City of Hope and Fear:

Douglass and Melville in the Nation’s Capital

CHRISTOPHER STEN
The George Washington University

A
mong several points of convergence in the lives of Frederick Douglass
and Herman Melville, an especially notable one centers on the nation’s
capital and the Federal Government. Both men were well-known
authors and public figures who traveled to Washington several times before
and during the Civil War; and in 1872, Douglass moved to the Federal City
with his family for what proved to be the rest of his life. Both men had political
ties in Washington and sought to use them to gain political appointments
or influence on matters of personal interest or public policy: Melville four
times between 1846 and 1864, and Douglass even more often as a frequent
consultant, lobbyist, and spokesman on matters affecting African Americans
for more than three decades. Both met or corresponded with Charles Sumner,
the powerful abolitionist Senator from Massachusetts, and sought his support
or assistance: Melville on personal matters and Douglass on matters of public
interest. Both met Lincoln in the White House and formed first-hand impres-
sions of the president: Melville on a single occasion during an open house,
and Douglass several times as an invited guest or petitioner. And both men
conversed with Ulysses S. Grant, in Melville’s case when Grant was in charge
of the Army of the Potomac, and in Douglass’s when Grant was President.
Clearly, they both moved in rarified political circles, or were capable of such,
when the need arose.
Despite the advantages of class and his family’s political connections,
Melville never succeeded as an office-seeker, and in fact made only fitful
attempts in that direction. He was a writer and thinker, not an orator-politician
like his brother, and took only indirect interest in promoting larger social
causes (or himself). He did, however, make imaginative use of his brief
sojourns to the city, in several late chapters of Mardi (1849) and—following
a final visit in 1864 to witness the war first-hand—a handful of Civil War
poems from Battle-Pieces; or Aspects of the War (1866). By contrast and as few
in the nation’s history have ever done, Douglass succeeded in a wide variety
of political roles, as a journalist, spokesman on race, political activist, and

C 2008 The Authors

Journal compilation

C 2008 The Melville Society and Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

LEVIATHAN A J O U R N A L O F M E L V I L L E S T U D I E S 23
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office-holder during his thirty-year career. From the beginning, he had a

cause—first, the abolition of slavery, then equality before the law for black men
and women—that kept him constantly challenging the Federal Government to
change the laws that were destroying his people’s hopes and keeping them in
servitude and poverty.
Early in their lives, Melville and Douglass held dramatically different
views of the city and its role as the seat of national government, views that
tended to stay with them for much of the rest of their lives. Douglass, while
still a young slave learning to read, encountered a speech by then-Congressman
John Quincy Adams that contained the mysterious word, “abolitionist,” a word
that changed his life.1 From that time on, he regarded Washington as the
city of hope, a place where issues of slavery, racial equality, and suffrage
could be “made right”—legislated or mandated by executive order—a view
that sustained him through much of his adult life, though it often led to deep
frustration. On the other hand, as an unsuccessful office-seeker, Melville was
inclined to take a more distant view of the Federal City and be more skeptical.
In his Mardi chapters, he portrayed Washington in satiric, surreal terms as
a city caught up in its own self-importance; later, in Battle-Pieces, he viewed
it in somber tones as a juggernaut of power that boded ill for the future of
the country. Between them, Melville and Douglass defined the poles of hope
and fear, faith and doubt, and sometimes both at once—faith in an activist
government founded on principles of equal rights and equal protection before
the law, and doubt about the growing power of the State and about the courage
and wisdom of those who govern.
Melville’s first engagement with Washington was, in fact, conducted
at a distance through correspondence, shortly before Typee (1846), his first
book, came out, when his older brother Gansevoort, who had been serving
as Secretary of the American Legation at London, suddenly died there, in
May 1846, after a brief illness. The considerable expenses for his illness,
funeral, and the transport of his body back to America were to be borne by
Melville’s mother and siblings, then all “in exceedingly embarrassed circum-
stances.” Louis McLane, minister to the Court of St. James’s, had previously
written to Gansevoort’s superior, Secretary of State James Buchanan, seeking
authorization to pay for these expenses, one way or another, and Herman, who
had learned of his brother’s death several weeks after it had occurred, followed
up with urgent letters to Secretary Buchanan, President James K. Polk, and

1 Of Adams’s discussion of the term “abolitionist,” Douglass explained in My Bondage and My

Freedom, “There was HOPE in those words,” as qtd. in John Stauffer, The Black Hearts of Men:
Radical Abolitionists and the Transformation of Race (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002),
28-29.

