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LIFE AND TIMES OF FREDERICK DOUGLASS 229

appropriated, and when nothing had been gained by the North — the armed
and bloody attempt to force slavery upon the virgin soil of Kansas — the
efforts of both of the great political parties to drive from place and power
every man suspected of ideas and principles hostile to slavery — the rude
attacks made upon Giddings, Hale, Chase, Wilson, Wm. H. Seward, and
Charles Sumner — the effort to degrade these brave men, and drive them
from positions of prominence — the summary manner in which Virginia
hanged John Brown; — in a word, whatever was done or attempted, with a
view to the support and security of slavery, only served as fuel to the fire,
and heated the furnace of agitation to a higher degree than any before
attained. This was true up to the moment when the nation found it necessary
to gird on the sword for the salvation of the country and the destruction of
slavery.

At no time during all the ten years preceding the war, was the public
mind at rest. Mr. Clay's compromise measures in 1850, whereby all the
troubles of the country about slavery were to be "in the deep bosom of the
ocean huried," were hardly dry on the pages of the statute book before the
whole land was rocked with rumored agitation, and for one, I did my best by
pen and voice, and by ceaseless activity to keep it alive and vigorous. Later
on, in 1854, we had the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which removed the only
grand legal barrier against the spread of slavery over all the territory of the
United States. From this time there was no pause, no repose. Everybody,
however dull, could see that this was a phase of the slavery question which
was not to he slighted or ignored. The people of the North had been accustomed
to ask, in a tone of cruel indifference. "What have we to do with
slavery?" and now no labored speech was required in answer. Slaveholding
aggression settled this question for us. The presence of slavery in a territory
would certainly exclude the sons and daughters of the free States more effectually
than statutes or yellow fever. Those who cared nothing for the slave,
and were willing to tolerate slavery inside the slave States, were nevertheless
not quite prepared to find themselves and their children excluded from the
common inheritance of the nation. It is not surprising therefore, that the
public mind of the North was easily kept intensely alive on this subject, nor
that in 1856 an alarming expression of feeling on this point was seen in the
large vote given for John C. Fremont and William L. Dayton for President
and Vice-President of the United States. Until this last uprising of the North
against the slave power the anti-slavery movement was largely retained in
the hands of the original abolitionists, whose most prominent leaders have
already been mentioned elsewhere in this volume. After 1856 a mightier arm

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