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LIFE AND TIMES OF FREDERICK DOUGLASS 217

take, or that their free-soil party, like the old liberty party, was ultimately
required to step aside and make room for the great Republican party. In all
this and more it illustrates the experience of reform in all ages, and conforms
to the laws of human progress. Measures change, principles never.

I was not the only colored man well known to the country who was present
at this convention. Samuel Ringgold Ward, Henry Highland Garnet,
Charles L. Remond, and Henry Bibb, were there and made speeches which
were received with surprise and gratification by the thousands there assembled.
As a colored man I felt greatly encouraged and strengthened for my
cause while listening to these men — in the presence of the ablest men of the
Caucasian race. Mr. Ward especially attracted attention at that convention. As
an orator and thinker he was vastly superior, I thought, to any of us, and being
perfectly black and of unmixed African descent, the splendors of his intellect
went directly to the glory of his race. In depth of thought, fluency of speech,
readiness of wit, logical exactness, and general intelligence, Samuel R. Ward
has left no successor among the colored men amongst us, and it was a sad day
for our cause when he was laid low in the soil of a foreign country.

After the Free Soil party, with "Free Soil," "Free Labor," "Free States,"
"Free Speech," and "Free Men," on its banner, had defeated the almost permanently
victorious Democratic party under the leadership of so able and
popular a standard-bearer as General Lewis Cass. Mr. Calhoun and other
southern statesmen were more than ever alarmed at the rapid increase of
anti-slavery feeling in the North, and devoted their energies more and more
to the work of devising means to stay the torrents and tie up the storm. They
were not ignorant of whereunto this sentiment would grow if unsubjected
and unextinguished. Hence they became fierce and furious in debate, and
more extrarngant than ever in their demands for additional safeguards for
their system of robbery and murder. Assuming that the Constitution guaranteed
their rights of property in their fellowmen, they held it to be in open
violation of the Constitution for any American citizen in any part of the
United States to speak, write, or act against this right. But this shallow logic
they plainly saw could do them no good unless they could obtain further
safeguards for slavery. In order to effect this, the idea of so changing the
Constitution was suggested, that there should be two instead of one President
of the United States — one from the North and the other from the South — and
that no measure should become a law without the assent of both. But this
device was so utterly impracticable that it soon dropped out of sight, and it
is mentioned here only to show the desperation of slaveholders to prop up
their system of barbarism against which the sentiment of the North was