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William Learned Marcy, a one-time New York politician whose appointment,

by Polk, as Secretary of War had been notably promoted by Gansevoort
and other prominent young Democrats.2 Herman, now a new and notable
author, was using whatever connections he had to secure compensation for
his brother’s service.
Through Gansevoort, who had been lionized before his death as one
of the most gifted and electrifying political orators of his generation, and
Melville’s future father-in-law, Justice Lemuel Shaw, Melville was socially
and politically well-connected in New York and Massachusetts, and in fact
possessed a prominent family pedigree as well, with Revolutionary War heroes
on both sides of his family. As a consequence, it made sense for the young
author to trade on his political connections, making two trips to Washington
in search of political appointment. In 1847, a year after his brother’s death,
he turned to the Federal Government for employment, as he was preparing to
marry Elizabeth Shaw. The second trip occurred on the eve of the Civil War
when he was himself physically and emotionally exhausted, in bad health, and
in need of a radical change. Both times he came away empty handed.
In the first instance, while pursuing a government appointment, Melville
had heard that several new jobs had been created “in the Treasury Department
at Washington” under the New Loan Bill. With help from his Uncle Peter
Gansevoort, then a judge in Albany County and well-connected with the
Democratic group that ruled the “Albany Regency” in New York State, he
collected “several strong letters from various prominent persons” in New York
City, addressed “to influential characters in Washington.” When he arrived in
the Federal City, he and his brother Allan called on New York Senator John A.
Dix, only to learn there were fewer appointments than the newspaper reports
had suggested.3 Melville had traveled 250 miles only to discover he carried
“dead letters” in his pocket, not unlike the letters his memorable character,
Bartleby, the Wall Street scrivener, was rumored to have handled and put to
the flames at his previous job in the Post Office in Washington.
Nonetheless, Melville made modest literary “capital” from his first trip
by using a pair of his Washington experiences in early fictional works. His
visit to the twenty-ninth Congress found its way into Chapters 158-160 of
Mardi, and his attendance at a ball at the Russian Ministry, where he met
the famous Commodore Thomas ap Catesby Jones, surfaced in Chapter 69 of

2 Melville’s letters to Buchanan and Marcy survive but not the one to President Polk, though a
portion of it is quoted in the letter to Buchanan. See Correspondence, ed. Lynn Horth (Evanston
and Chicago: Northwestern University Press and The Newberry Library, 1993), 41-44.
3Hershel Parker, Herman Melville: A Biography, 1819-1851, 2 vols. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1996), 1: 484-85.

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White-Jacket (1850). Jones, Melville’s captain on the U. S. frigate United States,

had not so much as acknowledged his existence when Melville, despite his
family’s illustrious pedigree, was a lowly sailor, but when the two met at this
social event in Washington, Melville claimed his former captain treated him
like an equal and was “exceedingly chatty,” or so the sailor White Jacket tells
us.4 In the case of Mardi, though the narrator shows a high regard for Vivenza
(the United States), referring to it as “the foremost and goodliest stripling
[nation] of the present,” Melville had a satirist’s disdain of Congress at the
time and saw the capital city as overrun with pretentious, tobacco-spitting
politicians, “lunatic” orators, and sly pick-pockets. When Taji, the central
hero, and his entourage make a visit to the “great central Temple,” they see a
group of posturing Congressmen who “would have looked very imposing, were
it not, that in rear their vesture was sadly disordered. Others, with swelling
fronts, seemed chiefly indebted to their dinners for their dignity,” while still
others were simply sleeping on the job. However, Melville’s sharpest satire
was reserved for one Senator Alanno—William Allen of Ohio, at the time a
leader of the Northern Democrats and a supporter of westward expansion and
the Mexican War, that feisty figure known for the phrase “Fifty-four forty or
fight!” whom Melville portrays as breaking out, periodically, in uncontrollably
“violent paroxysms.”5
Melville had another connection to Washington through White-Jacket,
an indirect or even impersonal one, but one that bore some relation to Freder-
ick Douglass and other black men and women who had experienced the lash
under slavery. Melville’s narrative, which took a strong stand against a wide
range of abuses of power in the American Navy, zeroed in on the practice of
flogging in particular, likening it to the practice of whipping slaves on the plan-
tations of the South: “You see a human being, stripped like a slave, scourged
worse than a hound. And for what? For things not essentially criminal, but
only made so by arbitrary laws” (NN WJ 138). Published when the issue was
being seriously debated in Congress, the book probably came out too late to
have an impact on the legislation of 1850 which finally abolished the practice
on American fighting ships. Still, Melville made it clear he was trying to change
Washington lawmakers’ thinking about the issue, on both moral and practical
grounds, while emphasizing that the one practice was as reprehensible as the

