In short
Frederick Douglass’s transition from emancipation triumph to the fight over Reconstruction—especially voting rights—after Lincoln’s assassination and under Andrew Johnson’s hostile approach. The episode also follows Carl Schurz’s fact-finding mission to expose postwar violence, and how Douglass’s confrontation with Johnson helped push Congress toward the 14th and 15th Amendments.
Guest backgrounds
David Blight, Pulitzer Prize-winning Frederick Douglass biographer and “Frederick Douglass expert.” Manisha Sinha, historian at the University of Connecticut who studies Lincoln and Andrew Johnson; author on Johnson. (Hosts: Malcolm Gladwell and editor Kai Wright.)
Key claims
Douglass is framed as a “founding father” whose clear-eyed radicalism persists after the war. Johnson is portrayed as racist, vindictive, and opposed to Black political rights, preferring quick readmission and pardons for ex-Confederates. Schurz’s report documents violence and helps defeat Johnson’s restoration plan.
Notable examples
Douglass’s Rochester speech after Lincoln’s death (“the republic lives”); Johnson interrupting Douglass’s delegation and using the N-word; Schurz witnessing Charleston devastation, Savannah’s 4th of July mob attack on freed people, and widespread murders; Congress overriding Johnson’s vetoes, leading to the 14th and 15th Amendments.
Written by AI. May contain mistakes. Listen to the episode to check what was said.
Chapters
Tap a time to open that second in VODouglass in the Reconstruction Era
2:41 to 4:19
Learn about Douglass's role and influence during the early days of Reconstruction.
“I'm Malcolm Gladwell, and this is Reconstruction, the Unfinished Promise.”
Douglass Reflects on Lincoln's Assassination
4:19 to 7:17
Understand Douglass's reaction to Lincoln's assassination and its implications.
“I found all kinds of stories in the press of people reciting the first time they saw Douglas.”
Andrew Johnson: Lincoln's Successor
7:17 to 12:20
Examine the challenges and failures of Andrew Johnson's presidency.
“He goes back to Rochester at the news of Lincoln's assassination, and a huge crowd had gathered in the central square of Rochester, New York, where he lived.”
Reconstruction: A New Beginning
12:20 to 14:00
Discover the complexities of the Reconstruction era and its impact on freed people.
“We get to use the word unprecedented sometimes because it fits.”
Reconstruction Challenges and Johnson's Approach
14:00 to 18:02
Learn about the complexities of reuniting the nation post-Civil War and Johnson's methods.
“They seceded and took up arms against the United States.”
Reconstruction Challenges and Johnson's Approach
18:10 to 20:04
Learn about the complexities of reuniting the nation post-Civil War and Johnson's methods.
“That's quince.com slash reconstruction for free shipping and 365-day returns.”
Carl Schurz's Mission in the South
20:17 to 28:00
Explore Carl Schurz's pivotal journey to report on post-war conditions in the South.
“Remember, Frederick Douglass and Andrew Johnson both need public opinion on their side after the war.”
Freed People's Vision of Labor
28:00 to 30:09
Learn about the aspirations of freed people for labor and land ownership post-war.
“freed people themselves, are experimenting in systems of free labor that would replace slavery.”
Schertz's Journey Through the South
30:10 to 34:16
Explore Schertz's observations of the devastation and chaos in the South.
“that the Confederacy has lost and secession has failed, but there's no agreement on what should come next.”
Schertz's Report and Political Implications
34:17 to 37:54
Understand the significance of Schertz's report to President Johnson and its effects on Reconstruction.
“He includes everything he has seen, organized by topic.”
Show all 16 chapters
Schertz's Report and Political Implications
39:20 to 40:37
Understand the significance of Schertz's report to President Johnson and its effects on Reconstruction.
“We're almost halfway through the year, and I'll be honest, I've had stretches where I'm running on empty without fully realizing it.”
Contrasting Visions for Reconstruction
40:47 to 42:07
Examine the differing views on Reconstruction and the role of Black citizenship.
“Here, I'm going to turn our story back to our editor, Kai Wright.”
Johnson's Racist Outburst
42:07 to 44:27
Learn about Andrew Johnson's confrontational and racist remarks during a meeting with Black leaders.
“He was not going to be preached to by a bunch of black men.”
Douglass's Response and Warning
44:27 to 48:56
Discover Frederick Douglass's powerful speech addressing the dangers of overconfidence in government and the need for true democracy.
“until he went to his desk and he wrote a new speech.”
Shifting Power in Reconstruction
48:56 to 51:42
Examine how Andrew Johnson's political miscalculations led to a shift in power towards congressional Republicans, enabling civil rights advancements.
