rtitude and cast it
into the fire. They wanted a free country, where the fleeing victim of
slavery could find a refuge. Douglass perceived the immense advantage
these swarming millions would gain through being free in the States
where they already were. He had always been minded to do the best
thing possible. When a slave, he had postponed his escape until it
seemed entirely feasible. When denied cabin passage on steamboats,
he had gone in the steerage or on deck. When he had been refused
accommodation in a hotel, he had sought it under any humble roof that
offered. It would have been a fine thing in the abstract to refuse the
half-loaf, but in that event we should have had no Frederick Douglass.
It was this very vein of prudence, keeping always in view the object
to be attained, and in a broad, non-Jesuitical sense subordinating the
means to the end, that enabled Douglass to prolong his usefulness a
generation after the abolition of slavery. Douglass in his _Life and
Times_ states his own case as follows:

"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 opinion was not exactly the opinion of the majority of the
Liberty party, which did not question the constitutionality of slavery
in the slave States. Neither was it the opinion of the Supreme Court,
which in the Dred Scott case held that the Constitution guaranteed
not only the right to hold slaves, but to hold them in free States.
Nevertheless, entertaining the views he did, Douglass was able to
support the measures which sought to oppose slavery through political
action. In August, 1848, while his Garrisonian views were as yet
unchanged, he had been present as a spectator at the Free Soil
Convention at Buffalo. In his Life and Times he says of this
gathering: "This Buffalo Convention of Free Soilers, however low their
standard, did lay the foundation of a grand superstructure. It was a