As I wrote in a direct response to Norrell, he does indeed provide an ample evidence of the secret work of Washington, thus providing an important corrective to how Washington's legacy is understood. However, there is a crucial distinction though between public utterance and private action, particularly in the case of a figure to whom most blacks and many influential whites looked to for guidance on the question of black citizenship in America.

It wasn't merely that Washington was silent on the matter of political struggle. He repeatedly claimed in public speeches and writings that blacks had been foolish after slavery to focus on political freedom, wrong now to focus on grievances. It would be difficult to argue that Washington, who dominated black public discourse and had the ear of some of the most powerful whites in the country, did not set the national terms of struggle for black civic inclusion, regardless of his private actions. Other leaders were forced to operate on the ideological landscape he fashioned, or resist his hegemony.

It is also wrong, I think, to depict Washington as going as far as he thought he safely could to advance black freedom. Black progress wasn't a continuum on which he cleaved to one end. He had a distinct vision - a coherent philosophy wherein political self-determination was secondary to the development of industrial discipline, bourgeois morality, and economic individualism. This was also the legacy of the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands (and passed on to Washington, I imagine, by General Armstrong at the Hampton Institute). After the war, Freedmen officials and Union officers by sought to make citizens of former slaves by impressing on them not their newly gained rights, but rather the interconnected values of marital obligation, contract labor, and material accumulation. The point here is that Washington embraced this vision of freedom not because he was constrained from doing more. He clearly believed, like Freedmen officials before him, that freed blacks required discipline and regimentation to prepare for the full benefits of citizenship. Norrell quotes Washington as saying, quite earnestly, that the toothbrush may be the greatest instrument of civilization.