“democracy is a great thing but it it first needs law and structure but then it needs people who believe in it.”
The Legacy of Reconstruction
51:42 to 54:40
Understand the transformative impact of Reconstruction and its lasting influence on American rights and education.
“Establishing the idea of universal citizenship to anyone born in the United States, regardless of race or any other status, with equality before the law for all citizens.”
Transcript
Automatic transcript. May contain errors.0:03Douglas is such a fascinating character, right? Frederick Douglass, perhaps America's most famous abolitionist leader, a person who as a child escaped from slavery, who went on to become a global spokesperson for freedom. When I sat down with President Barack Obama, he really wanted to talk about this larger-than-life man. Douglass is constantly battling between a desperate belief that the better angels of our nature will win out. He has seen this possibility of genuine equality, but he has also seen the very worst. He himself has experienced slavery. He has watched slave catchers grab people and haul them away.
1:04And he has witnessed equivocation and cowardice and betrayal. I am struck by that same thing, that he sees the best, and he also is clear-eyed about who we are and what we're capable of. And this is why I think he belongs in that kind of pantheon of founding father. Frederick Douglass is a founding father. He really is. He really is.
1:33I said that not only because it's true, but because Douglas is one of those people who should have been crushed by history. Instead, for a long time, he bent it to his will. The movement to end slavery did not begin with Frederick Douglas. That movement existed before the United States did. A year before the Declaration of Independence, Philadelphia Quakers founded the nation's first anti-slavery society. And from the beginning of the transatlantic slave trade, enslaved people organized revolutions and plotted escapes. And the abolition movement churned out fiery figures that are now well-known, Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth, William Lloyd Garrison and David Walker, the radical John Brown.
2:17But certainly, Frederick Douglass was best known in his own time, both in the U.S. and abroad. And so we begin our series with Douglass in the opening days of Reconstruction in 1865. He's a man who thinks he's just completed his life's work, but he's about to discover that his work has just begun. I'm Malcolm Gladwell, and this is Reconstruction, the Unfinished Promise.
2:55One of our editors, Kai Wright, has been obsessed with Douglass for years, and particularly with the evolution of the man's politics. Can you help people understand just how big a deal Frederick Douglass is at this stage in history? I mean, like, today he would have a billion Instagram followers, like the most streamed podcast in history, right? Kai called up David Blight, who is the Frederick Douglass expert. Blight wrote a Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Douglas. He's such a fan that when he spoke with Kai, he was wearing a T-shirt with a portrait of Douglas on it. I'm going to let the two of them tell the story of this influential activist's second chapter.
3:37And it's interesting to think about. Yeah, he'd either be the guest on every major podcast or he'd be doing his own. He's a very big deal. At the end of the war, his image was everywhere. He really couldn't go anywhere without being recognized. Part of it was the hair. Think about the term hair on fire. It's a shock of hair, a lion's mane. Part of it was just his presence and the voice, almost a shouting kind of baritone voice. I know of no country where the conditions for affecting great changes are more favorable than here in these United States. I found all kinds of stories in the press of people reciting the first time they saw Douglas.
4:31To a certain degree, he became a kind of wonder of America. Reception soiree to Mr. Frederick Douglas. The celebrated Frederick Douglas has been lionized in the city for several days. Notwithstanding the severe rainstorm last evening, Frederick Douglass drew out an immense audience. If you came to America from Europe, for example, touring the country, you wanted to see Niagara Falls, you wanted to see New York City, Washington, D.C., and a few other things. But if possible, especially if you came out of Reformed traditions, try to see Frederick Douglass. But in the spring of 1865, this world-famous man who has spent literally his entire life working to abolish slavery, at the moment of his triumph, he's in a funk.
5:23He's kind of a guy who's lost for purpose, right? He is lost for purpose at the very end of the war. It's the way he described it. Yeah. And he drew right from one of his favorite moments in Shakespeare. He said, Othello's occupation is gone. I feel as though I have reached the end of the noblest and best part of my life. My school is broken up. My church disbanded. He didn't know where to go. He didn't quite know what to do. who douglas you see he's one of the rare rare radical reformers in history who lives to see his cause triumph in the middle of his life he's only 40 some years old uh and he will face the challenge the rest of his life to sustain the victory of emancipation the great transition from slavery to freedom.
6:22But no one knows, no one really knows yet where any of this is going. What he was certain of, Kai, is that the Confederate South was not going away. He kept warning. He warns. They're still there. The slave-holding spirit, he always is warning, is still out there. This ghost haunting the United States. I can't overemphasize how fast history moved in 1865. The war ends in April, and in less than a week, Abraham Lincoln is assassinated. That obviously catches the whole world off guard. But for Frederick Douglass, who, again, is already disoriented by the fact that he's just witnessed the completion of his whole life's mission, I just, I can't imagine how he processed Lincoln's death.
