With the fall of slavery and the emancipation of the colored race the heroic epoch of Douglass’s career may be said to have closed.  The text upon which he so long had preached had been expunged from the national bible; and he had been a one-text preacher, a one-theme orator.  He felt the natural reaction which comes with relief from high mental or physical tension, and wondered, somewhat sadly, what he should do with himself, and how he should earn a living.  The same considerations, in varying measure, applied to others of the anti-slavery reformers.  Some, unable to escape the reforming habit, turned their attention to different social evils, real or imaginary.  Others, sufficiently supplied with this worlds goods for their moderate wants, withdrew from public life.  Douglass was thinking of buying a farm and retiring to rural solitudes, when a new career opened up for him in the lyceum lecture field.  The North was favorably disposed toward colored men.  They had acquitted themselves well during the war, and had shown becoming gratitude to their deliverers.  The once despised abolitionists were now popular heroes.  Douglass’s checkered past seemed all the more romantic in the light of the brighter present, like a novel with a pleasant ending; and those who had hung thrillingly upon his words when he denounced slavery now listened with interest to what he had to say upon other topics.  He spoke sometimes on Woman Suffrage, of which he was always a consistent advocate.  His most popular lecture was one on “Self-made Men.”  Another on “Ethnology,” in which he sought a scientific basis for his claim for the negro’s equality with the white man, was not so popular—­with white people.  The wave of enthusiasm which had swept the enfranchised slaves into what seemed at that time the safe harbor of constitutional right was not, after all, based on abstract doctrines of equality of intellect, but on an inspiring sense of justice (long dormant under the influence of slavery, but thoroughly awakened under the moral stress of the war), which conceded to every man the right of a voice in his own government and the right to an equal opportunity in life to develop such powers as he possessed, however great or small these might be.

But Douglass’s work in direct behalf of his race was not yet entirely done.  In fact, he realized very distinctly the vast amount of work that would be necessary to lift his people up to the level of their enlarged opportunities; and, as may be gathered from some of his published utterances, he foresaw that the process would be a long one, and that their friends might weary sometimes of waiting, and that there would be reactions toward slavery which would rob emancipation of much of its value.  It was the very imminence of such backward steps, in the shape of various restrictive and oppressive laws promptly enacted by the old slave States under President Johnson’s administration, that led Douglass to urge the enfranchisement