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10/4/22

By Liam Farrell 

Three University of Maryland faculty helped illuminate the stories behind two 19th-century state icons for a new pair of documentaries premiering on PBS this month.

“Harriet Tubman: Visions of Freedom” debuts at 10 tonight, and “Becoming Frederick Douglass” follows at 10 p.m. Oct. 11. The films, directed by Academy Award-nominated filmmaker Stanley Nelson, include interviews about Tubman with Cheryl LaRoche, associate research professor in the School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation and the author of “Free Black Communities and the Underground Railroad: The Geography of Resistance;” about Douglass with Christopher Bonner, associate history professor and author of “Remaking the Republic: Black Politics and the Creation of American Citizenship;” and about Douglass with Robert Levine, whose most recent book is “The Failed Promise: Reconstruction, Frederick Douglass, and the Impeachment of Andrew Johnson.”

“There are no two people more important to our country’s history than Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman. Their remarkable lives and contributions were a critical part of the 19th century, and their legacies help us understand who we are as a nation,” Nelson said. “We are honored to share their stories with a country that continues to grapple with the impact of slavery and debate notions of citizenship, democracy and freedom.”

La Roche said Tubman is a fascinating figure because of the leadership she was able to show despite being a diminutive figure barely 5 feet tall who didn’t know how to read or write.

“She doesn’t have the impressive credentials we really associate with (being a leader),” she said. “And yet she is leading men, women, children—sometimes whole families—out of slavery.”

Tubman developed a strong sense of herself from an upbringing on the Eastern Shore with an intact nuclear family, La Roche said, and her religious faith gave her the confidence and strength to help liberate slaves on the Underground Railroad.

“She did not allow herself to be defined by what the 19th century thought of Black women,” she said. “She transcended all of that.”

Bonner teaches a course on Douglass, who was born into and escaped from slavery in Talbot County, Md., before launching a career as an abolitionist, orator and writer; a statue of him now stands on the UMD campus. He said Douglass’ life can be a lens onto how America has wrestled with its stated ideals and how it failed to live up to them even after slavery was ended.

“We can see the work that had to be done to make freedom real … and the insufficiencies of freedom,” he said. “He points to a history of people seeking opportunities in the United States and confronting its limitations.”

While both Tubman and Douglass are known as historic icons, Bonner said he hopes the documentary also shows the bravery and contributions of the people who supported and worked alongside them. In order to achieve remarkable things, he said, “the extraordinary needs other extraordinary.”

“Individuals can change the world but that happens when people work together,” he said. “Their histories are histories of solidarity.”

The films are co-productions of Firelight Films and Maryland Public Television, with additional support from the state of Maryland, Bowie State University, DirecTV and Pfizer.

Robert Levine Discusses Reconstruction, Frederick Douglass and the Impeachment of Andrew Johnson. The talk is part of a series centering ARHU faculty expertise on issues of systemic racism, inequality and social justice.

Date of Publication: 
2020-12-21
9/24/21

BY ROBERT S. LEVINE

Robert S. Levine is Distinguished University Professor of English at the University of Maryland, College Park, and author of The Failed Promise: Reconstruction, Frederick Douglass, and the Impeachment of Andrew Johnson, available now from W. W. Norton & Company.

On Jan. 3, 1867, nearly two years after the end of the Civil War, Frederick Douglass stood before a full house of hundreds of African Americans at Philadelphia’s National Hall. He had been invited to speak in a Black lecture series organized by William Still, famous for his work on the Underground Railroad. As recounted by the Philadelphia Daily Evening Telegraph, the celebrated African American singer Elizabeth Taylor Greenfield performed several arias before Douglass’s introduction. Douglass then took the stage to speak on the “Sources of Danger to the Republic.” The Telegraph reported that he “was frequently interrupted by applause, and evidently made the best effort of his life.”

“Sources of Danger to the Republic” is indeed one of Douglass’s greatest speeches, and it deserves to be better known for its ruminations on the precarious state of democracy in post-Civil War America. Douglass delivered the speech in the midst of the battle over civil rights for Black people, addressing the threat posed to the nation by a racist President who refused to give them the full rights of citizenship. Douglass’s warning about antidemocratic authoritarianism during the early years of Reconstruction resonates in our own time as well.

