Frederick Douglass on Land Reform

From Frederick Douglass' Paper, June 27, 1856

First African American confirmed to the Senate, 1877.

I unearthed an interesting article by Frederick Douglass on land reform today as I was sleuthing the question of how Douglass opined about confiscating and redistributing the land of the slavers. My impression from this article by Nicholas Buccola had been that Douglass did not advocate such redistribution, and that his later comments from 1880 in support of Thaddeus Stevens and Charles Sumner’s Reconstruction proposal represented a shift in Douglass’s thinking. I’m no longer sure, and I’d be very interested if anyone has any speeches or articles from the Reconstruction period where he speaks to this.

Here is the relevant passage from that 1880 Emancipation Day speech where he regrets that the nation had not followed Stevens and Sumner.

Against the voice of Stevens, Sumner and Wade, and other far-seeing statesmen, the Government by whom we were emancipated left us completely in the power of our former owners. They turned us loose to the open sky and left us not a foot of ground from which to get a crust of bread.

It did not do as well by us as Russia did by her serfs, or Pharaoh did by the Hebrews. With freedom Russia gave land and Egypt loaned jewels. It may have been best to leave us thus to make terms with those whose wrath it had kindled against us. It does not seem right that we should have been so left, but it fully explains our present poverty and wretchedness.

In trying to determine what Douglass’s views of appropriating the property of the slavers in order to give to the freedmen, I stumbled across this article from 1856 on land reform. This is a separate question entirely, but very interesting in itself for understanding how Douglass thought about land and property. I reprint it here. Only changes I made were a minor typo, some paragraph breaks, and I had to make a guess in one place where the scan was unclear. I flag the words in question.

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If all men are Brothers, and are equally precious in the sight of God, the equal right of all men to a portion of the earth at once becomes manifest. God is not partial. His glorious impartiality is heard in all the thunder and in all the myriad voices of nature. The most despised of the children of men, may breathe the pure air of heaven, and our patient old earth responds as readily to the hand of black industry as to white. God is impartial, just, and loving to all, and if so, there can be no question, that this earth of ours, created by God, and out of which we were formed, and by which our lives are sustained, belongs alike and equally to all the children of men. Any human arrangement, therefore, which in any measure tends to deprive a part of mankind of their right to the soil, whether directly or indirectly, immediately or remotely, by slow and imperceptible methods, by monopoly, no matter how, the thing done, is opposed to natural right and no subtilty of human reasoning, can make it in harmony with the Government of God.

The agitation of this question gained much more attention a few years ago than now. That agitation has been, for the last three years, if not dead, in a state of suspended animation. Its Lecturers have gone home, its papers have gone down and the thing has stopped. This is all wrong. The reasons for the Land Reform movement are as strong, and stronger now than formerly, and must increase in strength while the rich grow richer, and the poor poorer. There is one reason for the declension of interest in this question, furnished in the fact, that many of those who advocated the [cause]* most loudly, loved its principles with a selfish love.

They hated Land monopoly, simply because they were not able to monopolize the land themselves. The Land Reformers have now accepted their pre-emption rights joyfully, while they have seen without protest their colored brother shamelessly denied of his. We have heard but one protest against the Land Bill of ’54 and that was Gerrit Smith’s, in refusing to vote for it because it trampled upon the rights, and insulted the poorest of all God’s children in America. This act of Mr. Smith’s, condemned at the time by a time serving expediency, will shine among the brightest stars with which posterity will gratefully crown his memory.

He refused Land for the white man—nay, he scorned to accept for himself what was insultingly and shamefully denied to his humbler brother. Had Land Reformers been like Gerrit Smith, Land Reform would have had a “local habitation” as well as a “name;” but it withered away for the lack of the great principle of “IMPARTIALITY,” which it was loudest in professing, and upon which it was professedly based. White parties, white Land Reform, white Territories, white constitutions, white churches, and religion, and white everything, are essentially devilish. They would drive the black man to Hell! They would, at any rate, leave him no place in heaven or earth. It was our knowledge of the whited character of the Land Reform movement which has led us all along to distrust it, and when it died without a struggle, it died like itself—a thing which had no real hold upon life-giving principles.

We understand that the Land Reformers, those who have some thing like a true and consistent idea of the principles upon which the cause is based, are to hold a National Land Reform Convention on the 3rd and 4th July, at Albany. We are informed that our friends Gerrit Smith, and William Goodell, will be there. We are glad of this, and would be glad to be with them, but cannot, on account of other duties.

The Land Reform question, viewed by itself, is of very high importance. Relatively, however, looked at in connection with the terrible and overshadowing question of Slavery, it parts with its apparent urgency and importance. It seems most manifest to our judgment, that the slave question is now the great and paramount question, transcending for the present all other questions, the one which God, by the stern logic of events, is now pressing upon the attention of this guilty nation for settlement.

Whether men shall have their own bodies, their own wives and children, must ever be a more vital and pressing question, than whether men shall own or not own the insensible earth under our feet. Self-ownership, is the great right from which all other rights are inferable. When that great right is trampled in the dust, annihilated in the persons of four millions of the American people, we care but little for Land Reform.

*There is a fold in the paper where this was scanned and only the bottom third of the letters of these words are visible. The “cause most” is my best guess, and it makes sense in context.