7:16Douglas was horrified, and there are many ways to understand that. He goes back to Rochester at the news of Lincoln's assassination, and a huge crowd had gathered in the central square of Rochester, New York, where he lived. And Douglas went and joined the crowd, and there were some speakers, and the crowd called for him. And it's a very moving statement he made. It is a day for silence and meditation, for grief and tears. Yet I feel that though Abraham Lincoln dies, the republic lives. He said at that moment he had never felt a kinship with his fellow Americans. And by that, I think he meant white people.
8:14He never felt such a kinship as he did through Lincoln's death.
8:26Just think about these two men. Here's Douglas, a formerly enslaved child who now commanded the attention of the President of the United States. During the war, he was able to look Lincoln in the eye and challenge him to do more, to not only end slavery, but to arm Black men in the fight to save the Union. And here's Lincoln, standing astride history, trying to save the Union, and gradually realizing that Douglas was right. The only way forward for the United States was to abolish slavery. Both Lincoln and Douglas are legendary pragmatists, cerebral by nature, but each of them see the national story in fully biblical terms.
9:05They're ready to partner in this divine task of rebuilding the United States. And then, bang. The partnership is snuffed out in one gunshot on Easter weekend, no less, just days after the end of the war. And the man who rises into the presidency as a result of that gunshot, he is no Abe Lincoln. Andrew Johnson is an interesting character. He was literally the polar opposite of Lincoln. Manisha Sinha is chair of the history department at the University of Connecticut, and she has written a great deal about Lincoln's successor, Andrew Johnson, America's troubled 17th president. She's an advisor on our series.
9:52Johnson seems to have been a person who really sort of lacked political skills. You know, he's petty, he's mean, he's vindictive, he's abusive, he's a drunk. He's not a great character to inhabit the office of the president of the United States. But Lincoln had picked Andrew Johnson as his vice president in 1864 as a show of national unity because Johnson was a Southern Democrat instead of a Northern Republican. The first sign of trouble came on Lincoln and Johnson's inauguration day. There are the stories that Andrew Johnson was a little schnockered on some brandy or bourbon or something because he had a horrific toothache that day.
10:39Now, he might have been sipping for other reasons. Who knows? But he was not entirely sober at his inauguration as vice president of the United States. Now, at that point, what Douglas and others knew about Andrew Johnson is he's obviously from Tennessee. He's from East Tennessee. You know, there's an old saying about Johnson, quote, old Andy never went back on his raisin, which means he knew where he was from. He was a damn good stump speaker. You know, he could jump on a wagon and get the farmers cheering about something. He's a former slaveholder, that was known, who never believed in secession, which is why he stayed in the Union.
11:20He was the only senator from a seceded state to stay in the Union, which is what got him on Lincoln's ticket. Which, by the way, I've always said this to all my dear friends who are Lincoln scholars. Why don't you ever talk about that? That's one of Lincoln's biggest mistakes. It's a horrible choice. It's a horrible choice. It's a horrible choice. I mean, politically at the moment, it's a unity, it's a reunion ticket for the symbolism of the Southerner who stayed in the Union. He's a unionist. He really was. But a former slaveholder, a racist in his bones, and a fervent states' rights advocate.
12:03And, of course, nobody expected presidents to be shot.
12:12Andrew Johnson takes over the presidency at the start of the remarkable era that historians now call Reconstruction. We get to use the word unprecedented sometimes because it fits. The country had never been in this situation, the end of a massive civil war. America was now being reinvented, but how? What would it do? Who were the freed people? How would they be defined? Frederick Douglass couldn't have felt Andrew Johnson was fit to lead the nation through this conversation. But Douglass did have a clear idea about how to answer that crucial question of Reconstruction. Slavery is not abolished until the Black man has the ballot.
12:58We need voting rights, first and foremost. And the Republicans who controlled Congress mostly agreed. That's where Lincoln had been headed. Lincoln, when he died, one of the last speeches he made was to say, Black men who are educated and who have served in the Union Army should get the right to vote. So that's like the first public endorsement of Black citizenship. But Andrew Johnson? He wanted nothing to do with Black civil rights, political rights. He wanted, to the extent we can understand him, he wanted Black people to become a kind of an American serfdom. They would remain agricultural workers.
