The Annotated Frederick Douglass

In 1866, the famous abolitionist laid out his vision for radically reshaping America in the pages of The Atlantic.

- David W. Blight

In his third autobiography, Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, while reflecting on the end of the Civil War, Douglass admitted that "a strange and, perhaps, perverse feeling came over me." Great joy over the ending of slavery, he wrote, was at times "tinged with a feeling of sadness. I felt I had reached the end of the noblest and best part of my life; my school was broken up, my church disbanded, and the beloved congregation dispersed, never to come together again.” In recalling the postwar years, Douglass drew from a scene in a Shakespearean tragedy to express his memory of that moment: "Othello's occupation was gone.' In Othello, Douglass perceived a character, the former high-ranking general and "moor of Venice," who had lost authority and professional purpose. Douglass harbored a special affinity for this most famous Black character in Western literature, whose mental collapse and horrible end lingered as a warning in a famous speech: "O, now, for ever / Farewell the tranquil mind! Farewell content!"

In 1866, Douglass took up his pen to try to capture this mome of transformation, both for himself and for the United States. For the December issue of this magazine that year, in an essay simply titled "Reconstruction," Douglass observed that "questions of vast moment" lay before Congress and the nation. Nothing less than the essential results of the "tremendous war," he writes, were at stake. Would the war become "a miserable failure ... a scandalous and shocking waste of blood and treasure," or a "victory over treason," resulting in a newly reimagined nation "delivered from all contradictions and based loyalty, liberty, and equality"? In this inquiry, Douglass's new role as a conscience of the country became clarified. His leadership had always been through words and persuasion, written and oratorical. How, now that the war was over, would he employ his incomparable voice?