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LIFE AND TIME OF FREDERICK DOUGLASS 383

wanted to know of me if such persons would be acceptable to some such
nations. I of course, thought the way clear to this new departure and encouraged
the President in his proposed advanced step. At the time this promise
was made and this hope was held out I had little doubt of its perfect fulfillment.
There was in the President's manner the appearance of a well matured,
fixed and resolute purpose to try the experiment. Hence his sudden and violent
death came to me, not only with the crushing significance of a great
crime against the nation and against mankind, but as a killing blow to my
newly awakened hopes for my struggling people. I thought that could this
new departure in the policy of our Government be carried out a death wound
would be given to American prejudice and a new and much needed assurance
would be given to the colored citizen. Thereafter he would be more
respected at home and abroad, than he had ever before been. It would be
conclusive evidence that the American people and Government were in earnest,
and that they were not trifling and deceiving him when they clothed
him with American citizenship. It would say to the country and to the civilized
world that the great Republican party of the American Union, which
carried the nation through the war, saved the country from dismemberment,
reconstructed the Government on the basis of liberty, emancipated the slave
and made him a citizen, was an honest party and meant all it had said and
was determined hereafter to take no step backward. Cherishing as I did, this
view, of what was promised and should be expected from the continued life
of Mr. Garfield, his death appeared to me as among the gloomiest calamities
that could have come to my people. The hopes awakened by the kind-hearted
President had no support in my knowledge of the character of the self-indulgent
man who was elected, in the contingency of death, to succeed him.
The announcement, at the Chicago Convention, of this man's name as that
of the candidate for the Vice Presidency, strangely enough brought over me
a shudder such as one might feel in coming upon an armed murderer or a
poisonous reptile. For some occult and mysterious cause I know not what, I
felt the hand of death upon me. I do not say or intimate that Mr. Arthur had
anything to do with the taking off of the President. I might have had the same
shudder had any other man been named, but I state the simple fact precisely
as it was.

Whether President Garfield would have confirmed or disappointed my
hopes, had his life been spared by the assassin's bullet, can, of course never
be known. His promise to break the record of former Presidents was plain,
emphatic and hearty. Considering the strength of popular prejudice against
the negro, the proposition to send a colored man to an admitted post of