13:40They would stay in the South. They would be a backbone of the economy. To the extent Andrew Johnson thought much about all of that, that's as far as he ever wanted to go. He did think a great deal about how to handle the Confederacy. Remember, the Confederate states left the Union. They seceded and took up arms against the United States. And their leaders, many of whom had been members of Congress before the war, were actual literal traitors. So one of the big questions of Reconstruction was how to bring these states and their traitorous political leaders back into the fold. Johnson, he had been a senator from a Confederate state at the start of the war.
14:24He just personally refused to secede. So now he's president and he wants the traders back in. They would be immediately readmitted to the union. He would accept some disenfranchisement of ex-Confederates. But even that, he had an alternative plan for, which was to require them to apply to him personally for pardons. And that is. Sounds familiar. Well, that whole staff of people. working for the executive branch, just processing pardons for ex-Confederates. They would literally line up at the White House or executive building nearby to get their pardons. Johnson liked the idea. See, Johnson had the self-image of a poor boy.
15:13He's a poor boy from East Tennessee, hill country. And he did grow up with not much, although he had owned some slaves. And he was proud to tell you that. but he liked the idea of the old planter class, which he was not from, having to kind of cower to him. So yeah, that sounds familiar too, doesn't it? The guy with the sense of grievance is going to make everybody who might have looked down on him come and bend their knee. He loved that. And meanwhile, black people have to get caught in the middle of it. Black people aren't even going to be allowed in the middle of it. whatever andrew johnson may be he is no friend of our race so douglas sees andrew johnson and now he's got his new vocation now he has found his calling in opposition essentially to andrew johnson oh yeah and what a great foil David Blight and Kai Wright will be back to talk more about this coming showdown.
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20:17Remember, Frederick Douglass and Andrew Johnson both need public opinion on their side after the war. Douglass argues that the federal government has an obligation to the newly freed people of the South. It must not only protect them, but give them the right to vote. President Johnson disagrees. He doesn't think the federal government should do much of anything. In fact, he's busy pardoning Confederates. But Johnson is only president by dint of a terrible tragedy. His power is tenuous. He needs some ammunition for his arguments. So he sends a man you've probably never heard of on a historic mission.
20:57It's a mission that will become hugely consequential for Reconstruction. Just not in the way Andrew Johnson hopes.
21:09This is our dude, right? So in my many years in New York City, I have come, walked past this monument many times. We're in the corner of 116th Street on Morningside Drive on the edge of Columbia University, on the border between Columbia and Morningside Park, one of the crown jewels of Manhattan. And there is this statue, which I have passed, and it's never occurred to me to stop and wonder who it is. and it's this actually quite imposing statue of a man in what looks like a man in his 60s or 70s wearing a kind of long imposing cloak, holding onto his hat and a very determined look on his face.
21:54And it says,
22:00So this statue dates to 1913. At the dedication ceremony for this statue, Joseph Chout, the one who led the movement to get it built, said, This day will not end the memory of Carl Schertz.
22:20Does anyone remember Carl Schertz today? I don't think so. I've never seen anyone standing in front of that statue. The man actually seems lost to history, like a lot of what happened in the Reconstruction era. At the end of the Civil War, Carl Schertz was in the vanguard of American politics. one of the people who had rallied around Abraham Lincoln and the Republican Party to save the Union. If you think about it, this was a, we saw him talk about generations in politics. And this was a generation of political leaders. They won the Civil War. They mobilized as no one had ever imagined. And here they are in 1865, victorious.
23:03It's a remarkable generation. And Karl Schertz is right there in the middle of it. He's a German immigrant who fought and lost in movements against European monarchy before coming to America and joining Lincoln's political coalition. He sees the United States as a laboratory for democracy, as an example to the world. No more royalty, no more aristocracy, and no more slavery. The awesome thing about Schertz is, on the one hand, he's like, he's on kind of the side of liberal democracy for all these mass movements in the 19th century. He's like a streak running across the 19th century. Finally, I found someone who's gotten into Carl Schertz as much as I have.
23:48John Grinspan, a historian at the Smithsonian Institute who studies the politics of the 1800s. And the other thing is Karl Schertz is incredibly kind of needling and pushy. And the Yiddish word nundik is the word I think of for him. He's such a difficult, sometimes annoying individual that it's fun to see the humanity in somebody who's involved in all these kind of glorious movements. It's the summer of 1865, just a few months after the Civil War has ended and after Lincoln has been killed. Andrew Johnson, the new president, asks Carl Schertz to come to the White House. Schertz thinks, here's an opportunity to shape the Reconstruction effort that's just begun.
24:33He sees some things he thinks Johnson is doing wrong. And he, in a maybe naive way, thinks he can go to Johnson and talk him into a better policy.
