The Douglass Option

Frederick Douglass believed there was an alternative. So should we.

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In February 1866, alarm was spreading through the Republican North over President Andrew Johnson’s Southern course. Politics in the occupied South seemed to be careening toward something like a neo-Confederate restoration.

Johnson’s entire career had fit the archetype of a hill-country Jacksonian: the Herrenvolk democrat, the striver from humble roots, the anti-monopoly champion of the poor white man — and therefore, the bitter enemy of the West Tennessee “slaveocracy.” Yet he believed with equal vehemence that the United States was and should remain “a country for white men.” And so under his reconstruction policy, white state governments in the South had imposed a series of draconian “Black Codes” on the freed slaves, and the planter oligarchy now seemed on the brink of a revival.