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OTTILIE ASSING TO FREDERICK DOUGLASS
Boston[, Mass.] 3 July 1876[.]
MY DEAR FRIEND:
Thanks for your dear letter! Indeed, it is a sacrifice to write letters when the thermometer is in the nineties, and I can well imagine how oppressive it must be in Washington, since even here, in cool New-England we had yesterday ninety-one degrees, accompanied by intolerable sultriness and swarms of most malignant muskitoes.1On 1 July 1876, the maximum temperature in Boston was 80 degrees Fahrenheit; on 2 July, maximum temperature wthe maximum temperature was 93; and on 3 July the as 89. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, National Weather Service Forecast Office, NOWData. Yet I am going to tax you once more just with one line. Please do drop me a note directed 29 10th St. Hoboken, informing me whether and when I may expect you on a visit, in order to enable me to devote those days which you will appoint entirely to you and to fix some other day for the numerous other friends who will doubtless call to bid me farewell.2Douglass visited Assing before her trip to Europe, and they traveled to Philadelphia to attend its Centennial Exhibition, where a bust of Douglass was on display. His itinerary indicates that in mid-June he was in Cincinnati, where he spoke at the Republican National Convention, and that on 21 June he was campaigning in Rochester, New York. On the day when Assing sailed for Europe, 13 July, Douglass was in New York City, attending a Republican rally at Cooper Union. Therefore, while the editors cannot confirm that Douglass visited Assing one last time before she left the United States, he might have had time to do so. Douglass Papers, ser. 1, 4: xxxiv–xxxv; Alexandria (Va.) People’s Advocate, 27 May 1876; Jerome Hodos, “The 1876 Centennial in Philadelphia: Elite Networks and Political Culture,” in Social Capital in the City: Community and Civic Life in Philadelphia, ed. Richard Dilworth (Philadelphia, 2006), 19–39; Kathleen A. Clark, Defining Moments: African American Commemoration and Political Culture in the South, 1863–1913 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2005), 123; Ottilie Assing to Ludmilla Assing, 11 June 1876, Varnhagan Collection, Biblioteka Jagiellonska Krakowa, cited in Diedrich, Love across Color Lines, 322. You see, it is in your own interest that I am asking for that little exertion, for I know how you dislike a rush of visitors as is likely to take place.—People here declare my plan for traveling in Europe excellent, almost envy me and predict great enjoyment to me. I think I should look forward to the trip with some expectation if I only could rely that my large bird would follow me in due time. Without this confidence it is just one degree above going into exile.
You will have noticed that Schurz3Carl Schurz (1829–1906), born in Liblar, near Cologne, Germany, and educated at the University of Bonn, was an officer in the revolutionary movement of 1848 before his immigration to the United States in 1852. Settling first in Wisconsin, he quickly transferred his political skills and interests to Republican party and antislavery politics, and was later rewarded by Abraham Lincoln with the position of minister to Spain. Schurz soon resigned that post, accepted a military appointment, and saw action at Chancellorsville, Gettysburg, and Chattanooga, eventually achieving the rank of major general. In his subsequent political career as editor, U.S. senator from Missouri (1869–75), and secretary of the interior in the Hayes administration (1877–81), his interests encompassed the conditional readmission of the ex-Confederate states and a general amnesty for their leaders, the Liberal Republican movement, and reform in civil service, public land, and Indian policy. At the close of the century, Schurz remained outspoken in his opposition to American expansionism. Joseph Schafer, Carl Schurz: Militant Liberal (Evansville, Wisc., 1930); James P. Terzian, Defender of Human Rights: Carl Schurz (New York, 1965); ACAB, 5: 428–29; NCAB, 3: 202–03; DAB, 16: 466–70; BDUSC (online). is attempting to regain favor with the Republicans and has already declared fealty to Gov. Hayes.4Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1822–93), nineteenth president of the United States, had previously served as governor of his home state of Ohio (1867–71) and as a Republican congressman (1865–67). Although Hayes had supported the Radical Reconstruction program while in Congress, events during Grant’s administration had convinced him that the remaining southern Republican state governments, led by carpetbaggers and blacks, could no longer sustain themselves, even with federal military intervention. As president, Hayes attempted to rejuvenate the southern Republican party through a program of sectional reconciliation aimed at attracting former Whigs and Douglas Democrats. He believed that the goodwill of southern whites was better protection than federal military force for the political and civil rights of blacks. Soon after his inauguration, Hayes ordered U.S. troops in Charleston and New Orleans away from the statehouses and back to their garrisons, causing the Republican governments in South Carolina and Louisiana to collapse in the face of armed force by their Democratic opponents. Hayes appointed numerous southern Democrats to federal office, including ex-Confederate general David M. Key, who became his postmaster general. Despite Hayes’s hope, few new southern white voters joined the Republican party, and it shrank into a powerless minority in most of the region for the remainder of the nineteenth century. Kenneth E. Davison, The Presidency of Rutherford B. Hayes (Westport, Conn., 1972); Keith Dan Polakoff, The Politics of Inertia: The Election of 1876 and the End of Reconstruction (Baton Rouge, La., 1973), 246–51, 317–21; Vincent P. DeSantis, Republicans Face the Southern Question: The New Departure Years, 1877–1897 (1959; New York, 1969), 66–132; William Gillette, Retreat from Reconstruction, 1869–1879 (Baton Rouge, La., 1979), 335–52. Well if he can whip in those weak minded Germans who still believe in him, he is welcome to do so, since their votes count just as much as those of the most intelligent, but no impartial person can fail to perceive that he only comes back because he found apostasy not a paying business. He has kept long enough on the fence to find out in which direction the wind blows, and that the Democrats—even if successful, would have no reward for him.