4Herman Melville, White-Jacket, or The World in a Man-of-War, ed. Harrison Hayford, Hershel
Parker, and G. Thomas Tanselle (Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University Press and The
Newberry Library, 1970), 290; hereafter cited as NN WJ.
5 Herman Melville, Mardi and a Voyage Thither, ed. Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker, and G.
Thomas Tanselle (Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University Press and The Newberry
Library, 1970), 516-17; hereafter cited as NN Mardi.

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other.6 Douglass himself had suggested a deeper connection between the two
practices the previous year, in a January 26, 1849, editorial, “Flogging in the
Navy,” for The North Star, when he argued that flogging was “but an off-shoot
of the system of slavery” (as qtd. in Wallace 85).
A decade or so later, in 1861, his public career waning, Melville was
back in Washington looking for employment again, this time as a foreign
consul in Florence, or Glasgow, or the Sandwich Islands. Although he had
attended two “levees” at the White House, where he stood in line and shook
the President’s hand—Lincoln, he said, worked “hard at it like a man sawing
wood at so much per cord”— and had the substantial support of Charles
Sumner, the staunch anti-slavery Senator from Massachusetts and friend of
Frederick Douglass, Melville could not otherwise get his foot in the door in
Washington. Having confessed in a letter to his wife that “as yet I have been
able to accomplish nothing in the matter of the consulship—have not in fact
been able as yet so much as even to see anyone on the subject,” he went
on to reveal how he had been spending his time, sunning himself on a park
bench across from the White House, and then joked grimly, “I am boarding
in a plain home—plain fare, plain people—in fact all plain but the road to
Florence.”7 Shortly thereafter, Melville received word that his father-in-law,
Lemuel Shaw, the Massachusetts Supreme Court Justice who made the decisive
ruling supporting the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, was deathly ill, and Melville
immediately headed for home after writing Sumner that he had been called
away, with no plan to return. Ironically, Melville did finally land a job with the
Federal Government a few years later, in late 1866. It was hardly a prestigious
foreign-service appointment such as he had sought earlier, but a modest if
reasonably well-paying one, in his home of New York City. There he became
a district inspector in the customs office of the ports of lower Manhattan, a

6 See Howard P. Vincent, The Tailoring of Melville’s White-Jacket (Evanston: Northwestern

University Press, 1970), 4; see also Myra Glenn, “The Naval Reform Campaign Against Flogging: A
Case Study of Changing Attitudes Toward Corporal Punishment, 1830-1850,” American Quarterly
35.4 (Autumn 1983): 408-25. Leaders in the anti-slavery movement saw the connection as well:
For example, the National Era, published in Washington and edited by John Greenleaf Whittier,
asserted in a 25 April 1850 review of White-Jacket that “the book should be placed in the hands
of every member of Congress,” as qtd. in Robert K. Wallace, Douglass and Melville: Anchored
Together in Neighborly Style (New Bedford: Spinner Publications, 2005), 85. For full text, see
Herman Melville: The Contemporary Reviews, ed. Brian Higgins and Hershel Parker (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 1995), 342-43. The first to recommend White-Jacket to Congress was
the nation’s principal anti-flogging activist, Watson J. Haynes; see Collamer M. Abbott, “White-
Jacket and the Campaign against Flogging in the Navy,” Melville Society Extracts 89 (June 1992),
24-25.
7Jay Leyda, The Melville Log: A Documentary Life of Herman Melville, 1819-1891, 2 vols. (New
York: Harcourt, Brace, 1951), 1: 637.

