandeur which he beholds about him—as much so as any of the forty millions of this great nation. Once in his life every American who can should visit Washington—not as the Mohametan to Mecca, not as the Catholic to Rome, not as the Hebrew to Jerusalem, nor as the Chinaman to the Flowery Kingdom, but in the spirit of enlightened patriotism, knowing the value of free institutions and how to perpetuate and maintain them.

“Washington should be contemplated not merely as an assemblage of fine buildings, not merely as the chosen resort of the wealth and fashion of the country, not merely as the honored place where statesmen of the nation assemble to shape the policy and frame the laws, not merely as the point at which we are most visibly touched by the outside world, and where the diplomatic skill and talent of the old continent meet and match themselves against those of the new, but as the national flag itself—a glorious symbol of civil and religious liberty, leading the world in the race of social science, civilization, and renown.”

My lecture in Baltimore required more than an hour and a half for its delivery, and every intelligent reader will see the difficulty of doing justice to such a speech when it is abbreviated and compressed into a half or three-quarters of a column. Such abbreviation and condensation has been resorted to in this instance. A few stray sentences, culled out from their connections, would be deprived of much of their harshness if presented in the form and connection in which they were uttered, but I am taking up too much space, and will close with the last paragraph of the lecture, as delivered in Baltimore. “No city in the broad world has a higher or more beneficient mission. Among all the great capitals of the world it is preeminently the capital of free institutions. Its fall would be a blow to freedom and progress throughout the world. Let it stand where it does now stand—where the father of his country planted it, and where it has stood for more than half a century—no longer sandwiched between two slave states—no longer a contradiction to human progress—no longer the hotbed of slavery and the slave trade—no longer the home of the duelist, the gambler, and the assassin—no longer the frantic partisan of one section of the country against the other—no longer anchored to a dark and semibarbarous past, but a redeemed city, beautiful to the eye and attractive to the heart, a bond of perpetual union, an angel of peace on earth and good will to men, a common ground upon which Americans of all races and colors, all sections, North and South, may meet and shake hands, not over a chasm of blood, but over a free, united, and progressive republic.”