Other than having a new calendar, 1882 seemed little different from the vanished 1881. Warships flying the Union Jack remained outside Rochester harbor, as they did outside other U.S. harbors along the Great Lakes. No warships flying the Stars and Stripes came out to challenge them. That sprang in part from the cease-fire, but only in part. The rest was that the U.S. Navy's Great Lakes flotilla was incapable of challenging its British counterpart.
One day in the middle of January, the War Department announced that the troops of the Army of the Ohio were returning to U.S. soil. By the way the announcement sounded, no one would have guessed it meant the U.S. Army was abandoning the last foothold it held in Kentucky. The telegram made the move sound like a triumph.
"Look at this!" Douglass waved the announcement in his son's face. "Look at this. How many dead men in Louisville? They won't be coming back to Indiana. And for what did they die? For what, I ask you?"
"For President Blaine's ambition," Lewis answered. "Nothing else." The abject failure of the U.S. war effort had left him even more estranged from and cynical about the society in which he lived than he had been before the fighting started.
But Douglass shook his head. "The cause for which we fought was noble," he insisted, as he had insisted all along. "The power of the Confederate States should have been kept from growing. The tragedy was not that we fought, but that we fought while so manifestly unprepared to fight hard. Blaine gets some of the blame for that, but the Democrats who kept us so weak for so long must share it with him. If we are to have a return engagement with the Confederacy, we must be more ready in all respects. I see no other remedy."
"I never thought I'd live to see the day when you and Ben Butler were proposing the same cure for our disease," Lewis said. "The Democrats like him, too."
That brought Douglass up short. Butler had no more kept silent about the proposals he had made in the meeting at the Florence Hotel outside Chicago than Abraham Lincoln had about his. Both men were stirring up turmoil all through the battered country, and each one's followers violently opposed the other's. As Lincoln had joined with the Socialists, so Butler was indeed drifting back toward the Democrats, from whose ranks he had deserted during the War of Secession.
Reluctantly, Douglass said, "An idea may be a good one no matter who propounds it."
"Nero fiddled while Rome burned," Lewis retorted. "You temporize while the Republican Party goes up in flames."
"I am not temporizing," Douglass said with dignity. "I have done all I could to hold the party together. I am still doing all I can. It may not suffice-I am only one man. But 1 am doing my best."
"You'd have a better chance if your skin were white," Lewis said. Douglass stared at him. Negroes in the U.S. seldom spoke so openly of the handicap they suffered by being black. Lewis glared back in furious defiance. "It's true, and you damn well know it's true."
But Douglass shook his head. "Not for me. Had I been born white-had 1 been born all white"-he corrected himself, to remind his son they both had white blood in their veins-"I suspect I would have drifted into some easy, profitable trade, never giving a second thought, or even a first, to politics. Being the color I am, I have been compelled to face concerns I should otherwise have ignored. It has not been an easy road, but I am a better man for it."
"I do not have your detachment, Father, nor, frankly, do I want it," Lewis said. "I wish you a good morning." He departed Douglass' home without much ceremony and with a good deal of anger.
Douglass had to go out himself a couple of days later, when his wife developed a nasty cough. The new cough syrups, infused with the juice of the opium poppy, really could stop the hacking and barking that seemed such a characteristic sound of winter. Thanking heaven for modern medicine, Douglass bundled himself up and trudged off to the nearest drugstore, a few blocks away.
He thanked heaven for the day, too. As January days in Rochester went, it was good enough-better than good enough. It was bright and clear and, he guessed, a little above freezing. Not too much snow lay on the ground. Even so, he planted his feet with care; the sidewalks had their share of icy patches.
"Half a dollar," the druggist said, setting on the counter a glass bottle with the label in typography so rococo as to be almost unreadable. His voice was polite and suspicious at the same time. Douglass' fur-collared overcoat argued that he had the money to pay for the medicine. His being a Negro argued, to far too many white men, that he was likely to be shiftless and liable to be a thief.
He reached into his pocket and found a couple of quarters, which he set beside the bottle of cough elixir. Only after the druggist had scooped the coins into the cash box did his other hand come off the bottle. That care made Douglass want to laugh. He was stout, black, and well past sixty. Even if he did abscond with the medicine, how could he possibly hope to get more than a couple of blocks without being recognized or, more likely, tackled with no ceremony whatever?
He was carrying the bottle of cough syrup out of the store when three middle-aged white men started to come in. He stood aside to let them use the narrow doorway ahead of him. Instead of going on past, though, the fellow in the lead stopped, rocked back on his heels, and looked at him with an expression of mingled contempt and insult.
"Well, looky here, Jim. Looky here, Bill," he drawled. "Ain't this a fine buck nigger we got?" His friends laughed at what they and he thought to be wit.
Douglass stiffened. "If you gentlemen will excuse me-" he said, his voice chillier than the weather outside.
"Listen to him, Josh," either Jim or Bill exclaimed. "Talks just like a white man, he does. Probably got a white man inside him, that he ate up for breakfast." All three of them found that a very funny sally, too.
"If you gentlemen will excuse me-" Douglass repeated, bottling up the fury he felt. He took a step forward. More often than not, his sheer physical presence was enough to let him ease through confrontations like this.
It didn't work today. Instead of giving way before him, the white man in the lead-Josh-deliberately blocked his path. "No, we don't excuse you, Sambo," he said, and looked back over his shoulder. "Do we, boys?"
"No," one of Jim and Bill said, while the other was saying, "Hell, no."
Josh stuck a ringer in Douglass' face. "And do you know why we don't excuse you, boy? I don't excuse you because it's all your goddamn fault."
"I have no idea what you arc talking about," Douglass said, now alarmed as well as furious. This sort of thing hadn't happened to him in Rochester for many years. He knew too well how ugly it could get, and how fast it could get that way. Carefully, he said, "I do not know what you believe to be my fault, but I do know I have never set eyes on any of you before in my life." And, if God be kind, 1 shall never see you again.
"Not you, you-you niggers," Josh said. "Hadn't been for you niggers, this here'd still be one country. We wouldn't have fought two wars against the lousy Rebels, and they wouldn't have licked us twice, neither."
"Yeah," said Jim or Bill.
"That's right," Bill or Jim agreed.
They weren't drunk. Douglass took some small comfort in that. It might make them a little less likely to pound him into the boards of the floor. He said, "Black men did not ask to be brought to these shores, nor did we come willingly. The difficulty lies not in our being here but in the way we have been used. I myself bear on my back the scars of the overseer's lash."