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patronage job he held for almost 20 years, until he retired in 1885.8 Melville
presumably derived a fair amount of literary capital from his 1861 trip to the
Federal City, using several of the scenes and landscapes he observed there in
his collection of Civil War poems. But it is hard to be sure because he also made
a third visit, this one in April of 1864, in the last months of the war, when he
came down to Washington from New York with his brother Allan to see the
fighting on the front lines first hand. For once the letters of his supporters—
again Senator Sumner (who vouched for Melville as “a loyal citizen & my
friend”) and Secretary of War Edwin Stanton—helped to accomplish his hope,
and he was issued a pass to “visit the Army of the Potomac” in the area
known as the Wilderness, near Culpeper, Virginia, less than a day’s ride from
Washington (Parker 2.562-63). Traveling out into the Virginia countryside
with a small scouting party, said to be within a very distant view of the Capitol
Dome, he met with young Colonel Charles Russell Lowell (James’s nephew)
and his young wife, Josephine, who had accompanied him—a surprisingly
common domestic arrangement in this period and in this war. Josephine was
the sister of Robert Gould Shaw, the late leader of the famous African American
54th Regiment from Massachusetts, for which Frederick Douglass served as
recruiter and whose sons, Lewis and Charles, were among the first to join.
In July of 1863, the Regiment had been much in the news, having performed
heroically despite heavy losses in the assault on Fort Wagner in South Carolina,
proving, in Douglass’s words, the black man’s “ability to meet the foe in the
open field” and his worthiness to be treated as the equal of white soldiers.9
Melville accompanied Charles Lowell and others in an unsuccessful overnight
effort to capture the elusive rebel John Mosby, an event reported in Melville’s
poem, “The Scout toward Aldie.” He apparently had a face-to-face talk with
Ulysses S. Grant, commander of the Northern Army, headquartered near the
Army of the Potomac, not far from Culpeper Station; the meeting is suggested
in “Chattanooga (November 1863)” and its brief appended note, and later
confirmed in his wife Elizabeth’s informal memoir. Melville’s uncle Thomas
Melvill lived in Galena, Illinois, Grant’s hometown, and Grant was an avid
reader, so, as Parker speculates, the poet and the general would have had a
good deal to talk about, if in fact they ever got beyond the subject of the war
and Grant’s experience defending the national capital (Parker 2.572-73).

8 See Stanton Garner, “Herman Melville and the Customs Service,” in Melville’s Evermoving Dawn:
Centennial Essays, ed. John Bryant and Robert Milder (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press,
1997), 276-93.
9 Frederick Douglass, Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1893); rpt. in Douglass: Autobiographies
(New York: The Library of America, 1996), 781; hereafter cited as Autobiographies.

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While Melville wrote several poems for Battle-Pieces that drew from the
experience of his 1864 trip to Washington, three in particular—“The Conflict
of Convictions,” “The Scout toward Aldie,” and “Lee in the Capitol”—rely on
the imagery of the city, the symbolic center of the War between the States. All
three poems feature the Capitol building’s new “iron dome,” which was finally
completed in 1863 in the midst of the War and at Lincoln’s urging when the
statue of Freedom was placed on its top. For Melville and others, who saw
the country change during and after the conflict into a new “power state,”
as Robert Penn Warren has said, the iron dome—which replaced a wooden
one—ironically became a symbol of this important turning point in the nation’s
history.10 The Union had been preserved by the Civil War, as Lincoln had
deeply wanted, but it had been preserved at a price; the sleeping giant had
been awakened. In “The Conflict of Convictions,” the most apprehensive of
these poems, Melville warned of the emergence of a new power structure that
in the years to come would diminish the freedoms laid down by the founding
fathers—a fear that Douglass would later see realized in the post-War era:

Power unanointed may come—

Dominion (unsought by the free)
And the Iron Dome,
Stronger for stress and strain,
Fling her huge shadow athwart the main;
But the Founders’ dream shall flee.11

In the spring of 1864, when Melville was struggling to keep up with

Colonel Lowell in the search for John Mosby in the Virginia countryside,
Frederick Douglass was working for Lincoln’s re-election. He had been coming
to Washington periodically, since the outbreak of the war, first to assist former
slaves who had fled to the city seeking refuge and relief, and then to try
to persuade Lincoln to make emancipation the principal goal of the War.
Though continuing his work as a journalist and spokesman for his race, he
was fast establishing himself as the first African American lobbyist of note
in the country’s history. In May of 1862, Douglass had written in Douglass’
Monthly urging Lincoln to “Let the slaves and free colored people be called
into service and formed into a liberating army, to march into the South and
raise the banner of Emancipation among the slaves.” For a time, it looked as
though this advice had fallen on deaf ears, and Douglass began to complain

10Herman Melville,Selected Poems of Herman Melville, ed. Robert Penn Warren (New York:
Random House, 1967), 353-54 (see note).
11“The Conflict of Convictions” (1860-61), The Poems of Herman Melville, ed. Douglas Robillard
(Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 2000), 56; hereafter cited as Poems.