24:46What follows is a little digression, but it's hard to resist. and it tells you something about how Americans were handling both the trauma of war and a president's assassination. On the way to Washington to see Johnson, Carl Schertz stays with friends in Philadelphia. The family had lost two sons in the war, and like so many others, they wanted to communicate with them through a seance. The night Schertz arrives, they invite him to join in. He wrote about it later. One of the daughters, an uncommonly beautiful, intelligent, and high-spirited girl of about 15, had shown remarkable qualities as a writing medium.
25:28When the circle was formed around the table, hands touching, a shiver seemed to pass over her. Her fingers began to twitch. She grasped the pencil held out to her, and as if obeying an irresistible impulse, she wrote in a jerky way. the messages given her by the spirits. He asks that the girl call up the spirit of Abraham Lincoln, who's, you know, just dead for a few months at that point. And he claims that at the seance, the spirit of Abraham Lincoln tells him that Johnson is going to send him on an important mission. It's classic Carl Schertz that he has Lincoln come back from behind the grave to give him a promotion.
26:10But now, after that side trip to the spirit world, He has a real president to meet. I asked historian Manisha Sinha about that encounter. So Schertz goes to Washington, sits down with Johnson. And what does Johnson explicitly ask him to do? So Johnson asks Schertz to go to the southern states and says, I want you to report on the conditions in the south right now. And I think he wants to use Schertz. He wants to send Schertz to the south to report back to him. And hey, everything is fine. It's all hunky-dory. And, you know, the South can rejoin the union. Oh, so from Johnson's perspective, he's looking for a kind of cover story.
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26:55He thinks Schertz is going to come back with something that kind of justifies him sort of washing his hands of the whole thing and moving on. Why does he think Schertz would be such a willing dupe? That's an interesting question. I think he's also calculating that he wants to send someone who would be believable to the radical wing and to the entire Republican Party. In mid-July, Carl Schertz begins his fact-finding mission. He boards a steamboat from Washington to the South Carolina Sea Islands. A U.S. military officer takes him to a plantation near Buford, far down the eastern coast, just shy of the South Carolina-Georgia border.
27:37Schertz is excited by what he sees. Fields free from weeds, the cotton plants healthy, the cornfields promised a rich yield, everything breathing thrift, order, and prosperity. We passed by a large log house in which a colored preacher was exhorting his congregation, for it was Sunday. This is an area where the Union Army, abolitionists, freed people themselves, are experimenting in systems of free labor that would replace slavery. Freed people's idea of free labor was linked to their own traditions of economic autonomy. They envisioned free labor as sometimes even ownership of land, but definitely control over who they labored for, how much they labored, and what they would get for it.
28:27But this pleasant picture would not hold up for long. Shirts leaves the Sea Islands and takes another boat to Charleston, South Carolina. That's where he starts to encounter the real devastation of the war. He writes about how long it takes getting into Charleston before he sees a living creature. This city that was so kind of glamorous and sophisticated on the eve of the war now looks like it's just completely in ruins. He really sees the impact on urban civilian populations. And the degree of destruction and the degree of, the word he keeps using is sullenness. The degree of anger and resignation and frustration that he runs into among the kind of, especially the white elite Southern population, who previously had been so dominant in a place like Charleston, now will barely speak.
29:21Schertz travels further into South Carolina. He rides on miserable trains through 95 degree heat. His mule-drawn wagon breaks down. The roads are nothing but deep sand. He visits Columbia, the state capital, and finds it reduced to what he calls a confused mass of charred ruins. He passes through the remains of General Sherman's infamous march and sees a broad black streak of desolation. Reconstruction has barely begun. The war is, in a sense, over, in that the major armies have surrendered and Jefferson Davis has been captured, but there's no sense of order or peace. There's just kind of degrees of chaos.
30:02And he talks a lot as he travels to, especially to kind of former Confederates and to white Southerners. And he gets a sense that there's a consensus that the Confederacy has lost and secession has failed, but there's no agreement on what should come next. They want to fight the war over again. And they are sure in five years we are going to have a war bigger than any we have seen yet. They are impatient to get rid of this damned military despotism. They will show us what stuff Southern men are made of. Such is their talk. Schertz makes his way to Savannah, Georgia. He finds a city still reeling from mob violence that broke out on Independence Day.
30:45In Savannah, when they hold a 4th of July celebration in 1865, the war is over. It's a 4th of July celebration. It should be fairly patriotic. Basically, the only people that attend are Union soldiers and freed slaves, and they're attacked by an angry white mob. Historian Manisha Sinha says Karl Schurz wasn't the only person to witness this kind of thing. The patriotic holiday had become a flashpoint. We see evidence coming from all over the South that the only people who want to celebrate the 4th of July are freed people. It's not Southern whites who are very sullen and hate the 4th of July. interestingly enough, at that point.
