A WALL OF FIRE: The 15th Amendment

Give to every loyal citizen the elective franchise - a right and power which will form a wall of fire for his protection.

- Frederick Douglass

Voting rights for black people, who had been newly emancipated from chattel slavery, was one of the main themes of Reconstruction. And there were many voices leading the call for extending the elective franchise to black people as an essential element to achieve and sustain citizenship.

In this episode - A Wall of Fire - we feature some of the period’s most compelling voices; advocates for and against the right to vote for black men, and whether suffrage should be granted to women.

John Mercer Langston

Lawyer, Publisher, Lecturer, Freedmen’s Bureau Administrator, Educator and Elected Official

John Mercer Langston was born December 14, 1829 to a freed black woman and wealthy white planter in Louisa County, Virginia. After the death of his parents, he moved to Ohio in 1833. He earned both a bachelors degree and master’s degree from Oberlin College in Ohio. He was the first black person to apply to an American law school but was denied because of his race. He read law under prominent probate judge and was admitted to Ohio bar in 1849, becoming the first black man to be licensed to practice law in the state. Ironically, his admission was based, in part, on his mixed-race heritage.

Langston was elected president of the National Equal Rights League, forerunner of the NAACP, serving from from 1864 – 1868. During the Civil War, Langston recruited and trained black soldiers to fight on behalf of the Union as part of the United States Colored Troops (USCT) regiment. As listeners know, he was in Washington D.C. on April 11, 1865 and was at the White House when Abraham Lincoln gave his speech supporting extending the right to vote to black men. He was in Washington to seek a commission as a colonel because of his successful recruitment efforts, but he was denied.

Edwin Stanton, Secretary of War, appointed Langston to be Inspector General for the Freedmen’s Bureau and he became a leading advocate of the right to vote as an organizer of Republican Union leagues. He later became the Founding dean of Howard University Law school and later was twice mentioned as a Republican Vice-Presidential candidate.

Langston died November 15, 1897.

Langston is portrayed by voice-over specialist Marvin Cummings.

Frederick Douglass

Abolitionist, Publisher/Lecturer, Orator and Statesman

Frederick Douglass was born in Talbot County, Maryland in February 1818. He escaped from slavery in Baltimore in 1838 and later became a lecturer for the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1841. Douglass quickly emerged as the most fiery of its orators, and was renowned for his first-hand accounts of the slave experience. He published his first biography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave in 1845.

To promote the cause of abolition, Douglass would edit and publish a series of antislavery newspapers between 1847-1863. His writings and speeches were considered by many to be the definitive viewpoint in the cause of ending slavery and establishing citizenship rights for black people.

Douglass was one of the few leaders of the period who was in favor of extending the right to vote to women, although he maintained his stance that black men were more in need of the franchise as a component of citizenship, a right that white women already enjoyed to a certain extent. In December 1866, Douglass wrote an article in The Atlantic Monthly called Reconstruction where he said the elective franchise would be

…a right and power…which will form a wall of fire for his protection. [emphasis added]

He would later serve as a U.S. Marshall (1877-1881) and Recorder of Deeds (1881-1886) for the District of Columbia and he served as Minister of Haiti, 1889-1891.

Douglass lived the remainder of his life in the Anacostia neighborhood of Washington, D.C. where he died February 20, 1895.

Douglass is portrayed by Hidden Legal Figures host Derrick Alexander Pope, J.D.

Thaddeus Stevens

Lawyer, United States Congress

Thaddeus Stevens was born in Danville, Vermont on April 4, 1792. He moved to Pennsylvania in 1815 and became a lawyer the next year. He was not well-known initially, but after his representing a man charged with the murder of a constable, his reputation grew. He became an opponent of slavery early in his career and was first elected to Congress in 1849 as a member of the Whig party. He was defeated in 1853 largely for his anti-slavery views, but was returned to Congress as a Republican in 1859.

In Congress, he became regarded as one of the leaders of the Radical Republicans, those who wanted to secure the rights of newly emancipated black people and to punish severely those who were responsible for causing the civil war. Stevens is best known for proposing and chairing the Joint Committee on Reconstruction, which led to the drafting and passage of the Fourteenth Amendment and his 1865 speech in Lancaster, Pennsylvania where he proposed as an economic and political solution giving to freedmen “40 acres” of land confiscated by the Union from former white planters.