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about “the slow coach at Washington.”12 Lincoln, who was struggling to keep
the border states in the Union and mollify his fellow Republicans, was initially
reluctant to alter the status of black people—unless it were to colonize them
in Africa. But within months of taking office, he was showing signs of new
thinking, first forbidding Union soldiers from returning fugitive slaves to their
owners, then signing a bill outlawing slavery in the Federal City, and finally
issuing a proclamation declaring that all slaves in any rebel state would be free
at the start of 1863 (Bontemps 226-27). For once, Douglass was ecstatic with
developments in Washington and immediately embarked on a speaking tour
intended for black audiences in celebration of this milestone event. By contrast,
Melville had little to say about emancipation; his only poem on the subject of
slavery or emancipation in all of Battle-Pieces is a brief, sympathetic portrait,
“Formerly a Slave” (based on a sketch by Elihu Vedder), wherein he imagines
the “reverie” of an older freed slave woman who looks into the future with the
confidence that “Her children’s children . . . shall know / The good withheld
from her . . . ” (Poems 129).
Following emancipation, Lincoln had also signed a bill making it pos-
sible for free blacks to enter into military service, but the States initially
resisted. The one exception was Massachusetts, where Governor John An-
drew petitioned to raise two regiments of black soldiers (Bontemps 228-30).
Douglass, who had been appealing in his Monthly to “Men of Color” to enlist
in the Union cause,13 was at last asked by the head of the North’s recruitment
effort, George Luther Stearns (an abolitionist and one of the backers of John
Brown), to help recruit black volunteers. Recruiting was hard, in part because
of the widespread antagonism toward blacks, as evidenced in the draft riots
in New York (the ugly, atavistic atmosphere of which Melville captured in
his poem, “The House-top,” in Battle-Pieces) and elsewhere in the summer
of 1863. But the greatest obstacle was the fear that black soldiers would be
killed as insurrectionary slaves if taken prisoner by the Confederate Army.
Once this became official policy in the Rebel Army, Douglass was quick to
call for strong countermeasures, and on August 1, 1863, he wrote a letter to
Stearns expressing his “discouragement” at “the attitude of the government
at Washington” for its failure to protect black fighting men and otherwise
put them “upon an equal footing” with other soldiers (Autobiographies 782).
He soon learned that Lincoln had signed an order stipulating that “for every
soldier of the United States killed in violation of the laws of war a rebel soldier
12Arna Bontemps, Free at Last: The Life of Frederick Douglass (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1971),
224-25.
13 See “Men of Color, to Arms!” which appeared in Douglass’ Monthly in March 1863; reprinted in
Autobiographies 778-80.

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shall be executed,”14 but he couldn’t help feeling frustrated at the government’s

foot-dragging on these matters. Unlike Melville, who lamented the drift toward
consolidating more and more federal power in Washington, Douglass felt the
Federal Government wasn’t powerful enough, or that it was too often reluctant
to exercise the power at its disposal. As he wrote later in Life and Times, “What
ought to have been done at the beginning comes late, but it comes. . . . It really
seems that nothing of justice, liberty, or humanity can come to us except
through tears and blood” (Autobiographies 784).
Later that summer in 1863, Douglass—at the suggestion of Stearns—
made a “flying visit” (as qtd. in McFeely 228) to Washington from Philadel-
phia, to meet with the President and Secretary of War Stanton (who would
sign Melville’s military pass the following year, permitting him to venture out
into the battle territory in Virginia). It was Douglass’s task to urge Lincoln and
Stanton to do everything possible to improve conditions for black soldiers, and
in this way improve the prospects for black recruits. Initially reluctant to meet
with “the most exalted person” in the Republic (Autobiographies785), Douglass
later reported that his meeting with Lincoln was not only cordial but friendly
and energizing for the black leader. (It was also probably the first time a black
man had entered the front door of the White House.) Douglass came away
convinced that, though he moved cautiously, Lincoln was a true friend of his
race, and would not back down once he had decided on a course favorable to
black people. One year later, in August 1864, Douglass was back in the Lincoln
White House, this time summoned by the president himself, to help devise a
plan to save freed black men and women from being trapped in the South once
the war was over.15

