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Advances in African Economic,
Social and Political Development

Christian Henning
Ousmane Badiane
Eva Krampe Editors

Development
Policies and
Policy Processes
in Africa
Modeling and Evaluation
Advances in African Economic, Social
and Political Development

Series editors
Diery Seck
CREPOL - Center for Research on Political Economy, Dakar, Senegal
Juliet U. Elu
Morehouse College, Atlanta, GA, USA
Yaw Nyarko
New York University, NY, USA
Africa is emerging as a rapidly growing region, still facing major challenges, but
with a potential for significant progress – a transformation that necessitates vigor-
ous efforts in research and policy thinking. This book series focuses on three
intricately related key aspects of modern-day Africa: economic, social and political
development. Making use of recent theoretical and empirical advances, the series
aims to provide fresh answers to Africa’s development challenges. All the socio-
political dimensions of today’s Africa are incorporated as they unfold and new
policy options are presented. The series aims to provide a broad and interactive
forum of science at work for policymaking and to bring together African and
international researchers and experts. The series welcomes monographs and con-
tributed volumes for an academic and professional audience, as well as tightly
edited conference proceedings. Relevant topics include, but are not limited to,
economic policy and trade, regional integration, labor market policies, demo-
graphic development, social issues, political economy and political systems, and
environmental and energy issues.

More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/11885

Christian Henning • Ousmane Badiane •
Eva Krampe
Editors

Development Policies and

Policy Processes in Africa
Modeling and Evaluation
Editors
Christian Henning Ousmane Badiane
Institute of Agricultural Economics Director for Africa, IFPRI
University of Kiel Washington, D.C.
Kiel, Germany USA

Eva Krampe
European Investment Bank
Luxembourg, Luxembourg

ISSN 2198-7262 ISSN 2198-7270 (electronic)

Advances in African Economic, Social and Political Development
ISBN 978-3-319-60713-9 ISBN 978-3-319-60714-6 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-60714-6

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017951118

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018. This book is an open access publication.
Open Access This book is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0
International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing,
adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate
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indicate if changes were made.
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The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
Foreword

The challenge of economic development is to simultaneously understand both

which policy is the best to resolve a specific development problem and why and
how these policies can be effectively implemented given the political, behavioral,
and economic framework conditions in a specific country. Thus, to do good
economic policies we need to go beyond economics. It draws on the research on
the interface between politics, behavior (i.e., the incorporation of insights from
psychology into policy design), and economics.
Within IFPRI this research has been initiated by Peter Hazell and others in the
early 2000s and led to the development and application of quantitative economic
modeling tools for growth-poverty analysis in an economy-wide framework. The
political process, however, has not been integrated in these economic modeling
approaches. But, in political reality, identifying and pursuing technically sound
policies is further constrained for political reasons, e.g., elected government has
bias incentives to serve particular economic interest at the expense of the general
public, or specific needs of the poor or marginalized groups are not sufficiently
represented in the political process. Rather than lowering expectations when poli-
tics is a problem, technical experts and policymakers can use a better understanding
of political incentives, knowledge, and behavior to improve outcomes. Similarly,
behavioral economics brings new insights into how to craft better policies by
offering new policy tools, improving predictions about the effects of existing
policies, and generating new welfare implications.
This is what this book tries to do closing this research gap via developing and
applying quantitative approaches integrating political decision-making and behav-
ior economics into existing economic modeling tools. In particular, it contains a
selection of tools and methodologies that can help to tackle the complexities in the
analysis of policy processes and outcomes under the implementation of the Com-
prehensive Africa Agriculture Development Programme (CAADP) agenda. How-
ever, the various contributions are not targeted only to experts and interdisciplinary
scholars working on empirical or theoretical research using quantitative policy

v
vi Foreword

modeling and evaluation techniques. They are also intended for technical experts,
including policymakers and analysts from stakeholder organizations, who are
involved in formulating and implementing policies to reduce poverty and to
increase economic and social well-being in African countries.
A lesson for International Development Organizations, like the World Bank,
also comes out of this research. We can do more, through relatively small changes
in what we are already doing, to leverage our technical strengths in generating
credible data and evidence, and to work with our clients to diminish political
constraints to achieving development goals and to better understand what are the
needed conditions, constraints, and predictions of policies. We can provide more
targeted and reliable information via quantitative modeling of the political and
behavioral process that will help societies to build effective political institutions
that are capable of tackling development problems. To do this, we have to over-
come the fear of modeling politics and behavior and confront it as part of the
challenge of development. In this book, the authors have just begun to extend the
influence of modeling politics and behavior over policy design. The glass is only
starting to begin to be filled, but there’s no reason to believe the glass isn’t going to
completely fill up.

World Bank Maximo Torero

Washington D.C., USA
Preface

In 2003, African leaders endorsed the Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Devel-

opment Programme (CAADP) as the action plan for putting agriculture back on
Africa’s development agenda. A critical challenge for all policymakers wrestling
with economic development and poverty reduction in Africa—as well as every-
where else in the world—is how to assess which programs and policies actually
work. A corollary to this challenge is to identify, among the programs that do work,
those that provide the best value for money (OECD 2004). A key approach of
CAADP is the promotion of evidence-based policies, where it has been fully
recognized that policy impact evaluation is an important prerequisite for
evidence-based policy processes. In the literature, quantitative policy impact eval-
uation is considered a key method for generating scientific knowledge on which
policies actually work best in a country. However, the incorporation of this knowl-
edge into the political decision-making process is a nontrivial process. Hence,
beyond generating knowledge, incorporating it into the political process is another
prerequisite of an effective evidence-based policy process. In this regard, it is
widely expected that active stakeholder participation will not only increase politi-
cians’ incentives to select the most efficient policies but also increase the capacity
of policy learning inherent in a political system (see, e.g., Ball 1995). The principles
of review, accountability, and inclusivity, which are core principles of CAADP,
reflect the belief that participatory policy processes at the continental, regional, and
national levels lead to improved coordination, mutual learning, and the adoption of
best practices, which together should result in improved policy planning and
execution as well as better growth and poverty reduction outcomes.
Linking economic analysis to policy formulation and outcome is a very complex
and tedious process. The problem is not just one of applying rigorous economic
theory to high-quality data in order to tackle relevant questions. This is difficult
enough but may still be the easiest part. A greater challenge is for the knowledge
and insights generated from policy research and analysis to find their way into the
decision-making process. And even when it does, science-based evidence forms
only one part, and often not the most important part, of the understanding that

vii
viii Preface

influences the decision-making process, where imperfect political competition

often induces biased incentives and incomplete knowledge for politicians, imped-
ing the implementation of available best-practice politics.
This book examines the methodological challenges to analyze and understand
simultaneously both which policies work best and why and how these policies can
be effectively implemented given the political and economic framework conditions
in a country. In particular, this volume contains a selection of tools and methodol-
ogies that can help to tackle the complexities in the analysis of policy processes and
outcomes under the implementation of the CAADP agenda. The various contribu-
tions in these proceedings are not targeted only to experts and interdisciplinary
scholars working on empirical or theoretical research using quantitative policy
modeling and evaluation techniques. They are also intended for technical experts,
including policymakers and analysts from stakeholder organizations, who are
involved in formulating and implementing policies to reduce poverty and to
increase economic and social well-being in African countries.
Acknowledgments

This book is the product of joint research efforts of the University of Kiel (CAU),
the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), and the Poverty Reduc-
tion, Equity, and Growth Network (PEGNet) of the Kiel Institute of World Econ-
omy that started with a joint workshop in 2011 and continued with various joint
research project, e.g., a research project on participatory and evidenced-based
policy processes from 2012 to 2015 financed by the German Ministry of Cooper-
ation (BMZ) and a follow-up project on political processes to implement the
Bioeconomy strategy in industrial and developing countries that started in 2017
and is financed by the German Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF). These
joint research efforts brought together scholars working in the field of policy
modeling and evaluation at the microeconomic and macroeconomic level or in
the field of quantitative modeling of policy processes. Beyond the authors and
coauthors of the chapters included in this book, several other people have contrib-
uted to this work. In particular, we would like to thank Maximo Torero and Ulrich
Koester, who enlightened the discussions not only during the workshop in 2011 but
throughout our research projects with their thought-provoking comments and pre-
sentations. Moreover, an IFPRI-funded project analyzing participatory and
evidenced-based policy processes of CAADP reforms in Malawi, which has been
coordinated by Michael Johnson and Regina Birner, provided many contributions,
especially on modeling political processes, the context, and the empirical data used.
Financial support was also provided by ATSAF (Arbeitsgemeinschaft für
Tropische und Subtropische Agrarforschung). Finally, we thank Tsitsi Makombe,
Lauren Gilliss, Christine Van Fossen, and Svetlana Petri for supporting us with the
editorial work.

ix
Contents

Policy Support Through Modeling and Evaluation: Methodological

Challenges and Practical Solutions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
Ousmane Badiane, Christian Henning, and Eva Krampe

Part I Modeling Economic Policies

Macro-economic Models: Comparative Analysis of Strategies and Long
Term Outlook for Growth and Poverty Reduction Among ECOWAS
Member Countries . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21
Ousmane Badiane, Sunday P. Odjo, and Fleur Wouterse
Macro-economic Models: How to Spend Uganda’s Expected Oil
Revenues? A CGE Analysis of the Agricultural and Poverty Impacts
of Spending Options . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49
Manfred Wiebelt, Karl Pauw, John Mary Matovu, Everist Twimukye,
and Todd Benson
Micro-econometric and Micro-Macro Linked Models: Impact
of the National Agricultural Advisory Services (NAADS) Program
of Uganda—Considering Different Levels of Likely Contamination
with the Treatment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85
Samuel Benin, Ephraim Nkonya, Geresom Okecho, Joseé
Randriamamonjy, Edward Kato, Geofrey Lubade,
and Miriam Kyotalimye
Micro-econometric and Micro-Macro Linked Models: Modeling
Agricultural Growth and Nutrition Linkages: Lessons from Tanzania
and Malawi . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 97
Karl Pauw, James Thurlow, and Olivier Ecker
Micro-econometric and Micro-Macro Linked Models: Sequential
Macro-Micro Modelling with Behavioral Microsimulations . . . . . . . . 117
Jann Lay
xi
xii Contents