The “Sources of Danger” speech was prompted by the reactionary policies of Andrew Johnson, who assumed the presidency on April 15, 1865, after Abraham Lincoln’s assassination. Shortly after taking office, Johnson pardoned former Confederate leaders, and over the four years of his presidency he vetoed all legislation that sought to expand the rights of African Americans. (Many of those vetoes were overturned by the Radical Republicans and their allies.) In particular, Johnson opposed measures that granted African Americans the right to vote. His reactionary policies contributed to massacres of Black people in Memphis and New Orleans during the spring and summer of 1866. Appalled by the killing of over 100 Black people in those cities, Douglass linked the murders to the disempowerment promoted by Johnson. “Disenfranchisement means New Orleans; it means Memphis,” he said. In this way Douglass called attention to the always simmering possibilities for violence that accompanied the suppression of voting rights.

But Douglass was also angry at the Radical Republicans, who claimed to support African Americans, but attempted to stop Douglass from attending a public meeting of Republicans in September 1866 because they didn’t want their party to be perceived as “Black.” Douglass was also distraught that the Republicans’ proposed Fourteenth Amendment, which gave Blacks birthright citizenship, failed to include the right to vote. Without the vote, Douglass bitterly remarked, “my citizenship is but an empty name.”

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Thursday, December 09, 2021 - 9:00 AM to 10:00 AM

Robert Levine, professor of English, will discuss "The Failed Promise: Reconstruction, Frederick Douglass, and the Impeachment of Andrew Johnson.

9/24/21

BY ROBERT S. LEVINE

Robert S. Levine is Distinguished University Professor of English at the University of Maryland, College Park, and author of The Failed Promise: Reconstruction, Frederick Douglass, and the Impeachment of Andrew Johnson, available now from W. W. Norton & Company.

On Jan. 3, 1867, nearly two years after the end of the Civil War, Frederick Douglass stood before a full house of hundreds of African Americans at Philadelphia’s National Hall. He had been invited to speak in a Black lecture series organized by William Still, famous for his work on the Underground Railroad. As recounted by the Philadelphia Daily Evening Telegraph, the celebrated African American singer Elizabeth Taylor Greenfield performed several arias before Douglass’s introduction. Douglass then took the stage to speak on the “Sources of Danger to the Republic.” The Telegraph reported that he “was frequently interrupted by applause, and evidently made the best effort of his life.”

“Sources of Danger to the Republic” is indeed one of Douglass’s greatest speeches, and it deserves to be better known for its ruminations on the precarious state of democracy in post-Civil War America. Douglass delivered the speech in the midst of the battle over civil rights for Black people, addressing the threat posed to the nation by a racist President who refused to give them the full rights of citizenship. Douglass’s warning about antidemocratic authoritarianism during the early years of Reconstruction resonates in our own time as well.

The “Sources of Danger” speech was prompted by the reactionary policies of Andrew Johnson, who assumed the presidency on April 15, 1865, after Abraham Lincoln’s assassination. Shortly after taking office, Johnson pardoned former Confederate leaders, and over the four years of his presidency he vetoed all legislation that sought to expand the rights of African Americans. (Many of those vetoes were overturned by the Radical Republicans and their allies.) In particular, Johnson opposed measures that granted African Americans the right to vote. His reactionary policies contributed to massacres of Black people in Memphis and New Orleans during the spring and summer of 1866. Appalled by the killing of over 100 Black people in those cities, Douglass linked the murders to the disempowerment promoted by Johnson. “Disenfranchisement means New Orleans; it means Memphis,” he said. In this way Douglass called attention to the always simmering possibilities for violence that accompanied the suppression of voting rights.

But Douglass was also angry at the Radical Republicans, who claimed to support African Americans, but attempted to stop Douglass from attending a public meeting of Republicans in September 1866 because they didn’t want their party to be perceived as “Black.” Douglass was also distraught that the Republicans’ proposed Fourteenth Amendment, which gave Blacks birthright citizenship, failed to include the right to vote. Without the vote, Douglass bitterly remarked, “my citizenship is but an empty name.”

Convinced that Reconstruction was at a crossroads, Douglass composed “Sources of Danger to the Republic” during late 1866 and gave its first full presentation in January 1867 to the Black lecture series in Philadelphia. In all versions of the speech, Douglass asked: What happens when a “bad man,” as he termed Andrew Johnson, occupies the White House? Douglass knew that Johnson was hardly the first “bad man” to assume the presidency and would not be the last. Before the packed house at National Hall, Douglass made a surprising claim: the principle source of danger to the Republic was the Constitution itself, which, by failing to put a significant check on executive power, “put the liberties of the American people at the mercy of a bad and wicked President and his Cabinet.”