31:26And Black people really sort of seem to tie their demands and their freedom claims and their rights to the national government, to the Union Army, and to celebrating the nation. Schertz then takes a train to Atlanta. He spends the weekend there and finds yet more lawlessness. The planters in that region seem to have combined to keep the Negroes in their former state of subjection and to kill those that refuse to submit. There's a regular drumbeat at this time of open, regular violence against African Americans, formerly enslaved people, across the South.
32:07One scholar at the time estimates that there's a murder a day happening somewhere, and Schertz sees a lot of it. The demoralization of the people is frightful to behold in its manifestations. Travelers are frequently attacked on the public highways Cotton is stolen in enormous quantities Horses and mules are run off whenever they are not watched with the utmost care And the perpetrators are almost never arrested and punished I'd say the general direction of the whole trip is As he moves further south and certainly further west He runs into more and more chaos and more and more violence And more and more kind of evil plans by former Confederates to do whatever they can to get as close to re-enslaving people as possible.
32:55Schertz finally reaches the end of his journey, New Orleans, in September. He's been traveling for two months through a treacherous landscape. He is, by now, completely exhausted and miserable. He writes about sweltering nights in the wretched country taverns and about nights spent in desperate fights with ravenous swarms of mosquitoes. He gets dengue fever, or as he calls it, breakbone fever. And he's just appalled by all that he has witnessed in the South. This is the most shiftless, most demoralized people I have ever seen. If I can only make my main report, I shall open the eyes of the people of the North.
33:41Schertz returns to Washington, D.C. He's ready to write a report to the president documenting all the devastation and lawlessness he's seen. This is precisely the assignment Andrew Johnson had given him. And now, Schertz has the evidence he needs to make the president face reality. This reconstruction thing is not going to be fast, it's not going to be easy, and it's going to take effort on our part. But Andrew Johnson is no longer interested in what Carl Schertz has to say. He doesn't want Schertz around anymore, he doesn't want Schertz involved anymore, He seems to regret ever giving him the position to begin with.
34:16And he certainly doesn't want to publish a report. Schertz writes it anyway. He includes everything he has seen, organized by topic. The rampant violence against Black people and the, quote, utter absence of national feeling among Southern whites. He calls for troops to stay in the South, for Black suffrage to be a condition of any Confederate state's re-entry into the Union. He says there needs to be a reconstruction of the, quote, whole organism of Southern society to bring it in harmony with the rest of American society. This is the report he delivers to Andrew Johnson and which he gives to Johnson's Republican enemies.
34:58I think Johnson miscalculates enormously. I mean, this is sort of a spectacular own goal by Johnson. He finds this guy thinking this guy will be his kind of willing dupe. We'll go back in. Someone with some credibility with the abolitionists will go and give a nice whitewash for what's going on in the South that will justify Johnson's own agenda. And the guy returns and he's not playing ball. He's determined to tell the truth. And now Johnson's stuck. He created this mess, this political mess for himself. Exactly. And I think Johnson realizes then that Schertz's report and other such reports coming out of the South is going to result in the failure of his own restoration plan.
35:51That plan being do as little as possible. Republicans ultimately forced the president to formally submit Karl Schertz's report to Congress, thereby making it a fully public document. but the president attaches a note in which he tries desperately to obscure the facts. His damage control is kind of, it's kind of audacious. In his note, he says, perplexing questions were naturally to be expected. I love the grammatical construction of this, you know, mistakes were made. Perplexing questions were naturally to be expected from the great and sudden change in the relations between the two races. But systems are gradually developing themselves under which the freedmen will receive the protection to which he is justly entitled.
36:40And then he celebrates the spirit of nationality, which is rapidly emerging from the sectional animosity of the war. It's like, it's one plus one is three. Absolutely. And especially for Johnson to talk about freed people's rights is a bit rich. A bit rich, exactly. In your face, rich. And, you know, but he really wants to tell Northerners, hey, the South is no longer bitter. They're not bitter against the Union or you, that they have all accepted it. And in fact, Schertz has just witnessed the precise opposite.
37:20I think 100 ,000 copies of it go out, which is a huge number back then. And it shows up in basically all the newspapers. And by the end of the year, Schertz's report is really influencing how people are thinking about Reconstruction. Carl Schertz's report ended up being the most radical thing he ever did. He went on to have a successful career and then faded into obscurity. But his report on the condition of the South helped change the course of history. Because the Republicans in Congress immediately begin to challenge Johnson's policies. They put forth their own bold ideas for how the country should be put back together.
