but
its effects can be as far-reaching and as debasing. There has been
some manifestation of its possible consequences in the recent
outbreaks of lynching and other race oppression in the South. The
practical disfranchisement of the colored people in several States,
and the apparent acquiescence by the Supreme Court in the attempted
annulment, by restrictive and oppressive laws, of the war amendments
to the Constitution, have brought a foretaste of what might be
expected should the spirit of the Dred Scott decision become again the
paramount law of the land.

On February 7, 1866, Douglass acted as chief spokesman of a committee
of leading colored men of the country, who called upon President
Johnson to urge the importance of enfranchisement. Mr. Johnson, true
to his Southern instincts, was coldly hostile to the proposition,
recounted all the arguments against it, and refused the committee
an opportunity to reply. The matter was not left with Mr. Johnson,
however; and the committee turned its attention to the leading
Republican statesmen, in whom they found more impressionable material.
Under the leadership of Senators Sumner, Wilson, Wade, and others, the
matter was fully argued in Congress, the Democratic party being in
opposition, as always in national politics, to any measure enlarging
the rights or liberties of the colored race.

In September, 1866, Douglass was elected a delegate from Rochester to
the National Loyalists' Convention at Philadelphia, called to consider
the momentous questions of government growing out of the war. While he
had often attended anti-slavery conventions as the representative of a
small class of abolitionists, his election to represent a large city
in a national convention was so novel a departure from established
usage as to provoke surprise and comment all over the country. On
the way to Philadelphia he was waited upon by a committee of other
delegates, who came to his seat on the train and urged upon him the
impropriety of his taking a seat as a delegate. Douglass listened
patiently, but declined to be moved by their arguments. He replied
that he had been duly elected a delegate from Rochester, and he would
represent that city in the convention. A procession of the members
and friends of the convention was to take place on its opening day.
Douglass was solemnly warned that, if he walked in the procession, he
would probably be mobbed. But he had been mobbed before, more than
once, and