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172 LIFE AND TIMES OF FREDERICK DOUGLASS

majority of the people were evidently with the new constitution; even the
word white in it chimed well with the popular prejudice against the colored
race, and at the first helped to make the movement popular. On the other
hand, all the arguments which the Dorr men could urge against a property
qualification for suffrage were equally cogent against a color qualification,
and this was our advantage. But the contest was intensely bitter and exciting.
We were as usual denounced as intermeddlers (carpet-bagger had not come
into use at that time) and were told to mind our own business, and the like,
a mode of defense common to men when called to account for mean and
discreditable conduct. Stephen S. Foster, Parker Pillsbury, and the rest of us
were not the kind of men to be ordered off by that sort of opposition. We
cared nothing for the Dorr party on the one hand, nor the "law and order
party" on the other. What we wanted, and what we labored to obtain, was a
constitution free from the narrow, selfish, and senseless limitation of the
word white. Naturally enough when we said a strong and striking word
against the Dorr Constitution the conservatives were pleased and applauded,
while the Dorr men were disgusted and indignant. Foster and Pillsbury were
like the rest of us, young, strong, and at their best in this contest. The splen-
did vehemence of the one, and the weird and terrible denunciations of the
other, never failed to stir up mobocratic wrath wherever they spoke. Foster
especially, was effective in this line. His theory was that he must make con-
verts or mobs. If neither came he charged it either to his want of skill or his
unfaithfulness. I was much with Mr. Foster during the tour in Rhode Island,
and though at times he seemed to me extravagant and needlessly offensive
in his manner of presenting his ideas, yet take him for all in all, he was one
of the most impressive advocates the cause of the American slave ever had.
No white man ever made the black man's cause more completely his own.
Abby Kelley, since Abby Kelley Foster, was perhaps the most successful of
any of us. Her youth and simple Quaker beauty combined with her wonder-
ful earnestness, her large knowledge and great logical power, bore down all
opposition to the end, wherever she spoke, though she was before pelted
with foul eggs, and no less foul words from the noisy mobs which attended
us.

Monroe and I were less aggressive than either of our co-workers, and of
course did not provoke the same resistance. He at least, had the eloquence
that charms, and the skill that disarms. I think that our labors in Rhode Island
during this Dorr excitement did more to abolitionize the State, than any pre-
vious, or subsequent work. It was the "tide," "taken at the flood." One effect
of those labors was to induce the old "Law and Order" party, when it set

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