Douglass admired the U.S. Constitution, regularly calling it a “liberty document.” But it had “defects and errors,” he claimed, because the framers mistakenly invested the President with “kingly powers.” Key to Douglass’s speech was his elaboration of exactly how the Constitution enabled a President to thwart democracy.

Douglass objected, first of all, to the “immense patronage” that the Constitution put at the President’s disposal—hundreds of millions of dollars that he could use to appoint someone to a government job “because of his political opinions, not for any fitness for the position.” Patronage power was potentially corrupting, both of the President and his appointees, Douglass explained, for “it holds out a temptation to a man to agree with the President, not because of the wisdom and justice of his position, but because in that way he can get something in exchange for his soul.”

Second, Douglass objected to the Constitution’s conception of a presidential veto that could only be overturned by a two-thirds vote of Congress. Placing so much power in the hands of the President, he insisted, undercut the democratic spirit of Congress. In a similar vein, he argued that the presidency should be a single-term position. Under the current system, he remarked, the President “is partly President, and partly chief of the Presidential party.” For that reason, the President will always be tempted to serve himself more than the country.

Third, Douglass took special exception to the President’s pardoning power. The framers’ decision to make the President the sole arbiter on federal pardons in effect gave the President “a coin with which to traffic in treason.” Knowing that he could pardon anyone serving his interests, the President could use that power to gain “co-operation and alliance, instead of loyal obedience to the laws of the land.” Douglass summed up the problem: “A Government that cannot hate traitors, cannot love and respect loyal men.”

Douglass believed that the defects in the Constitution could be fixed through amendments that cut back on patronage, limited the pardoning power, changed the votes needed to overturn a presidential veto, made the presidency a one-term position and got rid of the vice-presidency (the office that enabled Johnson’s presidency). “Laughter and cheers,” according to the reporter for the Telegraph, greeted Douglass’s remark that “we have had back luck with Vice-Presidents.”

Douglass despised Johnson. But even more crucial to “Sources of Danger” was his concern that Americans risked losing that which they most valued: “democracy in its purity.” For Douglass, democracy was about voting rights. Making clear that the lack of Black suffrage had much to do with Johnson, but was not exclusively Johnson’s fault, Douglass proclaimed: “The fact is that the ballot-box, upon which we have relied as a protection from the passions of the multitude, has failed us, broken down under us.” Most Black people in America, whether in the North or South, simply didn’t have the right to vote. In his speech at National Hall, Douglass called on Black people to “hate as you love,” extolling anger as a way to create community and prompt political action. One month later, when he gave a slightly revised version of the speech to a white audience in St. Louis, Douglass concluded quite differently, telling the whites in attendance that “this matter of Reconstruction” can be left to the “constructive talent of this Anglo-Saxon race.” He continued to deliver versions of “Sources of Danger” through 1867; it was one of his most popular speeches.

With the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment in 1870, giving Black men the right to vote, Douglass got what he wanted, but by the late 1870s Black people found it nearly impossible to vote in the South. Douglass anticipated these problems in “Sources of Danger” when he instructed Johnson and other white racists: “Drive no man from the ballot-box because of his color.” Douglass’s speech inspired people in 1867 and has much to say to us today, not just about the dangers posed by executive power, whether of Presidents or governors, but about what it means for the character of the nation to restrict the voting rights of African Americans and other people of color. The speech is a prophetic warning from the past about how the powerful can use the tools of power to shut down democracy. Just as important, it advocates resistance in order to preserve what Douglass termed “our beautiful republican institutions.”

8/18/21

By Jessica Weiss ’05  /  Aug 18, 2021

It was a year of presidential impeachment and struggles over African American voting rights—wait, are we talking about 2021 or 1868?

In his new book coming out on Saturday, “The Failed Promise: Reconstruction, Frederick Douglass, and the Impeachment of Andrew Johnson,” University of Maryland Distinguished University Professor of English Robert Levine draws the parallels between the centuries. Using archival materials including speeches, newspaper articles and letters, he chronicles the great Maryland-born abolitionist and orator’s changing views on the 17th U.S. president—from initial optimism following President Lincoln’s assassination to his ultimate disillusionment in the prospect of a reconstructed United States that secured Black Americans’ right to freely vote.