37:58And this sparks what is really the first big battle between the branches of American government. The White House versus Congress. Who will have the last word on the direction of the Union? The following year, 1866, is one of the most momentous years in American political history. And that's when Frederick Douglass steps back into the fray.
38:52Transcription by CastingWords
39:20Thank you. at$8.99. Audible. Be fascinated. Be fascinating.
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40:56So you now have two starkly contrasting visions for how the country should be put back together. There's Andrew Johnson's approach, quick and easy, with everything essentially going back to how it was before the war. And then there's the approach Carl Schertz advised in his report. Make Black people full citizens with the right to vote and use the military to enforce that right if need be. In January of 1866, Congress convenes a set of hearings to debate the matter. They're considering a big, sprawling constitutional amendment that will settle things once and for all. This is what will ultimately become the 14th Amendment to the U.S.
41:37Constitution. And as all of this is consuming the national conversation, Frederick Douglass leads a delegation of Black men to the White House. They managed to get this appointment. They weren't invited. David Blight again, Douglass' biographer. They went in with a prepared statement. They were able to get through part of their prepared statement. They went there to lobby the president of the United States for the right to vote and protection and all the other rights. they got through part of their prepared statement and Johnson interrupted them. He was not going to be preached to by a bunch of black men.
42:16In fact, at one point he said, I especially don't want to be preached to by people like you. And he meant Douglas who can round out periods and put in fancy words. Wow. Oh yeah. People who know how to use their words. I don't want to be speaking to me like that. Johnson held the floor for 45 minutes. Johnson went on and on and on and part of Johnson's speech which is what it was this was not a discussion he said you know I once owned slaves but I want you to know I I own slaves but I never sold one that's he said that to them I guess believing that would not offend them i mean it's like yeah no no he's real it's amazing it got worse douglas would try to uh interrupt you know like mr president may i uh mr president may i and then johnson finally just said no you will not speak to me and at some point there about 50 55 minutes in Douglass said, well, we're finished here.
43:24He asked his whole delegation to get up, and they walked out.
43:31Johnson can barely disguise his own racism. He doesn't see Douglass the way Lincoln sees him, as a Black leader, and as somebody who's putting forth some legitimate ideas about Black rights and Reconstruction. It's just the opposite. that he sees, he demeans Douglas and he calls him the N-word. And he says, oh, he'll cut my throat off just like any other slave. Douglas said he heard it. I've always imagined Douglas turning around looking at Andrew Johnson, you know, wishing he could, you know, take his teeth out, but probably just walked out and said, oh, yeah. They went over to a hotel. They wrote up a statement.
44:12They published it immediately the next morning in a Washington, D.C. paper, describing exactly what had happened. And then Douglas wrote a new speech. Douglas always did this. When something big happens, he'd go to his desk and he wouldn't know exactly what he thinks about something until he went to his desk and he wrote a new speech. And he called it Sources of Danger to the Republic. And it's a barn burner. He just butchered Johnson in this speech. I know of no greater misfortunes to individuals than an overconfidence in their own perfections. And I know of fewer misfortunes that can happen to a nation greater than an overconfidence in the perfection of its government.
45:01Douglas opens the speech by warning, look, don't think there's something divine or almighty about the institutions that support American democracy, starting with the Constitution itself. There were neither thunderings, nor lightnings, nor earthquakes, nor tempests, nor any other disturbance of nature when this great law was given to the world. The Constitution is just a piece of paper, ideas on a page. It is simply a human contrivance. It is the work of man and men struggling with many of the prejudices and infirmities common to man. and it is time to deal with those prejudices. Douglas says if you want this to be a democracy, it's got to be a real democracy.
45:53Make it a government of the people, by the people, and for the people, and for all the people, each for all, and all for each. Blot out all discriminations against any person, theoretically or practically. Keep no man from the ballot box, or jewelry box or the cartridge box because of his color. Exclude no woman from the ballot box because of her sex. Let the government of the country rest securely down upon the shoulders of the whole nation. But really, in this speech, Douglass is here to talk about leadership. He says, yes, we must update the Constitution. But even then, no matter what is written in that document, Our liberty actually depends on something more active.
46:44That, that is the lesson of the Civil War. He says, imagine if Lincoln had not been president during the war. Imagine the wartime commander-in-chief as the guy we got now. Had that other embodiment of political treachery, meanness, baseness, ingratitude, the vilest of the vile, the basest of the base, the most execrable of the execrable of modern times, he who shall be nameless, occupied the presidential chair. Your magnificent republic might have been numbered with the things that were. Douglas wants them to get rid of the veto. He wants them to limit presidents to one term. and he wants them to get rid of Johnson's ability to pardon Confederates for sure.