Part II Modeling Policy Processes

Modeling and Evaluation of Political Processes: A New Quantitative
Approach . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 139
Christian Henning and Johannes Hedtrich
A Network Based Approach to Evaluate Participatory Policy
Processes: An Application to CAADP in Malawi . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 175
Christian Henning and Eva Krampe
The Formation of Elite Communication Networks in Malawi:
A Bayesian Econometric Approach . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 213
Christian Aßmann, Eva Krampe, and Christian Henning
Voter Behavior and Government Performance in Malawi:
An Application of a Probabilistic Voting Model . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 235
Christian Henning, Laura Seide, and Svetlana Petri
Whither Participation? Evaluating Participatory Policy Processes
Using the CGPE Approach: The Case of CAADP in Malawi . . . . . . . 271
Christian Henning, Johannes Hedtrich, Ligane Massamba Sène,
and Eva Krampe

Part III Concluding Remarks

Strategic Analysis and Knowledge Support Systems (SAKSS):
Translating Evidence into Action . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 311
Michael E. Johnson
Lessons Learned and Future Challenges . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 343
Christian Henning and Ousmane Badiane
List of Acronyms

ACF Advocacy Coalition Framework

ADD Agricultural Development Divisions
ASWAp Agricultural Sector-Wide Approach
BAU Business as usual
BC Bunda College
BF Baron/Ferejohn model
BGH Baron–Grossman–Helpman model
CAADP Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Programme
CAMAL Coffee Association of Malawi
CAP Common Agricultural Policy
CAU University of Kiel
CBF Community-based facilitator
CES Constant Elasticity of Substitution
CET Constant Elasticity of Transformation
CGE Computable General Equilibrium
CGPE Computable General Political Economy Equilibrium
CISANET Civil Society Agriculture Network
COMESA Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa
CSO Civil Society Organization
DCGE Dynamic single-country Computable General Equilibrium
DFID Department for International Development of the Government of the
United Kingdom
DPP Democratic Progressive Party
eCGPE Evolutionary Computable General Political Economy Equilibrium
ECOWAP Common Agricultural Policy of ECOWAS
ECOWAS Economic Community of West African States
EU European Union
EV Equivalent Variation
FISP Farm Input Subsidy Program
FUM Farmers Union of Malawi
GA Governmental accountability
xiii
xiv List of Acronyms

GAMS General Algebraic Modeling System

GDP Gross domestic product
GH Grossman/Helpman model
GIS Geographic information systems
HPD Highest Posterior Density
ICRISAT International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics
IDRC International Development Research Centre
IFPRI International Food Policy Research Institute
IITA International Institute of Tropical Agriculture
ILRI International Livestock Research Institute
IWMI International Water Management Institute
LES Linear Expenditure System
LSMS- Living Standards Measurement Study and Integrated Surveys on
ISA Agriculture
LNE Local Nash Equilibrium
LSNE Local Strict Nash Equilibrium
MCL Mixed conditional logit
MCMC Markov Chain Monte Carlo
MCP Malawi Congress Party
MDG Millennium Development Goal
MEJN Malawi Economic Justice Network
MGDS Malawi Growth and Development Strategy
MIC Middle Income Country
MoAFS Ministry of Agriculture and Food Security
MoDPC Ministry of Development Planning and Cooperation
MoF Ministry of Finance
MoIWD Ministry of Irrigation and Water Development
M&E Monitoring and evaluation
NAADS National Agricultural Advisory Services
NAIP National Agriculture Investment Program
NASFAM National Smallholder Farmers’ Association of Malawi
NEPAD New Partnership for Africa’s Development
NGO Non-governmental organization
ODI Overseas Development Institute
OECD Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development
OLS Ordinary Least Squares
OPC Office of the president
PBF Political belief formulation module
PDM Political decision-making module
PDR Principle of departmental responsibility
PEGNet Poverty Reduction, Equity, and Growth Network
PIF Permanent Income Fund
PIF Policy Impact Function
PNAD Pesquia Nacional por Amostra de Domicı́lios
List of Acronyms xv

PPG Pro-poor Growth

PPPS Probability proportionate to population size
QUAIDS Quadratic almost ideal demand system
REC Regional economic community
ReSAKSS Regional Strategic Analysis and Knowledge Support System
R&D Research and development
SADC Southern Africa Development Community
SAKSS Strategic Analysis and Knowledge Support System
SAM Social Accounting Matrix
SF Stabilization Fund
STAM Seed Trade Association of Malawi
TAM Tea Association of Malawi
TAMA Tobacco Association of Malawi
TDS Technology development site
UDF United Democratic Front
UNHS5 2005/06 Uganda National Household Survey 5
WTO World Trade Organization
Policy Support Through Modeling
and Evaluation: Methodological Challenges
and Practical Solutions

Ousmane Badiane, Christian Henning, and Eva Krampe

In 2003, African leaders endorsed the Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Devel-

opment Programme (CAADP) as the action plan for putting agriculture back on
Africa’s development agenda. A critical challenge for all policymakers wrestling
with economic development and poverty reduction in Africa—as well as every-
where else in the world—is how to assess which programs and policies actually
work. A corollary to this challenge is to identify, among the programs that do work,
those that provide the best value for money (OECD 2004). A key approach of
CAADP is the promotion of evidence-based policies, where it has been fully
recognized that policy impact evaluation is an important prerequisite for
evidence-based policy processes. In the literature, quantitative policy impact eval-
uation is considered a key method for generating scientific knowledge on which
policies actually work best in a country. However, the incorporation of this knowl-
edge into the political decisionmaking process is a non-trivial process. Hence,
beyond generating knowledge, incorporating it into the political process is another
prerequisite of an effective evidence-based policy process. In this regard, it is
widely expected that active stakeholder participation will not only increase politi-
cians’ incentives to select the most efficient policies, but also increase the capacity
of policy learning inherent in a political system (see e.g. Ball 1995). The principles
of review, accountability, and inclusivity, which are core principles of CAADP,
reflect the belief that participatory policy processes at the continental, regional, and

O. Badiane (*)
International Food Policy Research Institute, Washington, DC, USA
e-mail: obadiane@cgiar.org
C. Henning
Department of Agricultural Economics, University of Kiel, Kiel, Germany
E. Krampe
European Investment Bank, Luxembourg, Luxembourg

© The Author(s) 2018 1

C. Henning et al. (eds.), Development Policies and Policy Processes in Africa,
Advances in African Economic, Social and Political Development,
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-60714-6_1
2 O. Badiane et al.

national levels lead to improved coordination, mutual learning, and the adoption of
best practices, which together should result in improved policy planning and
execution, better growth, and poverty reduction outcomes.
Linking economic analysis to policy formulation and outcome is a very complex
and tedious process. The problem is not just one of applying rigorous economic
theory to high-quality data in order to tackle relevant questions. This is difficult
enough but may still be the easiest part. A greater challenge is for the knowledge
and insights generated from policy research and analysis to find their way into the
decisionmaking process. And even when it does, science-based evidence forms
only one part, and often not the most important part, of the understanding that
influences the decisionmaking process, where imperfect political competition often
induces biased incentives for politicians, impeding the implementation of available
best-practice politics.
Contained in the present volume are a selection of tools and methodologies that can
help to tackle the complexities in the analysis of policy processes and outcomes under
the implementation of the CAADP agenda. The contributions go beyond the innovative
methods and tools applied for quantitative policy impact analyses by international
organizations like the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development
(OECD), the World Bank or the European Union, as they also to examine the process
behind the choice of policies and the factors that determine the likelihood of their
adoption and implementation. It is the product of a workshop organized by the
University of Kiel (CAU), the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI)
and the Poverty Reduction, Equity, and Growth Network (PEGNet) of the Kiel Institute
of World Economy in 2011. The workshop brought together scholars working in the
field of policy modeling and evaluation at the microeconomic and macroeconomic
level or in the field of quantitative modeling of policy processes.
The various contributions in these proceedings are not targeted only to experts
and interdisciplinary scholars working on empirical or theoretical research using
quantitative policy modeling and evaluation techniques. They are also intended for
technical experts, including policymakers and analysts from stakeholder organiza-
tions, who are involved in formulating and implementing policies to reduce poverty
and to increase economic and social well-being in African countries.
In order to facilitate discussion on the recently developed evaluation methodolo-
gies and their applicability in the context of CAADP and its evaluation mechanisms,
we first develop a general assessment framework. This framework incorporates
guidelines and principles not only for economic policy impact evaluation, but also
for methodological approaches and tools assessing policy processes quantitatively.

1 A General Framework for Policy and Policy Process

Evaluation

1.1 The Basic Setup

At an abstract level, impact evaluation of a given policy instrument, say ‘γ’,

includes two different aspects. First, it is necessary to assess the technical
Policy Support Through Modeling and Evaluation: Methodological Challenges. . . 3

transformation of policy γ into relevant policy outcomes z. This transformation is

captured by the technical transformation function T(z, γ), which links specific out-
comes to the policy in question. Second, different policy outcomes have to be
evaluated from the viewpoint of society. Formally, welfare analysis is a tool that
provides for an adequate evaluation criterion, i.e., an index function EC(z). EC(z)
transforms each state of the world z into an index number, and by doing so allows
for a consistent ordering of states. For example, EC(z1) > EC(z2) implies that state
z1 is preferred to state z2. Accordingly, if we were to know both functions, EC and
T, evaluation would be a purely technical task. For a set of available policies γ 2 A,
where A is the set of all feasible policies a society can choose from, the policy with
the maximal evaluation value EC would be implemented:

Eðγ Þ ¼ MaxfECðzÞjT ðz; γ Þ ¼ 0g ð1Þ

In reality, however, an empirical specification of both the welfare function EC

and the technical transformation function T is extremely complex and difficult.
Conventional policy impact analyses that focus on identifying the technical trans-
formation function usually assume a welfare function as exogenously given. The
main argument for this assumption is that a comprehensive modeling of the
decisionmakers’ evaluation of his or her preferred outcome and of the political
decisionmaking processes cannot be attained with the research approaches at hand.
A corollary to this argument is that research can at best focus on the technical
relationship (T) between alternative policies and outcomes, thereby offering
evidence-based guidance for decisionmaking.
Even when assuming an exogenously given welfare function (EC(γ)), policy
impact evaluation still remains a quite complex undertaking, because it is by no
means straightforward to specify the technical transformation function. This results
from many different reasons. First, policy outcomes are often formulated in terms
of abstract, higher level policy objectives, e.g., equal quality of life conditions in
rural and urban regions. These objectives need to be transformed into a set of
measurable policy outcome indicators, which then can be systematically related to
policy programs. Second, the relationship between policy programs and lower level
policy objectives, as well as the relationship between the latter and higher level
objectives, all reflect the behavior of people and thus require a theory of human
behavior. Therefore, a quantitative specification and assessment of the technical
relationship between inputs of a policy program and their effects on higher level
policy objectives remains a tricky business. More importantly, disentangling the
effects of a specific policy program becomes more challenging when many policy
programs are implemented simultaneously.
4 O. Badiane et al.