Robert Levine portrait

“‘The Failed Promise’ is a lesson for our times as we continue to confront our nation’s unfulfilled promise of racial equality,” said Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr., director of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research.

We recently spoke to Levine about the importance of recovering a Black perspective on Johnson and the continuing resonance of Douglass’ words. This interview has been condensed for length and clarity.

You have a wide interest in American literature and culture, but a particular fascination with Frederick Douglass. Why?
Douglass was a new passion for me when I got to the University of Maryland (in 1983) as he was a Marylander. The more I read by him, the more I was taken with the brilliance of the language in both his autobiographies and speeches. He works in different genres. You have the autobiographer, you have the fiction writer, you have the lecturer, and he edits newspapers and writes columns—so you have all that plus thousands of letters that are available at the Library of Congress and elsewhere. David W. Blight, Douglass’ most recent biographer, terms him a “prophet.” He is a prophet. He looks forward to issues in the 20th and the 21st century.

Speaking of prophecy, it must have been interesting to work on a book that includes perspectives on an impeachment in the midst of another impeachment.
Like a lot of people, I got interested in the Johnson impeachment during the Donald Trump era. In 2017 I was invited to give a talk at the University of Edinburgh and at the University of Paris, so I decided to talk about the Johnson impeachment ... and people were really interested. So, I came home and decided to write an essay and the essay got really long. And then the more I read, the more I thought I might have a short book. And as I was mapping it out, I realized I actually had enough for a standard book. Over time it became less a book about Trump and more a book about the unfinished promise—or what I call the “failed promise”—of Reconstruction.

What surprised you about the hope many Black people had for Johnson at the start of his presidency?
I found in writings by Radical Republicans and Black activists a belief that Lincoln was limited and that Johnson showed much more promise. Right at the start they said, ‘Hey, maybe this is the person we need.’ Johnson was a pro-Union Southerner; he put his life on the line. He was anti-slavery—not during the 1850s, but during the Civil War he turned against slavery. In October 1864, Johnson gave a widely publicized speech in Tennessee. The Emancipation Proclamation did not free enslaved people in the border states, so there were still enslaved people in Tennessee. And he said in that speech that he would end slavery in Tennessee. He was not legally able to do that, he didn't have that power, but he told the Black people in attendance that they needed a Moses and they shouted back to him, “You are our Moses!” And that's something that stuck with Johnson for the rest of his life, an increasingly delusional belief that he was Moses, that he cared about Black people.

But fast forward to the end of 1865 and Douglass and his colleagues are disillusioned.
One of my favorite chapters is about when Frederick Douglass visited Johnson in the White House in February 1866 with eight or nine other people, known as the “Black delegation.” There’s a dramatic moment where they're seeing if Johnson will actually talk to them and make concessions. And when it's clear that he won't, they're walking out of the Executive Office and Douglass says something to Johnson about how he’s turning on his friends, and then Johnson lays into Douglass and Douglass lays into Johnson. The interesting thing here is that there was a renowned young stenographer there who wrote down the entire exchange. And in that exchange Johnson reveals some of his darkest, most reactionary thoughts about the formerly enslaved. That night, the whole back and forth was printed in The Washington Star newspaper, and that article about Douglass’ encounter with Johnson circulates in newspapers across the United States; it was republished in Nevada, in California and in other states across the country. I argue that Douglass deliberately provoked Johnson so as to elicit his true racist views. This moment had a huge impact on how Johnson came to be perceived.

You’ve noted, including in a recent op-ed in The Washington Post, that Douglass’ words have particular relevance in the current debate over voting rights.
Almost every page of my book shows how important voting rights were at the time to Black people, how voting rights are central to U.S. citizenship, how if you aren't allowed to vote, you aren't a citizen—you aren't part of the politics. Douglass gets impassioned about how important voting is to actually feeling that you're visible in the nation. He argues that Black people even fought in wars for the United States, so shouldn’t they have the right to vote? His efforts paid off with the ratification of the 15th Amendment in 1870, but Douglass soon realized that the new law would not necessarily be enforced. Now it's the year 2021, and I wish voting rights weren't still an issue in our culture, but yes, Douglass’ campaign for Black voting rights in the years right after the Civil War continues to speak directly to the current moment.

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