Stevens was the Chairman of the Managers chosen by the House of Representatives to present the case at the impeachment trial of President Andrew Johnson in 1868.

Stevens died at his home on August 11, 1868.

* * * * * * *

Stevens is portrayed by North Carolina Chief Assistant District Attorney Quintin McGhee.

Andrew Johnson

17th President of the United States

Andrew Johnson was born in Raleigh, North Carolina on December 29, 1808 and moved to Tennessee in 1826. He worked as a tailor in Greenville before being elected to Congress as a Democrat in 1843 and to the United States Senate in 1857. He was Military Governor of Tennessee, serving from 1862 until 1865 when he was elected Vice President under Abraham Lincoln.

He succeeded to the presidency after Lincoln’s assassination in April 1865, and as an avowed supporter of states’ rights and sympathizer to the claim of white supremacy, he rejected the plans for Reconstruction that sought advancement of rights for the newly emancipated. His main interest was in offering amnesty and pardons for the southerners who had taken part in waging and conducting the civil war. He vetoed the bill Congress passed to extend the authority of the Freedmen’s Bureau and the first civil rights bill.

Johnson was later impeached, becoming the first United States president to reach that distinction, for his attempt to discharge Secretary of War Edwin Stanton in violation of the Tenure of Office Act. He was, however, acquitted by the Senate.

After being defeated by Ulysses S. Grant in the 1868 election, Johnson would once again serve in the United States Senate in 1875, until his death on July 31, 1875.

* * * * * * *

Douglass is portrayed by Hidden Legal Figures host Derrick Alexander Pope, J.D.

Susan B. Anthony

Abolitionist, Leader in Women’s Suffrage Movement

Susan B. Anthony was born in Adams, Massachusetts on February 15, 1820. She began a friendship with Elizabeth Cady Stanton in 1851 and became active in the women’s rights movement. She served as an agent for the American Anti-Slavery Society from 1856-1861. She organized a petition drive in support of the Thirteenth Amendment and helped found the American Equal Rights Association in 1866, and she served as an executive officer of the National Woman Suffrage Association from 1869 to 1890.

Anthony was arrested and fined $100 for voting in the 1872 election. During her trial she told the judge,

You have trampled under foot every vital principle of our government. My natural rights, my civil rights, my political rights, my judicial rights, are all alike ignored. I shall never pay a dollar of your unjust penalty.

She edited the History of Woman Suffrage (3 Vols., 1881-1886) with Stanton and Matilda Joslyn Gage and she served as vice president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association from 1890 to 1892 and she succeeded Stanton as president from 1892 to 1900.

She died at her home in Rochester, New York on March 13, 1906 from pneumonia and heart failure.

* * * * * * *

Anthony is portrayed in this episode by Attorney Yvonne Godfrey.

Frances Ellen Watkins Harper

Teacher, Poet, Suffragette

Frances Ellen Watkins was born to free parents in Baltimore, Maryland on September 24, 1825. She taught school in Ohio and Pennsylvania. After publishing Poems on Miscellaneous Subjects in 1854, she toured New England, Canada, and the western states as an antislavery lecturer until she married Fenton Harper in 1860. Her husband died in 1860 and she resumed lecturing making several tours of the south during Reconstruction.

Ninety-seven years before the world would come to know the name Rosa Parks, Frances Harper refused to ride in the “colored” section of a segregated trolley car in Philadelphia. She would use the experience to address the Eleventh meeting of the National Women’s Rights Convention in New York in 1866. Part of her speech is used in this episode and future episodes will include portions of her address.

She published the narrative poem, Moses: A Story of the Nile in 1869 and in 1872, a poetry collection Sketches of the South. That same year, she established the YMCA Sabbath School in Philadelphia. She later became active in the temperance and women’s suffrage movements. She was a co-founder of the National Association of Colored Women in 1906.

She died of heart failure February 22, 1911.

* * * * * * *

Harper is portrayed in this episode by Attorney Saundra Davis.