1.2 Policy Impact Evaluation

The framework includes three major components, which are discussed in the
subsequent sections. They include policy evaluation criteria, intervention logic,
and evaluation methods.

1.2.1 Policy Evaluation Criteria

Clear and relevant evaluation criteria should be the starting point of developing
adequate evaluation tools. Five such evaluation criteria can be distinguished
(European Commission 2004):
– Relevance: What are the general needs, problems, and issues, both short and
long term, that are being targeted under the policy programs? Given the identi-
fied needs, a hierarchy of general, intermediate, and specific program objectives
can be derived, where objectives at a lower-level function as inputs to achieve
objectives at the next higher level.
– Effectiveness: To what extent does a policy program deliver results or outputs
that correspond to program objectives? Effectiveness is a technical relationship
between program objectives and program results.
– Efficiency: To what extent are program objectives achieved at the lowest costs?
Efficiency is a technical relationship between program inputs and program
results.
– Utility: To what extent does a policy program contribute to the identified needs?
– Sustainability: To what extent does the utility of a program last after the program
has been terminated?

1.2.2 Intervention Logic

Any evaluation of policy programs is based on intervention logic, or the systematic

derivation of the hierarchy of measurable objectives relating a policy program, all
the way from specific, operational objectives to more abstract, general policy
objectives. The intervention logic, as a central evaluation tool, thus corresponds
to a set of hypothetical cause-and-effect linkages that describe how an intervention
is expected to attain its global objectives.
To this end, an intervention can be systematically subdivided into specific
elements that are related to each other at specific stages of the project, as demon-
strated in Fig. 1.
In general, we can distinguish program implementation and program effects.
Any policy program starts with its implementation; for example, financial inputs or
administrative capacities are used to realize specific outputs. In an investment
program, for example, the inputs might correspond to a specific amount of financial
resources that are spent to subsidize investment projects on farms. The output of
Policy Support Through Modeling and Evaluation: Methodological Challenges. . . 5

Fig. 1 Schematic presentation of a policy impact evaluation framework. Source: Authors, based
on European Commission (2004)

this investment project corresponds to the number and type of investment programs
that are actually subsidized. Depending on the applied implementation procedure,
the number and type of investment projects might differ. In particular, if farms are
heterogeneous, the type of farms that will be subsidized under a program might
differ according to applied implementation procedures.
The outputs of a project generate effects, which can be further subdivided into
results (short-term effects that occur at the level of direct target groups) and impacts
(medium- and long-term effects). Medium-term impacts involve effects on both
direct and indirect beneficiaries/recipients of assistance, while long-term effects
correspond to the global impacts of a policy program. Moreover, the global impact
of a policy program is related to the general needs, problems, and issues identified at
a higher policy level, where the program’s utility is defined as its contribution to
identified needs (see Fig. 1).

1.2.3 Evaluation Methods

Any intervention logic for policy programs is based on theory. Two different
evaluation approaches can be distinguished: (1) qualitative and (2) quantitative
models. Qualitative models, for example the logical framework matrix, simply
6 O. Badiane et al.

provide a qualitative description of the intervention logic. Quantitative impact

evaluation is based on a quantitative specification of relevant cause-and-effect
linkages. Quantitative evaluation models can be further subdivided into model
based, and econometric policy evaluation approaches.

Model-Based Policy Evaluation

The common approach in economics for specifying an intervention logic of policy

programs is to apply a theoretical model. Different approaches are available for
model-based policy evaluation, ranging from simple incidence analysis, to more
advanced micro and macro behavioral models, to complex micro-macro linkages
models. These approaches differ regarding the set of agents and actions they
consider, as well as the assumed coordination mechanism of individual actions.
The complexity increases with the number of agents and the level of behavioral
response that models explicitly take into account.

Simple Incidence Analysis

Simple incidence analysis ignores any behavioral response of involved actors. For
example, an ex ante evaluation of a planned tax reform or a planned investment
subsidization project may be based on a simple arithmetic representation of the
incidence of a tax or subsidy, without simulating any policy response of involved
agents (Bourguignon et al. 2002). However, policies often have important price or
income effects, which in turn induce changes of agents’ behavior, such as changes
in supply, consumption, or labor demand behavior. A behavioral model is needed in
this case.

Micro-simulation Partial Equilibrium Models

In contrast to incidence models, behavioral models take the policy responses of
involved actors explicitly into account. However, there exist different types of
behavioral models that differ regarding the level of response they take into account.
Micro-simulation models take only the direct policy response of involved actors
into account. Basically, these models are partial equilibrium models that neglect the
indirect effects of policy programs resulting from agents’ interaction at the macro
level. The structure of these models can be described as follows:

xi ¼ Fðξ; φi ; γ Þ ð2Þ
z ¼ Gðxi ; ξ; φi ; γ Þ ð3Þ

where xi denotes the vector of relevant behavioral variables of an individual agent i,

φ and ξ denote the general and agent-specific exogenous variables, respectively,
Policy Support Through Modeling and Evaluation: Methodological Challenges. . . 7

that determine individual behavior, γ is the evaluated policy, and z is the policy
outcome.
For a policy evaluation, the behavioral Eq. (2) has to be estimated based on
survey data. Given the specified Eqs. (2 and 3), the impact of different policies can
be simulated. The relevant agents are, for example, all households or firms in a
specific region. Often census data is used to provide information on their individual
characteristics. The response of all relevant agents can be estimated using Eq. (3),
given this information. The behavioral function F() is either specified as a reduced
form or an explicit functional form is derived from the underlying microeconomic
optimization problem.1 All micro-simulation models neglect the interaction of
individual agents. Micro-simulation models are not adequate tools for policy
evaluation if behavioral response at the micro level crucially depends on interac-
tions among actors at the macro level.

Macro or General Equilibrium Models

General equilibrium models are designed to include policy effects at the macro
level (Bourguignon et al. 2002). The most simple general equilibrium models are
linear models, e.g., regional input-output models or social accounting matrices
(SAMs). More advanced (nonlinear) general equilibrium models are standard
computable general equilibrium (CGE) approaches. With the CGE approach,
policy-induced behavioral responses at the micro level are explicitly transmitted
onto the overall economy via induced price changes at the macro level. However,
the explicit inclusion of macro-level effects comes at a cost. Standard CGE models
are highly aggregated, assuming only a small number of representative economic
agents (firms and households). Theoretically, CGE models could be more
disaggregated into a large number of heterogeneous firms and households, but
they become difficult to solve with the computer capacities usually available.
Moreover, the empirical estimation of functional parameters of the CGE model is
also a major problem due to very limited adequate data. Thus, although CGE
models can be linked with a micro-accounting model, if relevant policy evaluation
criteria include distributional effects, aggregated CGE models are less appropriate
tools for an adequate policy evaluation (see Chapter “Sequential Macro-Micro
Modelling with Behavioral Microsimulations” in this volume).

1
A very interesting nonparametric approach applies propensity score matching techniques, orig-
inally developed as an advanced ex post evaluation technique, to simulate policy effects at the
micro level (Todd and Wolpin 2006). An advantage of a nonparametric estimation strategy, when
compared to parametric approaches, follows from the fact that the former are less demanding
regarding data requirements and do not require any specific functional form assumptions (Todd
and Wolpin 2006). However, in many cases nonparametric approaches are not applicable to ex
ante policy evaluation, but stronger modeling assumptions, e.g., functional form assumption, have
to be made.
8 O. Badiane et al.

Micro-Macro Linked Models

In order to deal with computational capabilities and empirical complexity issues,
some authors suggest micro-macro linked models, which combine micro-
simulation models and macro general equilibrium models (Robilliard et al. 2001).
A full integration of micro and macro models is hard to achieve, although techni-
cally possible (Bourguignon et al. 2008). Therefore, often a sequential approach is
applied where first macro models are solved and central variables of the macro
model are then incorporated into corresponding micro models (Robilliard et al.
2001). Standard CGE models assume that interactions among individual agents are
coordinated through perfect markets. In reality, transaction costs as well as market
power imply imperfect competition and thereby perfect markets rarely exist. Of
course, the standard CGE approach can be extended to include market imperfection
due to transaction costs or market power. But these extended approaches are
technically more demanding and therefore have been rarely applied for policy
evaluation. More feasible alternatives include a linked or sequential micro-macro
model, in which different micro-behavioral models can be combined with macro
equilibrium models. Linked micro models include farm-household models incor-
porating non-market activities or nonlinear transaction costs (Singh et al. 1986).

