The two greatest Americans of the nineteenth century were Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass; and the two great themes of their lives were equality and self-government. Douglass made his reputation, in his own time and for posterity, as a searing witness to slavery and as its most powerful opponent. But the abolition of slavery didn’t conclude his life’s work. After the Civil War and Lincoln’s murder, Douglass was left to take on the cause that connects him most directly to our time: the right and necessity of Black Americans to be fully equal citizens, with equal votes. 

The same idea of human equality with which Douglass rhetorically demolished slavery gave him the logical tools to reframe the United States as a truly self-governing republic. To be human is to be born equal, with an equal right to participate in making and directing one’s government. “The fundamental and unanswerable argument in favor of the enfranchisement of the negro is found in the undisputed fact of his manhood,” Douglass wrote in The Atlantic in 1867. “He is a man, and by every fact and argument by which any man can sustain his right to vote, the negro can sustain his right equally.” He warned that depriving freed slaves of the vote would blight all Americans and bring ruin to the republic. Douglass died as the rule of Jim Crow hardened across the South. Equal citizenship, the cause of his last years, became the work of future generations, down to the present.