14 As qtd. in William S. McFeely, Frederick Douglass (New York: Norton, 1991), 227-28. For full
text, see Douglass’s open letter to George Luther Stearns, Douglass’ Monthly, August 1, 1863), in
Philip S. Foner, ed., The Life and Writings of Frederick Douglass, 4 vols. (New York: International
Publishers, 1950).
15 Douglass noted with “the deepest interest and profoundest satisfaction” that the President was
no longer determined to save the Union at any price, and “showed a deeper moral conviction
against slavery than I had ever seen before in anything spoken or written by him.” For him, the
evidence of this was Lincoln’s proposal for an aggressive effort behind the lines of the Confederacy
to inform slaves of Emancipation and urge them to head north for freedom. Douglass was to
organize “a band of scouts, composed of colored men,” whose job it would be to go into the rebel
states and “carry the news of Emancipation, and urge the slaves to come within our boundaries”
(Life and Times, in Autobiographies 796-97). In the end, nothing came of the plan. However,
confirmation of Lincoln’s continuing regard for Douglass came on the occasion of his second
inauguration, when Douglass tried to attend a White House reception to offer his congratulations
to the president. Initially prevented from entering because of his race, Douglass stood his ground
and, with the help of an acquaintance, got word to the president about his plight, at which point
he was ushered into the White House where Lincoln greeted him warmly. It was the last time the
two were to meet.

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Following the War, Douglass’s engagements with the Federal Govern-

ment increased. In 1866, in the early days of Reconstruction, at the Convention
of Colored Men meeting in Washington to protest the restrictive Black Codes
in the South, he was appointed to a delegation charged with taking his people’s
collective grievances to then President Andrew Johnson. Douglass, who with
his fellow delegates called for a national voting rights act that would give blacks
the franchise in every state, took the position that just as Lincoln had called on
blacks to join in the war to save the Union, so now they should be given the
vote “with which to save ourselves” (McFeely 246-47). Little of course came
of this except growing alienation between President Johnson and the country’s
black population. Johnson opposed enfranchising former (male) slaves on the
grounds that it would exasperate a longstanding hostility between them and
poor whites, and generally favored the idea of returning black people to Africa,
a notion Douglass vehemently opposed, on the grounds that blacks had helped
to build and defend the nation; it was their home.
Not long after, Douglass was a member of another delegation that came
to Washington to defeat a measure in the Senate that would give individual
states the option to limit the enfranchisement of former slaves, to the point
where they would count as only three-fifths of their total number. Douglass
and his colleagues lobbied hard among Republican members of the Senate
to kill the measure. Thanks to the leadership of President Grant and the
Republican Party, their collective fight resulted in the Fifteenth Amendment to
the Constitution, by which black men were invested with “the right to vote and
to be voted for in the American Republic” (Autobiographies 834). Douglass was
excited about the work of these delegations, and in this period began to set his
mind on playing a larger role in the reconstruction of the country. As one who
had long championed full citizenship for African Americans, he was convinced
what they most needed was the vote. He also came to feel he was someone
who could exemplify the soundness of the plan to enfranchise his people; he
would be a model black citizen. This goal pointed Douglass toward the national
stage of the capital, but he was initially reluctant to move there permanently
because of the hostility of whites toward blacks in the South, and Washington
at the time was still decidedly a Southern city. Only later, in 1870, after his
Rochester home burned, was he finally persuaded to move to Washington
(without family, initially) to help with the publication of The New National Era,
an enterprise which he hoped would “cheer and strengthen” black Americans
“in the work of their own improvement and elevation.” After moving into a
house near the Capitol building, however, Douglass soon came to see his move
as personally a “mistake,” since the cooperation and financial support he had
been promised for the newspaper barely materialized (Autobiographies 836).

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The election of the radical Republican Ulysses S. Grant to the presidency