47:33The president, he says, has too much power. Mr. Johnson has sometimes overstepped this power in certain conditions of his mind, which are quite frequent, and mistaken himself for the United States instead of the president of the United States. there's a line in it that uh gives me chills when i read it today he says our government may at some point be in the hands of a bad man when in the hands of a good man it is all well enough we ought to have our government so shaped that even when it is in the hands of a bad man we shall be safe indeed you know can you imagine the first time i read that i mean it was well i'd have read it before at some point, but you can read a Douglas speech six times and find something new in it.
48:28But I used to end, occasionally, I used to end talks on Douglas with that during Trump's first term. Then just end with that. I wouldn't mention Trump. I mean, I didn't have to. It was so poignant. But what he's saying there is we got problems with our constitution. There structural problems with it but we still do depend on human character on some level it's such a prescient warning for all sorts of political systems all sorts of places in the world
49:04democracy is a great thing but it it first needs law and structure but then it needs people who believe in it. And one without the other probably won't work.
49:22Frederick Douglass took this speech on the road, campaigning for a bold new constitution. And Andrew Johnson barnstormed across the country with his own speech. It was an election year, on top of everything else. So the president wanted voters to give him a new Congress, one that would support his vision for a quick and tidy Reconstruction. He even says the real traitors to the Union were not the former Confederates, but they are the radical Republicans and the abolitionists. These are the real enemies to the Union. Johnson is stuck in this very rigid racist view. So he thinks the majority will support him because he can play the race card.
50:05And he does that constantly. If you give Black people rights, you're taking them away from whites. He says that constantly. And he's stunned when Northern whites do not get duped by his race card because they're seeing what's happening in the South. So the sympathy is for freed people at that point. There is no sort of racial unity between Northern whites and Southern whites in this issue. Johnson completely misreads the political situation. And it totally backfired on Johnson. The Republicans overwhelmingly won those congressional off-year elections, both houses, and returned a veto-proof two-thirds majority of both houses of Congress that next fall.
50:53And for the next three years, from 1866 to 1870, Congress passes law after law over Andrew Johnson's vetoes. They actually grow so tired of his obstruction that they impeach him in 1868. He's the first ever president to claim that dishonor. Johnson survives by a single vote, but it hardly matters. He's a lame duck president, a leader without a party. And with Johnson out of the way, congressional Republicans radically redesign the United States of America. This would be a tremendous moment. It is kind of a refounding of the republic because suddenly you get this momentum for the first federal civil rights laws that are passed at this time, the constitutional amendments, especially the 14th Amendment.
51:42The 14th Amendment. Establishing the idea of universal citizenship to anyone born in the United States, regardless of race or any other status, with equality before the law for all citizens. The 15th Amendment, establishing voting rights for Black men, at least. And civil rights laws that spell out how all these new rules are going to work. The founding principles of an interracial democracy in the United States. It's really an exciting moment in American history. Black Southerners leap at the opportunity as well. They rush to the polls to vote. Thousands of Black men hold public office. and they helped create some of the most progressive state governments in the history of this country.
52:29States like South Carolina create the first public schools, expand legal rights for women, abolish debtors' prisons, and so much more.
52:43They did engineer a remake in the United States, And it's the only time for that brief moment from essentially 1866 to 68, 69, 70, that moment when the term radical had a sort of consensus track sheet. It's hard to imagine. I know. In the United States. Radical Republicans. Radical was the consensus. They were in power. For three years. Yeah. By the way, the greatest legacy of the original Republican Party, try this on as an irony. they believed above all in activist aggressive use of federal power i mean look at the ways they had just used federal power that period is the laboratory where an american government the idea of government was reinvented for better or worse you can hate it you can love it you can like parts of it but that's the ear you got you want to understand rights in america you got to go to reconstruction you want to understand the role of government in society got to go to reconstruction you want to talk about what governments owe their people and what people owe their governments you got to go to reconstruction you want to talk about race in america you got to go to reconstruction because it kind of all starts there in the modern sense and and we relive it now every day all the time.
54:10All the time. I would add that if you want to understand education in America, you've got to go to Reconstruction as well, because that's when public education as we know it was established, and much of it by the people who'd just recently been enslaved.
54:39Thank you.
From the publisher
Frederick Douglass was one of the few activists to see his goal achieved within his lifetime — the abolition of slavery. Journalist Kai Wright shares how Douglass discovered a new purpose after President Lincoln’s assassination: campaigning for a bold new Constitution.
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