Life and Times of Frederick Douglass

Douglass finds President Grover Cleveland to be a “robust, manly man” with “the courage to act upon his convictions”—exactly the sort of person Douglass admires (453). Cleveland is a Democrat and Douglass a Republican, so the admiration is purely personal yet well founded. Following the death of his first wife, Anna Murray, in 1882, Douglass two years later married a white woman, Helen Pitts. This “shocking offense” leaves Douglass “ostracized by white and black alike” (453), though not by President Cleveland, who, at age 49, made an unconventional marriage of his own by wedding 21-year-old Frances Folsom.

Cleveland won the presidency in 1884 thanks largely to the rot and drift inside the Republican Party. For nearly eight years of Republican administrations under Rutherford B. Hayes and Chester A. Arthur, “the spirit of slavery and rebellion increased in power and advanced toward ascendancy” (454), interrupted only by the brief and hopeful interlude of James Garfield’s evanescent moment. President Cleveland himself represented neither slavery nor rebellion, but his Democratic Party most certainly did, and the Freedmen knew it.

In 1883, the Supreme Court struck down the Civil Rights Act of 1875, in effect prohibiting the federal government from enforcing the equal-rights protections guaranteed by the 14th Amendment.