1.3 Econometric Policy Evaluation

A general problem of model-based policy evaluation is that models are often quite
complex, and an empirical specification of the model is often impossible due to
limited data. Central causal relationships assumed by a model cannot easily be
verified or tested empirically. Hence, it is necessary to develop methods that are
able to provide empirical evidence suitable for guiding policy. This is not an easy
task, because it refers to causal inferences that require special research methods that
are not always easy to communicate due to their technical complexity.
This section surveys econometric methods that the economics profession has
used increasingly over the past decade to estimate causal effects of policies. A
causal linkage can be specified as a simple binary relationship between program
participation and a relevant performance variable, e.g., the impact of participation
in a training program on farm profit or employment. The most straightforward way
to measure the policy impact in this context would be to compare the performance
of a program participant with the counterfactual performance of the participant
without participation. A major challenge of this approach is to simultaneously
observe both performances, assuming participation and the counterfactual perfor-
mance. The different methods applied in this area are designed to distinguish
accidental association from causation. They provide empirical strategies to identify
the causal impact of different reforms on any kind of policy outcomes.
The best approach to identifying program impact on a given performance
variable is to conduct field experiments, i.e., to undertake a random selection of
Policy Support Through Modeling and Evaluation: Methodological Challenges. . . 9

the units of interest into participating (treatment) and non-participating (control)

groups in a policy program. Based on a comparison of the average performance of
the randomly selected treatment and control groups, the impact of the policy
program can be statistically evaluated. While experimental approaches can be
applied for ex post and ex ante policy evaluation, a huge drawback of this approach
is that it is extremely expensive and, for many policies, it is impossible to design
sophisticated field experiments allowing a quantitative evaluation. In this case,
other econometric procedures based on observational data are available that allow
one to identify the true impact of a policy program assuming a non-random
selection of treatment and non-treatment groups. These econometric approaches
can be subdivided into non-parametric and parametric approaches. An increasingly
popular non-parametric approach to policy evaluation is matching on observable
factors, especially propensity score matching (PSM) (Caliendo and Hujer 2006).
Matching and other econometric methods that build on the idea of controlling for
observable factors have clear limitations. The policy impact is very often deter-
mined by factors that are unobserved by the researcher. This implies that PSM
delivers biased results or that policy impact is heterogeneous across participants. In
order to get around these problems, alternative methods have been developed. They
are used to emulate experimental settings using observational data, i.e., ‘natural’
experiments, such as the instrumental-variable approach and the regression-
discontinuity approach, or panel-data-based methods that aim to account for
endogeneity.
A general cutback of all statistical models, however, is the fact that they are
limited to causal inferences, i.e., empirical testing on the question of whether a
given policy program achieved its intended outcome or not. In general, they are not
alone suitable to elucidate the question of why or how a policy program works.
Therefore, the best approach to policy evaluation is to combine model-based and
econometric methods as complementary approaches, where econometric tech-
niques are applied to identify causal relations between specific policy programs
(γ) and central economic factors (θ), and model-based techniques to analyze the
impact of a change in these economic factors on central outcome indicators (z). The
transformation function T(z, γ) is separated into two parts: (i) a policy impact
function θ ¼ PI(γ) describing the relationship between policy interventions and
the economic factors θ, and (ii) a policy outcome function PO(z, θ) describing the
linkages between the economic factor θ and policy outcomes z. Econometric
methods are more suitable for tackling the policy impact function, whereas eco-
nomic models do a better job of tracking the policy outcome function.

1.4 Modeling and Evaluation of Policy Processes

Many countries around the globe continue to apply suboptimal policies despite
available scientific knowledge demonstrating the existence of policy instruments
that would lead to more desirable overall economic and social outcomes. For
10 O. Badiane et al.

example, there is evidence that many developing countries that still largely depend
on agriculture, especially in Africa, underinvest in this sector. They especially
spend too little budget on, e.g., agricultural research and extension which are
areas of public investment with high returns in terms of growth and poverty
reduction (Fan and Rao 2003).
Thus, evidence-based policy formulation includes, beyond the generation of
scientific knowledge, the effective incorporation of this knowledge into the political
decisionmaking process. The latter is by nature complex and dynamic, involves
multiple actors (individuals and organizations), and is defined by local political,
social (cultural and belief systems) and institutional realities (bureaucratic struc-
tures and capacities). Essentially, the policy process corresponds to an aggregation
of the heterogeneous preferences of different stakeholder groups into a common
policy decision. In representative democracies, preference aggregation is
subdivided into two steps. First, heterogeneous voter preferences are transformed
into the corresponding preferences of a subset of political representatives via
democratic elections. A central property of democratic elections is their represen-
tativeness, i.e., the correspondence between the distribution of preferences among
elected representatives with the distribution of preferences among the voting
population. Second, the heterogeneous preferences of political representatives are
aggregated into a final political decision via legislative voting procedures.
The above process can be modeled as follows: Let a society comprise of nI
different groups, where I ¼ 1 , . . . , nI denotes the index of stakeholder groups.
Further, let UI(z) denote the utility function of an individual group member i 2 I,
and wI denotes the population share of group I. Then, an ideal policy process can be
defined as a process that results in a policy choice γ ∗:
X
γ ideal ¼ arg max wI UI ðzÞ s:t: T ðz; γ Þ ¼ 0 ð4Þ
γ
I

where T(z, γ) is the political technology, that is, the subset of all policy outcomes z
that can be optimally achieved by available policies γ, given existing political
knowledge.
Differences between observed and ideal policy choices result from two different
sources. First, a biased aggregation of society preferences, i.e., real policy pro-
cesses, results in different political weights of groups when compared to the ideal
democratic process. At a theoretical level, existing political economy models
highlight this bias as a main cause of persisting inefficient policies. Biased political
weights correspond to biased incentives of elected politicians, and result from
asymmetric lobbying activities (Grossman 1994) or biased voter behavior (Bardhan
and Mookherjee 2002). More recently, Persson and Tabellini (2000) highlight the
role of formal constitutional rules as determinants of politicians’ incentives to
misrepresent society interests and choose inefficient policies.
Beyond biases resulting from the aggregation of society preferences, a second
source of biased policy is that the true political technology is not fully known by the
relevant political actors. Understanding the complex relationship between policy
Policy Support Through Modeling and Evaluation: Methodological Challenges. . . 11

instruments and induced policy outcomes is difficult. As a result, political actors use
simple mental models to understand how policies translate into outcomes. We call
these simple mental models policy beliefs. Based on their policy beliefs, political
actors derive their individual preferences with respect to policies. Similarly, some
authors have recently highlighted the role of biased voter beliefs as a main deter-
minant of inefficient policy choices (Beilhartz and Gersbach 2004; Bischoff and
Siemers 2011; Caplan 2007). In particular, the work by Caplan (2007) has been
highly recognized in public choice literature, as he has collected an impressive
amount of evidence showing persistently biased voter beliefs. Based on his empir-
ical findings, Caplan (2007) draws the rather pessimistic conclusion that democratic
mechanisms of preference aggregation naturally lead to the choice of inefficient
policies.
In this context, two key underlying premises that define the framework of
evaluating policy processes are adopted here. The first premise is that biased
voter beliefs imply biased voter behavior and hence a biased aggregation of
preferences. The second premise is that politicians and lobbyists do not fully
understand the complex relationship between political instruments and desired
policy outcomes. Hence, beyond biased incentives, lack of political knowledge
becomes another important cause of policy failure.
The evaluation of policy processes can be based on the comparison between
actual, implemented policy choice γ actual and the ideal policy choice γ ideal : kγ actual
 γ idealk . kk is the Euclidian distance. That is, the evaluation of policy processes
should be able to identify political performance gaps as defined above. Policy
diagnosis should also allow for the separation of identified performance gaps into
incentive-induced and knowledge-based gaps. Finally, a comprehensive evaluation
of policy processes should provide the possibility of developing a political therapy,
i.e., the derivation of a strategy to reduce identified performance gaps. The latter in
particular calls for model-based evaluation methodologies.
Our methodology is derived from the model described in Fig. 2.
Schematically, a dynamic policy process includes a sequence of political
decisionmaking based on actors’ policy beliefs, the transformation of the selected
policy into outcomes via induced policy responses in the economic system, the
translation of economic and political outcomes into political support via elections
and lobbying and policy learning, i.e., the updating of policy beliefs (see Fig. 2).
Policy learning occurs via two mechanisms. First, based on observed outcomes,
political actors engage in observational policy learning, i.e., they update their policy
beliefs by comparing observed outcomes with the policy outcomes they expected
based on their initial policy beliefs. Individual observations, however, are noisy and
hence individual observational learning is limited. Accordingly, political actors
engage in communication learning, i.e., they update their policy beliefs based on
political beliefs communicated by other actors. Within policy processes, commu-
nication learning occurs via political mass communications, i.e., the formation of a
public opinion, as well as via exclusive political communication within a political
elite comprising of relevant politicians and stakeholder organizations. Interestingly,
the social organization of political communication processes has a significant
12 O. Badiane et al.

Fig. 2 Schematic
representation of a policy
process. Source: Authors

impact on the speed of policy learning. In particular, the structure of a communi-

cation network has a significant impact on its capacity to aggregate decentralized
information within a political elite. Moreover, network structure also determines
the influence of individual organizations on the policy beliefs of relevant politicians
and hence the direction of the bias of political decisionmaking.
Few studies have explicitly mapped out the above processes in explaining the
poor past performance of policy reforms and investment strategies, particularly in
the agricultural sector. Most have offered narratives based on historical accounts,
pointing to the strong role of powerful personalities, vested interests, corruption,
and external pressures, in influencing policy outcomes (Clay and Schaffer 1984;
Juma and Clark 1995; Keeley and Scoones 2003; Young 2005).
The challenge of analyzing participatory and evidence-based policy processes
empirically is to develop an applicable model framework that allows for quantita-
tive modeling of political decisionmaking and policy-learning processes, including
the endogenous formation of a legislator’s political preferences and policy beliefs.
In this context, four components of a political process framework can be distin-
guished (see Fig. 2): (i) the derivation of politicians’ incentives from electoral
competition and lobbying, i.e., modeling voter behavior and interest group activi-
ties; (ii) modeling legislative bargaining, i.e., the derivation of a collective policy
decision by a set of heterogeneous legislators based on constitutional rules; (iii)
economic modeling of policy impacts, i.e., the transformation of policies into
outcomes; and (iv) modeling of policy learning, i.e., the formation and updating
of policy beliefs via observational and communication learning. The existing
evaluation literature focuses only on the third component, although the other
three components represent aspects of the policy process that play a key role in
explaining why some nations succeed while others fail in adopting efficient and
effective policies.
Policy Support Through Modeling and Evaluation: Methodological Challenges. . . 13

The current volume assembles different contributions, which together provide a

comprehensive set of innovative quantitative approaches that can be used to model
these various aspects of the policy process. In particular, Chapter “Modeling and
Evaluation of Political Processes: A New Quantitative Approach” presents an
evolutionary computable general political economy equilibrium (eCGPE) model,
combining all four components listed above as an integrated quantitative approach
to model and evaluate real policy processes.

