Douglass’ concern led him to make a startling confession to Griffiths. Five days after Lincoln’s death, he wrote: “Mr. [Andrew] Johnson is, in many respects, better qualified for the work to come than was Mr. Lincoln.” Given the evidence, Douglass’ expectation was not unreasonable. As military governor of Tennessee during the Civil War, Johnson had gained a reputation as a Southern Unionist who supported freedom for the enslaved. In October 1864, he emancipated those enslaved in Tennessee (a state exempted by the Emancipation Proclamation because it was under Union control) and told a gathering of Black Tennesseans, “I will indeed be your Moses.” Johnson spoke of a future where all “loyal men, whether white or black” would have “a fair chance in the race of life.” Within days of becoming president in April 1865, he declared of the defeated Confederates: “They must not only be punished, but their social power must be destroyed.”
Douglass believed the new president would punish former Confederates in a way that Lincoln would not have. In a letter to Griffiths on April 20, 1865, he wrote that, “when confronted by apparent repentance” of former Confederates, Lincoln’s “wonderful moderation, his remarkable caution and his extreme amiability” would have softened him, sparing disloyal white Southerners “the loyal wrath their crimes have provoked.” Douglass said Lincoln would have given ex-Confederates back their land and restored their citizenship rights, requiring only the abolition of slavery—not full enfranchisement for Black men. Johnson, by contrast, had lived in slave states his entire life, and so “better understands than Mr. Lincoln did the necessity of putting down not only slavery but the slave power.”
Douglass, then, said Lincoln’s assassination might strangely prove a blessing for Black Americans. “I now think that even this dreadful crime, though intended to strike down both the government and the cause of the slave, will tend to the advantage of both,” he wrote to Griffiths. The assassination would unite the North and “prevent that hasty reunion of the South with the North which boded no good to the colored race.”
Douglass’ hopes were dashed, as Johnson soon showed his colors, catering more to ex-rebels than to freedmen. On May 29, 1865, he issued an amnesty proclamation, pardoning thousands of former Confederates. With Congress out of session from March until December, he also worked quickly to readmit seceded states. At the same time, Johnson refused to support the enfranchisement of Black men. In late September 1865, Douglass publicly denounced the president’s “persistent determination...to hold and treat us in a degraded relation.” After a contentious meeting with Johnson in February 1866, Douglass declared in a speech, “He who says President Johnson is following in the footsteps of his predecessor, casts foul dishonor on the name of Abraham Lincoln!”
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