# Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1892)/Chapter 48

CHAPTER VII.
DEFEAT OF JAMES G. BLAINE.
THE next event worthy of remark after the decision of the Supreme Court against the validity of the Civil Rights Law, and one which strikingly illustrated the reaction of public sentiment and the steady march of the slave power toward national supremacy since the agonies of the war, was the defeat in 1884 of Mr. James G. Blaine, the Republican candidate for the presidency, and the election of Mr. Grover Cleveland, the Democratic candidate for that office. This result, in view of the men and the parties represented, was a marked surprise. Mr. Blaine was supposed to be the most popular statesman in the country, while his opponent was little known outside of his own State. Besides, the attitude and behavior of the Democratic party during the war had been such as to induce belief that many years must elapse before it could again be trusted with the reins of the National Government. Events show that little dependence can be wisely placed upon the political stability of the masses. Popularity to-day is, with them, no guaranty of popularity to-morrow. Offenses and services are alike easily and speedily forgotten by them. They change front at the command of the moment. Yet it is never difficult to ​account for a change after that change has taken place.
The defeat of the Republican party in 1884 was due rather to its own folly than to the wisdom of the Democratic party. It despised and rejected the hand that had raised it to power, and it paid the penalty of its own folly. The life of the Republican party lay in its devotion to justice, liberty and humanity. When it abandoned or slighted these great moral ideas and devoted itself to materialistic measures, it no longer appealed to the heart of the nation, but to its pocket. It became a Samson shorn of its locks. The leader in this new and downward departure of the party was the first to feel its fatal consequences. It was he, more than any other man, who defeated the policy of Grant, Conkling, Gen. Butler, and other true men, in favor of extending national protection to colored citizens in their right to vote. His mistake became sensible even to him in the hour of his defeat. It was all plain then. He made, at Augusta, at the close of the campaign, the speech which he should have made at its beginning. In that speech he showed plainly that the hand which struck down the negro voter was the same hand by which he himself was politically slain.
This degeneracy in the Republican party began to manifest itself when the voices of Sumner, Wade, Morton, Conkling, Stevens, and Logan were no longer controlling in its councils; when Morton was laughed at for "waving the bloody shirt" and for exposing the bloody crimes and outrages against the Republican voters of the South; when the talk of unloading the negro waxed louder and louder; when Southern men pretended to be aching for a favorable moment for deserting the Democratic party and joining the Republican party, and when it was thought that the white vote of the South ​could be secured if the black vote was abandoned. Then came along the old issues of tariff and free trade, and kindred questions of material interests, to the exclusion of the more vital principles for which the Republican party stood in the days of its purity and power. But the expected accessions to its ranks from the white voters of the South did not take place. If anything, the South became, with every concession made by the Republicans to win its white vote, more solidly Democratic. There never was yet, and there never will be, an instance of permanent success where a party abandons its righteous principles to win favor of the opposing party. Mankind abhors the idea of abandoning friends in order to win the support of enemies. Considering that the Republican party had fallen away from the grand ideas of liberty, progress, and national unity in which it had originated, and no longer felt that it should protect the rights it had recognized in the Constitution, some of its foremost men lost their interest in its success, and others deserted outright, claiming that as there was now, on the Southern question, no difference between the two parties, there was therefore no choice. Even colored voters in the North, where in doubtful Republican States their votes are most important and can turn the scale for or against one or the other of the parties, began to advocate the withdrawal of their support from the old party by which they were made citizens and to join the Democratic party. Of this class I was not one. I knew that however bad the Republican party was, the Democratic party was much worse. The elements of which the Republican party was composed gave better