2 Contributions to This Volume

Following this overview of methodological approaches to quantitative policy

evaluations, the twelve contributions to these proceedings can be subdivided into
two parts: I. Theory and application of quantitative policy impact evaluation
models, and II. Theory and application of quantitative approaches to model and
evaluate policy processes.
Part I is subdivided into three sections: 1. Macroeconomic Models, 2. Micro-
Econometric Models and 3. Micro-Macro Linked Models. As an opener to Sect. 1,
O. Badiane, S. Odjo and F. Wouterse present their results for CAADP-reform
strategies and the long-term outlook for growth and poverty reduction of Economic
Community of West African States (ECOWAS) member countries
(Chapter “Comparative Analysis of Strategies and Long Term Outlook for Growth
and Poverty Reduction among ECOWAS Member Countries”). They use a recur-
sive dynamic CGE model linked with a micro accounting model, transforming
economic macro shocks into individual household income changes for their anal-
ysis. The second contribution of the section is by M. Wiebelt, K. Pauw,
J.M. Matovu, E. Twinmukye and T. Benson. They provide a comprehensive
analysis of the different policy options to use oil revenues in Uganda
(Chapter “How to Spend Uganda’s Expected Oil Revenues? A CGE Analysis of
the Agricultural and Poverty Impacts of Spending Options”). As their analysis
focuses on the implication on poverty, a recursive dynamic CGE model is linked
with a micro accounting model transferring average income changes of represen-
tative households generated in the CGE model into a corresponding change of
individual household income at the micro level.
Econometric evaluation techniques are applied and discussed by S. Benin et al.
in Chapter “Impact of the National Agricultural Advisory Services (NAADS)
Program of Uganda: Considering Different Levels of Likely Contamination with
the Treatment”. In particular, they develop and apply innovative matching
approaches to assess the impact of an agricultural advisory services program in
Uganda based on observational data.
Furthermore, Sect. 2 contains two innovative micro-macro-linked approaches.
In Chapter “Modeling Agricultural Growth and Nutrition Linkages: Lessons from
Tanzania and Malawi”, K. Pauw applies a CGE model that is sequentially linked
with a microeconomic nutrition demand model to analyze the impact of different
14 O. Badiane et al.

growth strategies on income growth and nutrition in Tanzania and Malawi. J. Lay
derives and applies a macroeconomic CGE model that is sequentially linked with a
reduced form model of households’ occupational choices on formal and informal
labor markets (Chapter “Sequential Macro-Micro Modelling with Behavioral
Microsimulations”). The micro model explicitly includes household’s fixed effects
to include unobserved heterogeneity among households into the structural labor
market model. The approach is used to empirically analyze poverty and the
distributional implications of Doha round scenarios in Brazil and poverty and the
distributional implications of the Bolivian gas shock.
Part II focuses on innovative quantitative models to evaluate evidence-based and
participatory policy processes under CAADP. In particular, an eCGPE approach is
theoretically derived and empirically applied to the CAADP reform process in
Malawi. It is demonstrated how political performance and incentive gaps can be
identified and quantitatively calculated using an eCGPE. This part opens with the
presentation of the complete eCGPE framework by C. Henning
(Chapter “Modeling and Evaluation of Political Processes: A New Quantitative
Approach”). In particular, the theories used to develop an eCGPE, which includes
an economic, a legislative decisionmaking, an interest mediation, and a political
belief formation module, are explained. The other contributions of the section
present findings from the empirical application of the framework to Malawi’s
policy process.
Chapters “A Network Based Approach to Evaluate Participatory Policy Pro-
cesses: An Application to CAADP in Malawi” and “The Formation of Elite
Communication Networks in Malawi: A Bayesian Econometric Approach” focus
on the findings from the political belief formation module. Applying social network
theory and methods, they analyze collective political belief formation of govern-
mental and non-governmental actors through communication learning in networks.
C. Henning and E. Krampe (Chapter “A Network Based Approach to Evaluate
Participatory Policy Processes: An Application to CAADP in Malawi”) also
develop an evaluation framework for participatory policy processes based on the
political belief formation module. C. Aßmann, E. Krampe and C. Henning
(Chapter “The Formation of Elite Communication Networks in Malawi: A Bayes-
ian Econometric Approach”) test some theoretical hypotheses on the determinants
of communication ties among key national stakeholder organizations, donors and
central political actors. They apply an adaptation of the Bayesian estimation
scheme for binary probit models, which can deal with missing values inevitably
occurring within survey data.
L. Seide, C. Henning, and S. Petri (Chapter “Voter Behavior and Government
Performance in Malawi: An Application of a Probabilistic Voting Model”) present
an analysis of voter behavior and its impact on governmental accountability and
capture. They derive the implications of voter behavior on governmental account-
ability and capture using probabilistic voting theory.
The final chapter of Part II is by C. Henning, J. Hedtrich, L. Sene, and
E. Krampe. They use the eCGPE model to provide a comprehensive analysis of
the economic impacts of policy options and knowledge and political incentive gaps
Another random document with
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singular, the said Frederick Baily alias
Douglass unto the said Hugh Auld, his
executors and administrators, and against all and
every other person or persons whatsoever, shall
and will warrant and forever defend by these
presents. In witness whereof, I set my hand and
seal, this thirteenth day of November, eighteen
hundred and forty-six (1846.)
Thomas Auld.
“Signed, sealed, and delivered, in presence of
Wrightson Jones, John C. Lear.”
The authenticity of this bill of sale is attested
by N. Harrington, a justice of the peace of the
state of Maryland, and for the county of Talbot,
dated same day as above.

* * * * *
“To all whom it may concern: Be it known that
I, Hugh Auld, of the city of Baltimore, in Baltimore
county in the state of Maryland, for divers good
causes and considerations, me thereunto
moving, have released from slavery, liberated,
manumitted, and set free, and by these presents
do hereby release from slavery, liberate,
manumit, and set free, my negro man, named
Frederick Baily, otherwise called Douglass,
being of the age of twenty-eight years, or
thereabouts, and able to work and gain a
sufficient livelihood and maintenance; and him
the said negro man, named Frederick
Douglass, I do declare to be henceforth free,
manumitted, and discharged from all manner of
servitude to me, my executors and
administrators forever.
 “In witness whereof, I the said Hugh Auld,
have hereunto set my hand and seal the fifth of
December, in the year one thousand eight
hundred and forty-six.
Hugh Auld.
“Sealed and delivered in presence of T.
Hanson Belt, James N. S. T. Wright.”

Having remained abroad nearly two years, and being about to

return to America, not as I left it—a slave, but a freeman, prominent
friends of the cause of emancipation intimated their intention to make
me a testimonial both on grounds of personal regard to me, and also
to the cause to which they were so ardently devoted. How such a
project would have succeeded I do not know, but many reasons led
me to prefer that my friends should simply give me the means of
obtaining a printing press and materials, to enable me to start a
paper, advocating the interests of my enslaved and oppressed
people. I told them that perhaps the greatest hindrance to the
adoption of abolition principles by the people of the United States,
was the low estimate everywhere in that country placed upon the
negro as a man: that because of his assumed natural inferiority,
people reconciled themselves to his enslavement and oppression, as
being inevitable if not desirable. The grand thing to be done,
therefore, was to change this estimation, by disproving his inferiority
and demonstrating his capacity for a more exalted civilization than
slavery and prejudice had assigned him. In my judgment a tolerably
well conducted press in the hands of persons of the despised race,
would by calling out and making them acquainted with their own
latent powers, by enkindling their hope of a future, and developing
their moral force, prove a most powerful means of removing
prejudice and awakening an interest in them. At that time there was
not a single newspaper regularly published by the colored people in
the country, though many attempts had been made to establish
such, and had from one cause or another failed. These views I laid
before my friends. The result was, that nearly two thousand five
hundred dollars were speedily raised towards my establishing such a
paper as I had indicated. For this prompt and generous assistance,
rendered upon my bare suggestion, without any personal effort on
my part, I shall never cease to feel deeply grateful, and the thought
of fulfilling the expectations of the dear friends who had given me
this evidence of their confidence, was an abiding inspiration for
persevering exertion.
Proposing to leave England, and turning my face toward America
in the spring of 1847, I was painfully reminded of the kind of life
which awaited me on my arrival. For the first time in the many
months spent abroad, I was met with proscription on account of my
color. While in London I had purchased a ticket, and secured a berth,
for returning home in the Cambria—the steamer in which I had come
from thence—and paid therefor the round sum of forty pounds,
nineteen shillings sterling. This was first cabin fare; but on going on
board I found that the Liverpool agent had ordered my berth to be
given to another, and forbidden my entering the saloon. It was rather
hard after having enjoyed for so long a time equal social privileges,
after dining with persons of great literary, social, political, and
religious eminence, and never, during the whole time, having met
with a single word, look, or gesture, which gave me the slightest
reason to think my color was an offense to anybody—now to be
cooped up in the stern of the Cambria, and denied the right to enter
the saloon, lest my presence should disturb some democratic fellow-
passenger. The reader can easily imagine what must have been my
feelings under such an indignity.
This contemptible conduct met with stern rebuke from the British
press. The London Times, and other leading journals throughout the
United Kingdom, held up the outrage to unmitigated condemnation.
So good an opportunity for calling out British sentiment on the
subject had not before occurred, and it was fully embraced. The
result was that Mr. Cunard came out in a letter expressive of his
regret, and promising that the like indignity should never occur again
on his steamers, which promise I believe has been faithfully kept.
 CHAPTER VII.
TRIUMPHS AND TRIALS.