in 1868 brought high hopes for black Americans and their leaders, many of
whom wanted appointments in the new administration. From early in the War,
Douglass had been an admirer and staunch supporter of Grant, not simply for
his “brilliant military successes” but for his “superiority to popular prejudice
[as evidenced] by his prompt cooperation with President Lincoln in his policy
of employing colored troops and by his order commanding his soldiers to
treat such troops with due respect” (Autobiographies 795). Douglass, who at
this point was the most prominent black person in America, was disappointed
when Grant failed to choose him for the job he desired most, as minister to
Haiti. But his faith in the man was at least partially restored, or so it seemed,
when Grant appointed him secretary to a special commission charged with
looking into annexing the Dominican Republic, and the island of Hispaniola it
shared with Haiti, with the hope of establishing a refuge for black Americans
seeking to escape the South’s oppression. (President Grant subsequently also
appointed Douglass as a member of the legislative council for the government
of the District of Columbia, a position from which Douglass soon resigned
because of the press of other duties.) Surprisingly, Douglass supported the
annexation, since, as he said, “Santo Domingo wanted to come under our
government” and needed the “peace, stability, prosperity, and civilization” the
U. S. had to offer, though Senator Sumner, his “loved, honored, and precious
personal friend” and supporter, vehemently opposed it (Autobiographies 845).
Several months later, however, Douglass had a new cause for disappointment,
when Grant snubbed him by refusing to invite him to the White House, along
with the other members of the commission, for a special dinner meeting on the
subject (McFeely 276-77). Race politics continued to rule, even for a President
much admired for his independence and strong moral character. Even so,
hoping that Grant might appoint him to a more desirable position, Douglass
swallowed his pride and publicly claimed not to be offended.
When Rutherford B. Hayes assumed office, after one of the closest
contests in history, Douglass—having campaigned for still another Republican
President—once again had reason to expect good things, for black people
generally and for himself. He had received personal assurances from Hayes,
in a conversation the two had in Columbus, Ohio, in 1878, that the right
of suffrage for all blacks throughout the South would be protected under his
administration, despite the Compromise of 1877.16 In fact, as it soon became
clear, the Government’s commitment, under Hayes, to securing and preserving
16See “The President’s Southern Policy: An Interview Given in Washington, DC, on 13 November
1878,” in The Frederick Douglass Papers, 5 vols., ed. John W. Blassingame and John R. McKivigan
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), 4.493-96.

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the rights of black people was virtually at an end. Douglass seems to have
been misled by Hayes’s false promises, but he had every reason to feel the
president had treated him with favor and respect when he selected him to be
U. S. Marshal for the District of Columbia—”the first appointment requiring
Senate approval to be given to a black man.” This was an especially attractive
job for Douglass because it offered the chance to make secondary federal
appointments from among the nation’s freedmen; to promote the employment
of black civil servants; and to build up the city’s black middle class. However,
Douglass failed to see that his own appointment was part of a clever plan of
the new president’s “to conceal the cessation of truly significant federal action
in behalf of black people.” Before long, as betrayals of black hope mounted,
including the abandonment of the rights of black Southerners and Hayes’s
withdrawal of federal troops from Louisiana and South Carolina, he came to
see that Reconstruction was over (McFeely 289-90, 299).
Douglass, of course, had his opponents, as well as his supporters, from
the time he was first mentioned as U. S. Marshal for the District of Columbia.
Efforts to derail his confirmation proved unsuccessful, but there was a mem-
orable incident involving a public lecture he gave in Baltimore that led to a
concerted effort to remove him from office. Nothing came of the incident fi-
nally, but it deserves mention because the subject of the offending performance
was a speech, “Our National Capital,” in which Douglass admitted “calling
attention to some of [the city’s] ridiculous features.” Speaking diplomatically,
Douglass began his portrait by noting “many complimentary things . . . giving
[the city] all credit for its good points.”17 Washington, he acknowledged,
was “the honored place where the statesmen of the nation assemble to shape
the policy and frame the laws”; it was also “a glorious symbol of civil and
religious liberty, leading the world in the race of social science, civilization,
and renown.” But because of its history and location, Washington, “compared
with other parts of the country, has been, and still is, a most disgraceful and
scandalous contradiction to the march of civilization.” And then he let loose:
Sandwiched between two of the oldest slave states, each of which
was a nursery and a hot-bed of slavery; surrounded by a people
accustomed to look upon the youthful members of a colored man’s
17 Douglass’s address, which was delivered on May 8, 1877, at Baltimore’s Douglass Institute,
is reprinted in full in Blassingame and McKivigan, 4.443-74. In a head note, Blassingame and
McKivigan point out that Douglass presented the same lecture in Washington a year or so earlier,
but it did not provoke the same outcry as the Baltimore event, since in the latter case Douglass
had just been confirmed as U. S. Marshal for D. C. and the public hostility to his appointment was
still lingering. It was mostly Washington newspapers, including the Evening Star and the National
Republican, and the New York press that joined in the call for Douglass to be removed from his
new office.

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family as a part of the annual crop for the market; . . . the inhabitants of
the national capital were, from first to last, frantically and fanatically
sectional. It was southern in all its sympathies, and national only in
name. . . . Slavery was its idol, and like all idol worshippers, its people
howled with rage, when this ugly idol was called in question.

