The federal offices: did Marshal, Recorder and Minister to Haiti buy his silence?

Frederick Douglass, answered from the texts and cited to the page.

The position in brief

I took the offices and I would take them again. A people shut out of every place of trust in the government is told by that exclusion what it is thought to be worth, and the first black man to hold a federal marshalcy answers that argument by existing in the office. As for silence: I published Why Is the Negro Lynched? in my last years, and no man who reads it will say the salary bought me.12345

Sources

  1. Yet even they paint him as a moral monster, ferociously invading the sacred rights of woman and endangering the homes of the whites. Now, I hold, no less than his accusers, that the crime alleged against the Negro is the most revolting which men can commit. It is a crime that awakens the intensest abhorrence and tempts mankind to kill the criminal on first sight.
    Why is the Negro Lynched
  2. It is, therefore, quite gratuitous to assume that the principles that apply to other men, apply to the lynchers and murderers of the Negro. The rules resting upon the justice and benevolence of human nature do not apply to the mobocrats, or to those who were educated in the habits and customs of a slave-holding community. What these habits are I have a right to know, both in theory and practice.
    Why is the Negro Lynched
  3. Hence it is absurd to meet my arguments with the facts predicated of our common human nature. I know that I shall be charged with apologising for criminals. Ex-Governor Chamberlain has already virtually done as much. But there is no foundation for such charge.
    Why is the Negro Lynched
  4. Reprinted by permission from "The A.M.E. Church Review" for Memorial Distribution, by a few of his English friends. BRIDGWATER: PRINTED BY JOHN WHITBY AND SONS, LIMITED. 1895. Why is the Negro Lynched? ("THE LESSON OF THE HOUR.") BY THE LATE FREDERICK DOUGLASS. Reprinted by permission from the "A.M.E.
    Why is the Negro Lynched
  5. Some of the Southern papers have denounced me for my unbelief in this charge and in this new crusade against the Negro, but I repeat I do not believe it, and firmly deny the grounds upon which it is based.
    Why is the Negro Lynched

Where the argument is made

  • Life and Times (1881), on the appointments
  • Why Is the Negro Lynched? (1894)
  • Three Addresses (1886)

How the argument was received

Contested. Younger black critics held that the appointments made him a Republican ornament; the Haitian ministry ended in resignation amid the Mole Saint-Nicolas affair, and Blight's account of the late career is candid about how much the party asked of him.