New Experiences—Painful Disagreement of Opinion with old Friends—Final

Decision to Publish my Paper in Rochester—Its Fortunes and its Friends
—Change in my own Views Regarding the Constitution of the United
States—Fidelity to Conviction—Loss of Old Friends—Support of New
Ones—Loss of House, etc., by Fire—Triumphs and Trials—Underground
Railroad—Incidents.

PREPARED as I was to meet with many trials and perplexities on

reaching home, one of which I little dreamed was awaiting me. My
plans for future usefulness, as indicated in the last chapter, were all
settled, and in imagination I already saw myself wielding my pen as
well as my voice in the great work of renovating the public mind, and
building up a public sentiment, which should send slavery to the
grave, and restore to “liberty and the pursuit of happiness” the
people with whom I had suffered.
My friends in Boston had been informed of what I was intending,
and I expected to find them favorably disposed toward my cherished
enterprise. In this I was mistaken. They had many reasons against it.
First, no such paper was needed; secondly, it would interfere with my
usefulness as a lecturer; thirdly, I was better fitted to speak than to
write; fourthly, the paper could not succeed. This opposition from a
quarter so highly esteemed, and to which I had been accustomed to
look for advice and direction, caused me not only to hesitate, but
inclined me to abandon the undertaking. All previous attempts to
establish such a journal having failed, I feared lest I should but add
another to the list, and thus contribute another proof of the mental
deficiencies of my race. Very much that was said to me in respect to
my imperfect literary attainments, I felt to be most painfully true. The
unsuccessful projectors of all former attempts had been my
superiors in point of education, and if they had failed how could I
hope for success? Yet I did hope for success, and persisted in the
undertaking, encouraged by my English friends to go forward.
I can easily pardon those who saw in my persistence an
unwarrantable ambition and presumption. I was but nine years from
slavery. In many phases of mental experience I was but nine years
old. That one under such circumstances should aspire to establish a
printing press, surrounded by an educated people, might well be
considered unpractical if not ambitious. My American friends looked
at me with astonishment. “A wood-sawyer” offering himself to the
public as an editor! A slave, brought up in the depths of ignorance,
assuming to instruct the highly civilized people of the north in the
principles of liberty, justice, and humanity! The thing looked absurd.
Nevertheless I persevered. I felt that the want of education, great as
it was, could be overcome by study, and that wisdom would come by
experience; and further (which was perhaps the most controlling
consideration) I thought that an intelligent public, knowing my early
history, would easily pardon the many deficiencies which I well knew
that my paper must exhibit. The most distressing part of it all was the
offense which I saw I must give my friends of the old Anti-Slavery
organization, by what seemed to them a reckless disregard of their
opinion and advice. I am not sure that I was not under the influence
of something like a slavish adoration of these good people, and I
labored hard to convince them that my way of thinking about the
matter was the right one, but without success.
From motives of peace, instead of issuing my paper in Boston,
among New England friends, I went to Rochester, N. Y., among
strangers, where the local circulation of my paper—“The North
Star”—would not interfere with that of the Liberator or the Anti-
Slavery Standard, for I was then a faithful disciple of Wm. Lloyd
Garrison, and fully committed to his doctrine touching the pro-slavery
character of the Constitution of the United States, also the non-
voting principle of which he was the known and distinguished
advocate. With him, I held it to be the first duty of the non-
slaveholding States to dissolve the union with the slaveholding
States, and hence my cry, like his, was “No union with slaveholders.”
With these views I came into western New York, and during the first
four years of my labors here I advocated them with pen and tongue,
to the best of my ability. After a time, a careful reconsideration of the
subject convinced me that there was no necessity for dissolving the
“union between the northern and southern States;” that to seek this
dissolution was no part of my duty as an abolitionist; that to abstain
from voting was to refuse to exercise a legitimate and powerful
means for abolishing slavery; and that the Constitution of the United
States not only contained no guarantees in favor of slavery, but on
the contrary, was in its letter and spirit an anti-slavery instrument,
demanding the abolition of slavery as a condition of its own
existence, as the supreme law of the land.
This radical change in my opinions produced a corresponding
change in my action. To those with whom I had been in agreement
and in sympathy, I came to be in opposition. What they held to be a
great and important truth I now looked upon as a dangerous error. A
very natural, but to me a very painful thing, now happened. Those
who could not see any honest reasons for changing their views, as I
had done, could not easily see any such reasons for my change, and
the common punishment of apostates was mine.
My first opinions were naturally derived and honestly
entertained. Brought directly, when I escaped from slavery, into
contact with abolitionists who regarded the Constitution as a
slaveholding instrument, and finding their views supported by the
united and entire history of every department of the government, it is
not strange that I assumed the Constitution to be just what these
friends made it seem to be. I was bound not only by their superior
knowledge to take their opinions in respect to this subject, as the
true ones, but also because I had no means of showing their
unsoundness. But for the responsibility of conducting a public
journal, and the necessity imposed upon me of meeting opposite
views from abolitionists outside of New England, I should in all
probability have remained firm in my disunion views. My new
circumstances compelled me to re-think the whole subject, and study
with some care not only the just and proper rules of legal
interpretation, but the origin, design, nature, rights, powers, and
duties of civil governments, and also the relations which human
beings sustain to it. By such a course of thought and reading I was
conducted to the conclusion that the Constitution of the United
States—inaugurated “to form a more perfect union, establish justice,
insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense,
promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty”—
could not well have been designed at the same time to maintain and
perpetuate a system of rapine and murder like slavery, especially as
not one word can be found in the Constitution to authorize such a
belief. Then, again, if the declared purposes of an instrument are to
govern the meaning of all its parts and details, as they clearly
should, the Constitution of our country is our warrant for the abolition
of slavery in every State of the Union. It would require much time
and space to set forth the arguments which demonstrated to my
mind the unconstitutionality of slavery; but being convinced of the
fact my duty was plain upon this point in the farther conduct of my
paper. The North Star was a large sheet, published weekly, at a cost
of $80 per week, and an average circulation of 3,000 subscribers.
There were many times, when in my experience as editor and
publisher, I was very hard pressed for money, but by one means or
another I succeeded so well as to keep my pecuniary engagements,
and to keep my anti-slavery banner steadily flying during all the
conflict from the autumn of 1847 till the union of the States was
assured and emancipation was a fact accomplished. I had friends
abroad as well as at home who helped me liberally. I can never be
too grateful to Rev. Russell Laut Carpenter and to Mrs. Carpenter,
for the moral and material aid they tendered me through all the
vicissitudes of my paper enterprise. But to no one person was I more
indebted for substantial assistance than to Mrs. Julia Griffiths Crofts.
She came to my relief when my paper had nearly absorbed all my
means, and was heavily in debt, and when I had mortgaged my
house to raise money to meet current expenses; and by her
energetic and effective management, in a single year enabled me to
extend the circulation of my paper from 2,000 to 4,000 copies, pay
off the debts and lift the mortgage from my house. Her industry was
equal to her devotion. She seemed to rise with every emergency,
and her resources appeared inexhaustible. I shall never cease to
remember with sincere gratitude the assistance rendered me by this
noble lady, and I mention her here in the desire in some humble
measure to “give honor to whom honor is due.” During the first three
or four years my paper was published under the name of the North
Star. It was subsequently changed to Frederick Douglass’ Paper in
order to distinguish it from the many papers with “Stars” in their titles.
There were “North Stars,” “Morning Stars,” “Evening Stars,” and I
know not how many other stars in the newspaper firmament, and
some confusion arose naturally enough in distinguishing between
them; for this reason, and also because some of these stars were
older than my star I felt that mine, not theirs, ought to be the one to
“go out.”
Among my friends in this country, who helped me in my earlier
efforts to maintain my paper, I may proudly count such men as the
late Hon. Gerrit Smith, and Chief Justice Chase, Hon. Horace Mann,
Hon. Joshua R. Giddings, Hon. Charles Sumner, Hon. John G.
Palfry, Hon. Wm. H. Seward, Rev. Samuel J. May, and many others,
who though of lesser note were equally devoted to my cause.
Among these latter ones were Isaac and Amy Post, William and
Mary Hallowell, Asa and Hulda Anthony, and indeed all the
committee of the Western New York Anti-Slavery Society. They held
festivals and fairs to raise money, and assisted me in every other
possible way to keep my paper in circulation, while I was a non-
voting abolitionist, but withdrew from me when I became a voting
abolitionist. For a time the withdrawal of their coöperation
embarrassed me very much, but soon another class of friends were
raised up for me, chief amongst whom were the Porter family of
Rochester. The late Samuel D. Porter and his wife Susan F. Porter,
and his sisters, Maria and Elmira Porter, deserve grateful mention as
among my steadfast friends, who did much in the way of supplying
pecuniary aid.
Of course there were moral forces operating against me in
Rochester, as well as material ones. There were those who regarded
the publication of a “Negro paper” in that beautiful city as a blemish
and a misfortune. The New York Herald, true to the spirit of the
times, counselled the people of the place to throw my printing press
into Lake Ontario and to banish me to Canada, and while they were
not quite prepared for this violence, it was plain that many of them
did not well relish my presence amongst them. This feeling, however,
wore away gradually, as the people knew more of me and my works.
I lectured every Sunday evening during an entire winter in the
beautiful Corinthian Hall, then owned by Wm. R. Reynolds, Esq.,
who though he was not an abolitionist, was a lover of fair-play and
was willing to allow me to be heard. If in these lectures I did not
make abolitionists I did succeed in making tolerant the moral
atmosphere in Rochester; so much so, indeed, that I came to feel as
much at home there as I had ever done in the most friendly parts of
New England. I had been at work there with my paper but a few
years before colored travelers told me that they felt the influence of
my labors when they came within fifty miles. I did not rely alone upon
what I could do by the paper, but would write all day, then take a
train to Victor, Farmington, Canandaigua, Geneva, Waterloo,
Batavia, or Buffalo, or elsewhere, and speak in the evening,
returning home afterwards or early in the morning, to be again at my
desk writing or mailing papers. There were times when I almost
thought my Boston friends were right in dissuading me from my
newspaper project. But looking back to those nights and days of toil
and thought, compelled often to do work for which I had no
educational preparation, I have come to think that, under the
circumstances it was the best school possible for me. It obliged me
to think and read, it taught me to express my thoughts clearly, and
was perhaps better than any other course I could have adopted.
Besides it made it necessary for me to lean upon myself, and not
upon the heads of our Anti-Slavery church. To be a principal, and not
an agent. I had an audience to speak to every week, and must say
