“Warmoth,” they warned him, “is the real master of Louisiana. And he represents capital, whose business it is to manipulate the labor vote--white and black.” “The Republican party is the true workingmen’s party of the country!” thundered Douglass. And what he did was to steer the convention away from unionism to politics--not seeing their interrelation. And so, as white labor in the North moved toward stronger and stronger union organization, it lost interest in, and vital touch with, the millions of laborers in the South. When the black night came, there was no help. But all this was later. Douglass returned to Washington singing the praises of Louisiana--its rich beauties and the amazing progress the people were making. He congratulated himself that he had succeeded “in holding back the convention from a fatal political blunder.” His story was carried by the _New York Herald_--and pointedly omitted from the columns of the _Tribune_. He found a letter awaiting him from Harvard: when was he sending on his newspaper files? There was some question of getting them catalogued before summer. Yes, he must attend to that--soon. And he laid the letter to one side. On June 2, 1872, his house in Rochester burned to the ground. His papers were gone, and Douglass cursed the folly of his procrastination. Rosetta and her husband had managed to get out with a few personal possessions. Household furniture could be replaced, but Anna wept for a hundred precious mementos of the days gone by--little Annie’s cape, the children’s school books, the plum-colored wedding dress and Frederick’s first silk hat. But Douglass thought only of his newspaper files and how he ought to have sent them to Harvard. The gods were not yet finished with Frederick Douglass. It was as if they conspired to strip him of the last small vestige of his pride, as if to make sure that henceforth and forevermore he should “walk humble.” “It is not without a feeling of humiliation that I must narrate my connection with the Freedmen’s Saving and Trust Company,” he wrote, when, later on, he felt he had to put down the whole unfortunate story. The pathetically naïve account which follows is amazing on many counts. How could this little group of “church members” have expected to find their way within the intricate maze of national banking in the United States? From the start they were doomed to failure. Yet here stands an eternal monument to the fact that the newly emancipated men and women “put their money in banks,” were thrifty and frugal beyond our most rigid demands. For these banks were in the South among the masses of people who had just come out of slavery. The one Northern branch was in Philadelphia. Frederick Douglass did not see the reasons for the bank’s failure. He blamed himself and the handful of black men who tried to scale the barricades of big business, only to have themselves broken and left with a corpse on their hands.