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LIFE AND TIMES OF FREDERICK DOUGLASS 215

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 slave-
holders, 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
cnntinued 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 antislavery
convention in Salem, Ohio. I expressed his apprehension that slavery
could only be destroyed by blood-shed, 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 York. It was a vast
and variegated assemblage, composed of persons from all sections of the
North, and may be said to have formed a new departure in the history of
forces organized to resist the growing and aggressive demands of slavery
and the slave power. Until this Buffalo convention anti-slavery agencies had
been mainly directed to the work of changing public sentiment by exposing
through the press and on the platform the nature of the slave system. Anti-
slavery thus far had only been sheet lightning; the Buffalo convention sought

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