something worth their hearing, or cease to speak altogether. There is
nothing like the lash and sting of necessity to make a man work, and
my paper furnished this motive power. More than one gentleman
from the south, when stopping at Niagara, came to see me, that they
might know for themselves if I could indeed write, having as they
said believed it impossible that an uneducated fugitive slave could
write the articles attributed to me. I found it hard to get credit in some
quarters either for what I wrote or what I said. While there was
nothing very profound or learned in either, the low estimate of Negro
possibilities induced the belief that both my editorials and my
speeches were written by white persons. I doubt if this scepticism
does not still linger in the minds of some of my democratic fellow-
citizens.
The 2d of June, 1872, brought me a very grievous loss. My
house in Rochester was burnt to the ground, and among other things
of value, twelve volumes of my paper, covering the period from 1848
to 1860, were devoured by the flames. I have never been able to
replace them, and the loss is immeasurable. Only a few weeks
before, I had been invited to send these bound volumes to the library
of Harvard University where they would have been preserved in a
fire-proof building, and the result of my procrastination attests the
wisdom of more than one proverb. Outside the years embraced in
the late tremendous war, there has been no period, more pregnant
with great events, or better suited to call out the best mental and
moral energies of men, than that covered by these lost volumes. If I
have at any time said or written that which is worth remembering or
repeating, I must have said such things between the years 1848 and
1860, and my paper was a chronicle of most of what I said during
that time. Within that space we had the great Free Soil Convention at
Buffalo, the Nomination of Martin Van Buren, the Fugitive Slave Law,
the 7th March Speech by Daniel Webster, the Dred Scott decision,
the repeal of the Missouri Compromise, the Kansas Nebraska bill,
the Border war in Kansas, the John Brown raid upon Harper’s Ferry,
and a part of the War against the Rebellion, with much else, well
calculated to fire the souls of men having one spark of Liberty and
Patriotism within them. I have only fragments now, of all the work
accomplished during these twelve years, and must cover this chasm,
as best I can from memory and the incidental items, which I am able
to glean from various sources. Two volumes of the North Star have
been kindly supplied me, by my friend, Marshall Pierce of Saco, Me.
He had these carefully preserved and bound in one cover and sent
to me in Washington. He was one of the most systematically careful
men of all my anti-slavery friends, for I doubt if another entire volume
of the paper exists.
 One important branch of my anti-slavery work in Rochester, in
addition to that of speaking and writing against slavery, must not be
forgotten or omitted. My position gave me the chance of hitting that
old enemy some telling blows, in another direction than these. I was
on the southern border of Lake Ontario, and the Queen’s Dominions
were right over the way—and my prominence as an abolitionist, and
as the editor of an anti-slavery paper, naturally made me the station
master and conductor of the underground railroad passing through
this goodly city. Secrecy and concealment were necessary
conditions to the successful operation of this railroad, and hence its
prefix “underground.” My agency was all the more exciting and
interesting, because not altogether free from danger. I could take no
step in it without exposing myself to fine and imprisonment, for these
were the penalties imposed by the fugitive slave law, for feeding,
harboring, or otherwise assisting a slave to escape from his master;
but in face of this fact, I can say, I never did more congenial,
attractive, fascinating, and satisfactory work. True as a means of
destroying slavery, it was like an attempt to bail out the ocean with a
teaspoon, but the thought that there was one less slave, and one
more freeman,—having myself been a slave, and a fugitive slave—
brought to my heart unspeakable joy. On one occasion I had eleven
fugitives at the same time under my roof, and it was necessary for
them to remain with me, until I could collect sufficient money to get
them on to Canada. It was the largest number I ever had at any one
time, and I had some difficulty in providing so many with food and
shelter, but as may well be imagined, they were not very fastidious in
either direction, and were well content with very plain food, and a
strip of carpet on the floor for a bed, or a place on the straw in the
barn loft.
The underground railroad had many branches; but that one with
which I was connected had its main stations in Baltimore,
Wilmington, Philadelphia, New York, Albany, Syracuse, Rochester,
and St. Catharines (Canada). It is not necessary to tell who were the
principal agents in Baltimore; Thomas Garrett was the agent in
Wilmington; Melloe McKim, William Still, Robert Purvis, Edward M.
Davis, and others did the work in Philadelphia; David Ruggles, Isaac
T. Hopper, Napolian, and others, in New York city; the Misses Mott
and Stephen Myers, were forwarders from Albany; Revs. Samuel J.
May and J. W. Loguen, were the agents in Syracuse; and J. P.
Morris and myself received and dispatched passengers from
Rochester to Canada, where they were received by Rev. Hiram
Wilson. When a party arrived in Rochester, it was the business of Mr.
Morris and myself to raise funds with which to pay their passages to
St. Catharines, and it is due to truth to state, that we seldom called in
vain upon whig or democrat for help. Men were better than their
theology, and truer to humanity, than to their politics, or their offices.
On one occasion while a slave master was in the office of a
United States commissioner, procuring the papers necessary for the
arrest and rendition of three young men who had escaped from
Maryland, (one of whom was under my roof at the time, another at
Farmington, and the other at work on the farm of Asa Anthony just a
little outside the city limits,) the law partner of the commissioner, then
a distinguished democrat, sought me out, and told me what was
going on in his office, and urged me by all means to get these young
men out of the way of their pursuers and claimants. Of course no
time was to be lost. A swift horseman was dispatched to Farmington,
eighteen miles distant, another to Asa Anthony’s farm about three
miles, and another to my house on the south side of the city, and
before the papers could be served, all three of the young men were
on the free waves of Lake Ontario, bound to Canada. In writing to
their old master, they had dated their letter at Rochester, though they
had taken the precaution to send it to Canada to be mailed, but this
blunder in the date had betrayed their whereabouts, so that the
hunters were at once on their tracks.
So numerous were the fugitives passing through Rochester that I
was obliged at last to appeal to my British friends for the means of
sending them on their way, and when Mr. and Mrs. Carpenter and
Mrs. Croffts took the matter in hand, I had never any further trouble
in that respect. When slavery was abolished I wrote to Mrs.
Carpenter, congratulating her that she was relieved of the work of
raising funds for such purposes, and the characteristic reply of that
lady was that she had been very glad to do what she had done, and
had no wish for relief.
 My pathway was not entirely free from thorns in Rochester, and
the wounds and pains inflicted by them were perhaps much less
easily borne, because of my exemption from such annoyances while
in England. Men can in time become accustomed to almost anything,
even to being insulted and ostracised, but such treatment comes
hard at first, and when to some extent unlooked for. The vulgar
prejudice against color, so common to Americans, met me in several
disagreeable forms. A seminary for young ladies and misses, under
the auspices of Miss Tracy, was near my house on Alexander street,
and desirous of having my daughter educated like the daughters of
other men, I applied to Miss Tracy for her admission to her school.
All seemed fair, and the child was duly sent to “Tracy Seminary,” and
I went about my business happy in the thought that she was in the
way of a refined and Christian education. Several weeks elapsed
before I knew how completely I was mistaken. The little girl came
home to me one day and told me she was lonely in that school; that
she was in fact kept in solitary confinement; that she was not allowed
in the room with the other girls, nor to go into the yard when they
went out; that she was kept in a room by herself and not permitted to
be seen or heard by the others. No man with the feeling of a parent
could be less than moved by such a revelation, and I confess that I
was shocked, grieved, and indignant. I went at once to Miss Tracy to
ascertain if what I had heard was true, and was coolly told it was,
and the miserable plea was offered that it would have injured her
school if she had done otherwise. I told her she should have told me
so at the beginning, but I did not believe that any girl in the school
would be opposed to the presence of my daughter, and that I should
be glad to have the question submitted to them. She consented to
this, and to the credit of the young ladies, not one made objection.
Not satisfied with this verdict of the natural and uncorrupted sense of
justice and humanity of these young ladies, Miss Tracy insisted that
the parents must be consulted, and if one of them objected she
should not admit my child to the same apartment and privileges of
the other pupils. One parent only had the cruelty to object, and he
was Mr. Horatio G. Warner, a democratic editor, and upon his
adverse conclusion, my daughter was excluded from “Tracy
Seminary.” Of course Miss Tracy was a devout Christian lady after
the fashion of the time and locality, in good and regular standing in
the church.
My troubles attending the education of my children were not to
end here. They were not allowed in the public school in the district in
which I lived, owned property, and paid taxes, but were compelled, if
they went to a public school, to go over to the other side of the city,
to an inferior colored school. I hardly need say that I was not
prepared to submit tamely to this proscription, any more than I had
been to submit to slavery, so I had them taught at home for a while,
by Miss Thayer. Meanwhile I went to the people with the question
and created considerable agitation. I sought and obtained a hearing
before the Board of Education, and after repeated efforts with voice
and pen, the doors of the public schools were opened and colored
children were permitted to attend them in common with others.
There were barriers erected against colored people in most other
places of instruction and amusements in the city, and until I went
there they were imposed without any apparent sense of injustice or
wrong, and submitted to in silence; but one by one they have
gradually been removed and colored people now enter freely all
places of public resort without hindrance or observation. This change
has not been wholly effected by me. From the first I was cheered on
and supported in my demands for equal rights by such respectable
citizens as Isaac Post, Wm. Hallowell, Samuel D. Porter, Wm. C.
Bloss, Benj. Fish, Asa Anthony, and many other good and true men
of Rochester.
Notwithstanding what I have said of the adverse feeling exhibited
by some of its citizens at my selection of Rochester as the place to
establish my paper, and the trouble in educational matters just
referred to, that selection was in many respects very fortunate. The
city was, and still is, the center of a virtuous, intelligent, enterprising,
liberal, and growing population. The surrounding country is
remarkable for its fertility; and the city itself possesses one of the
finest water-powers in the world. It is on the line of the New York
Central railroad—a line that with its connections, spans the whole
country. Its people were industrious and in comfortable
circumstances; not so rich as to be indifferent to the claims of
humanity, and not so poor as to be unable to help any good cause
which commanded the approval of their judgment.
The ground had been measurably prepared for me by the labors
of others—notably by Hon. Myron Holley, whose monument of
enduring marble now stands in the beautiful cemetery at Mount
Hope, upon an eminence befitting his noble character. I know of no
place in the Union where I could have located at the time with less
resistance, or received a larger measure of sympathy and
coöperation, and I now look back to my life and labors there with
unalloyed satisfaction, and having spent a quarter of a century
among its people, I shall always feel more at home there than any
where else in this country.

