Frederick Douglass Reflects on the Status of African Americans

Abstract

With the Union's overwhelming victory in the Civil War, Reconstruction appeared to offer an unprecedented opportunity to redress the injustices that resulted from over two centuries of slavery and to bring the nation closer to its founding ideals of liberty and equality. For all its limitations, Reconstruction represented a unique attempt to create a color-blind democracy. The American South was the only postemancipation society, except for Haiti, where slavery was overthrown by force of arms; the only society, except for Brazil, where slave owners received no compensation for the loss of their slave property; and the only society in the Western Hemisphere where former slaves received civil and political rights and formed successful political alliances with whites. Yet despite genuine gains—including enactment of Constitutional Amendments abolishing slavery, guaranteeing citizenship rights, promising equal protection of the law, and extending suffrage—by the 1880s, a caste system of race relations had reemerged...