Like most slaveholding communities, Washington was tolerant of

drinking, gambling, sensuality, indolence, and many other forms of
vice, common to an idle and lounging people. It was the home of the
bully and the duelist.
Unlike Melville’s satire of Washington in a few brief chapters of Mardi, Dou-
glass’s attack goes on relentlessly for several energy-filled pages.
Douglass’s insult had repercussions. With the election of Garfield in
1881, Douglass was removed from his position as U. S. Marshal and offered
the politically more modest (if lucrative) job of Recorder of Deeds. While he
claimed the latter post was better suited to him, since it did not require daily
appearances in criminal court and left him time for writing, the change was
widely perceived as an affront, especially since Garfield had openly promised
Douglass he would be reappointed as U. S. Marshal. Douglass remained in
this office for five years, even into the administration of the Democrat Grover
Cleveland, who treated him and his white wife, Helen Pitts, with friendship
and respect (even though Douglass had opposed his election).
In his remaining years, Douglass’s involvement with the Federal Govern-
ment continued with energy and purpose on a number of fronts. He worked
hard to defeat the Supreme Court’s 1883 reversal of the 1875 Civil Rights Act
regarding discrimination in public accommodations and travel, a decision that
“came to the black man as a painful and bewildering surprise” (Autobiographies
967). He repeatedly spoke out, through several administrations, against the
failure of the Federal Government to protect African Americans from physical
violence, and lynching most of all. He lobbied hard to convince the government
to establish a national system of aid for education. He provided yeoman service
as minister resident and counsel general to Haiti under Benjamin Harrison,
and then felt deep disappointment when negotiations over the treaty for the
U. S. Navy’s use of the port of Mole St. Nicolas in Haiti were taken out of
his hands. Douglass felt outrage more keenly than most, and he was quick to
perceive that the problem was typically the result of “that moral weakness in
high places which has attended the conflict between the spirit of liberty and the
spirit of slavery”—our freedom and our bondage (Autobiographies 968-69). But
disheartened and angry as he often was in matters involving Congress, the pres-
ident, and the Supreme Court—he kept a special hut called “the Growlery” in

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his back yard where he would repair to vent his anger—Douglass was not about
to counsel extreme responses or solutions to such dispiriting developments.
“[G]overnment is better than anarchy,” he told an audience in Lincoln Hall
in Washington, following the Supreme Court’s 1883 decision; “and . . . patient
reform is better than violent revolution.” The problem, he recognized, in this
case at least, was the independence of the Supreme Court, what he called “the
autocratic point in our government. No monarch in Europe,” he went on to
say, “has a power more absolute over the laws, lives, and liberties than that
Court has over our law, lives, and liberties.”18 It was a warning about the
growing power of the Federal Government but also its surrender of power
regarding civil liberties to the states; it also recalls the warning of Herman
Melville, who in “The Conflict of Convictions” had worried about the increase
in government power symbolized in the new iron dome on the Capitol in 1864,
a building that Melville, with outrage and shame, reminds us in Mardi “was the
handiwork of slaves” (Mardi 528).
Despite the huge setback to the civil rights of black people brought
on by the Supreme Court, Douglass retained a certain faith in the Federal
Government—the executive branch, perhaps, most of all—to keep alive what
Melville called the “Founders’ dream” of freedom for all people. For him,
Washington was still the city of hope, the place where he served his people and
his country, and so it remained until the end of his life. By contrast, Melville,
clearly taking a more distant, majoritarian view of history, saw complication
and diminished personal freedom in the growing power of the Federal Gov-
ernment in Washington. Though profoundly sympathetic to the slave and
the ex-slave (as seen repeatedly in his prose Supplement to Battle-Pieces), he
was not so wedded to the cause of a particular people as Douglass, nor so
optimistic about what of benefit the Federal Government could accomplish. In
“The Conflict of Convictions” he viewed growing “Dominion” over individual
sovereignty and the resulting flight of the “Founders’ dream” as the price the
country had to pay for saving the Union through civil war. For him, the Federal
City, like the Government it stood for, was on course to become an ominous
site of centralized power, the capital of a nation that was no longer an exception
in the world’s history but one that was fast becoming like other nations, past
and present. Warned Melville, “Age after age shall be / As age after age has
been . . . .” (Poems 56).

18 “This Decision Has Humbled the Nation: An Address Delivered in Washington, DC, on
22 October 1883”; rpt. in Frederick Douglass Papers, 5: 115. See also Autobiographies 969-71.

36 LEVIATHAN