Portrait of John Brown.

 CHAPTER VIII.
JOHN BROWN AND MRS. STOWE.

My First Meeting with Capt. John Brown—The Free Soil Movement—Colored

Convention—Uncle Tom’s Cabin—Industrial School for Colored People—
Letter to Mrs. H. B. Stowe.

ABOUT the time I began my enterprise in Rochester I chanced to

spend a night and a day under the roof of a man whose character
and conversation, and whose objects and aims in life made a very
deep impression upon my mind and heart. His name had been
mentioned to me by several prominent colored men, among whom
were the Rev. Henry Highland Garnet and J. W. Loguen. In speaking
of him their voices would drop to a whisper, and what they said of
him made me very eager to see and know him. Fortunately I was
invited to see him in his own house. At the time to which I now refer
this man was a respectable merchant in a populous and thriving city,
and our first place of meeting was at his store. This was a substantial
brick building, on a prominent, busy street. A glance at the interior,
as well as at the massive walls without, gave me the impression that
the owner must be a man of considerable wealth. From this store I
was conducted to his house, where I was kindly received as an
expected guest. My welcome was all I could have asked. Every
member of the family, young and old, seemed glad to see me, and I
was made much at home in a very little while. I was, however, a little
disappointed with the appearance of the house and with its location.
After seeing the fine store I was prepared to see a fine residence, in
an eligible locality, but this conclusion was completely dispelled by
actual observation. In fact, the house was neither commodious nor
elegant, nor its situation desirable. It was a small wooden building,
on a back street, in a neighborhood chiefly occupied by laboring men
and mechanics; respectable enough to be sure, but not quite the
place, I thought, where one would look for the residence of a
flourishing and successful merchant. Plain as was the outside of this
man’s house, the inside was plainer. Its furniture would have
satisfied a Spartan. It would take longer to tell what was not in this
house than what was in it. There was an air of plainness about it
which almost suggested destitution. My first meal passed under the
misnomer of tea, though there was nothing about it resembling the
usual significance of that term. It consisted of beef soup, cabbage,
and potatoes; a meal such as a man might relish after following the
plow all day, or performing a forced march of a dozen miles over a
rough road in frosty weather. Innocent of paint, veneering, varnish, or
table-cloth, the table announced itself unmistakably of pine and of
the plainest workmanship. There was no hired help visible. The
mother, daughters, and sons did the serving and did it well. They
were evidently used to it, and had no thought of any impropriety or
degradation in being their own servants. It is said that a house in
some measure reflects the character of its occupants; this one
certainly did. In it there were no disguises, no illusions, no make
believes. Everything implied stern truth, solid purpose, and rigid
economy. I was not long in company with the master of this house
before I discovered that he was indeed the master of it, and was
likely to become mine too if I stayed long enough with him. He
fulfilled St. Paul’s idea of the head of the family. His wife believed in
him, and his children observed him with reverence. Whenever he
spoke his words commanded earnest attention. His arguments,
which I ventured at some points to oppose, seemed to convince all;
his appeals touched all, and his will impressed all. Certainly I never
felt myself in the presence of a stronger religious influence than
while in this man’s house.
In person he was lean, strong, and sinewy, of the best New
England mould, built for times of trouble, fitted to grapple with the
flintiest hardships. Clad in plain American woolen, shod in boots of
cowhide leather, and wearing a cravat of the same substantial
material, under six feet high, less than 150 pounds in weight, aged
about fifty, he presented a figure, straight and symmetrical as a
mountain pine. His bearing was singularly impressive. His head was
not large, but compact and high. His hair was coarse, strong, slightly
gray and closely trimmed, and grew low on his forehead. His face
was smoothly shaved, and revealed a strong square mouth,
supported by a broad and prominent chin. His eyes were bluish gray,
and in conversation they were full of light and fire. When on the
street, he moved with a long, springing race horse step, absorbed by
his own reflections, neither seeking or shunning observation. Such
was the man, whose name I had heard in whispers, such was the
spirit of his house and family, such was the house in which he lived,
and such was Captain John Brown, whose name has now passed
into history, as one of the most marked characters, and greatest
heroes known to American fame.
After the strong meal already described, Captain Brown
cautiously approached the subject which he wished to bring to my
attention; for he seemed to apprehend opposition to his views. He
denounced slavery in look and language fierce and bitter, thought
that slaveholders had forfeited their right to live, that the slaves had
the right to gain their liberty in any way they could, did not believe
that moral suasion would ever liberate the slave, or that political
action would abolish the system. He said that he had long had a plan
which could accomplish this end, and he had invited me to his house
to lay that plan before me. He said he had been for some time
looking for colored men to whom he could safely reveal his secret,
and at times he had almost despaired of finding such men, but that
now he was encouraged, for he saw heads of such rising up in all
directions. He had observed my course at home and abroad, and he
wanted my coöperation. His plan as it then lay in his mind, had much
to commend it. It did not, as some suppose, contemplate a general
rising among the slaves, and a general slaughter of the slave
masters. An insurrection he thought would only defeat the object, but
his plan did contemplate the creating of an armed force which should
act in the very heart of the south. He was not averse to the shedding
of blood, and thought the practice of carrying arms would be a good
one for the colored people to adopt, as it would give them a sense of
their manhood. No people he said could have self respect, or be
respected, who would not fight for their freedom. He called my
attention to a map of the United States, and pointed out to me the
far-reaching Alleghanies, which stretch away from the borders of
New York, into the Southern States. “These mountains,” he said, “are
the basis of my plan. God has given the strength of the hills to
freedom, they were placed here for the emancipation of the negro
race; they are full of natural forts, where one man for defense will be
equal to a hundred for attack; they are full also of good hiding
places, where large numbers of brave men could be concealed, and
baffle and elude pursuit for a long time. I know these mountains well,
and could take a body of men into them and keep them there despite
of all the efforts of Virginia to dislodge them. The true object to be
sought is first of all to destroy the money value of slave property; and
that can only be done by rendering such property insecure. My plan
then is to take at first about twenty-five picked men, and begin on a
small scale; supply them arms and ammunition, post them in squads
of fives on a line of twenty-five miles, the most persuasive and
judicious of whom shall go down to the fields from time to time, as
opportunity offers, and induce the slaves to join them, seeking and
selecting the most restless and daring.”
He saw that in this part of the work the utmost care must be
used to avoid treachery and disclosure. Only the most conscientious
and skillful should be sent on this perilous duty; with care and
enterprise he thought he could soon gather a force of one hundred
hardy men, men who would be content to lead the free and
adventurous life to which he proposed to train them, when these
were properly drilled, and each man had found the place for which
he was best suited, they would begin work in earnest; they would run
off the slaves in large numbers, retain the brave and strong ones in
the mountains, and send the weak and timid to the north by the
underground railroad; his operations would be enlarged with
increasing numbers, and would not be confined to one locality.
When I asked him, how he would support these men? he said
emphatically, he would subsist them upon the enemy. Slavery was a
state of war, and the slave had a right to anything necessary to his
freedom. But said I, “suppose you succeed in running off a few
slaves, and thus impress the Virginia slaveholder with a sense of
insecurity in their slaves, the effect will be only to make them sell
their slaves further south.” “That,” said he, “will be first what I want to
do; then I would follow them up. If we could drive slavery out of one
county, it would be a great gain; it would weaken the system
throughout the state.” “But they would employ bloodhounds to hunt
you out of the mountains.” “That they might attempt,” said he, “but
the chances are, we should whip them, and when we should have
whipt one squad, they would be careful how they pursued.” “But you
might be surrounded and cut off from your provisions or means of
subsistence.” He thought that could not be done so they could not
cut their way out, but even if the worst came, he could but be killed,
and he had no better use for his life than to lay it down in the cause
of the slave. When I suggested that we might convert the
slaveholders, he became much excited, and said that could never
be, “he knew their proud hearts and that they would never be
induced to give up their slaves, until they felt a big stick about their
heads.” He observed that I might have noticed the simple manner in
which he lived, adding that he had adopted this method in order to
save money to carry out his purposes. This was said in no boastful
tone, for he felt that he had delayed already too long and had no
room to boast either his zeal or his self denial. Had some men made
such display of rigid virtue, I should have rejected it, as affected,
false and hypocritical, but in John Brown, I felt it to be real as iron or
granite. From this night spent with John Brown in Springfield, Mass.,
1847, while I continued to write and speak against slavery, I became
all the same less hopeful of its peaceful abolition. My utterances
became more and more tinged by the color of this man’s strong
impressions. Speaking at an anti-slavery convention in Salem, Ohio,
I expressed this apprehension that slavery could only be destroyed
by bloodshed, when I was suddenly and sharply interrupted by my
good old friend Sojourner Truth with the question, “Frederick, is God
dead?” “No.” I answered, and “because God is not dead slavery can
only end in blood.” My quaint old sister was of the Garrison school of
non-resistants, and was shocked at my sanguinary doctrine, but she
too became an advocate of the sword, when the war for the
maintenance of the Union was declared.
In 1848 it was my privilege to attend, and in some measure to
participate in the famous Free-Soil Convention held in Buffalo, New