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LIFE AND TIMES OF FREDERICK DOUGLASS 257

waiting for the response. It had not to wait long, for the trumpet of war was
soon sounded, and the tramp of armed men was heard in that region. During
all the winter of 1860 notes of preparation for a tremendous conflict came to
us from that quarter on every wind. Still the warning was not taken. Few of
the North could really believe that this insolent display of arms would end in
anything more substantial than dust and smoke.

The shameful and shocking course of President Buchanan and his
Cabinet towards this rising rebellion against the government which each and
all of them had solemnly sworn to "support, defend, and maintain"— that the
treasury was emptied, that the army was scattered, that our ships of war were
sent out of the way, that our forts and arsenals in the South were weakened
and crippled, — purposely left an easy prey to the prospective insurgents, —
that one after another the States were allowed to secede, that these rebel
measures were largely encouraged by the doctrine of Mr. Buchanan, that he
found no power in the constitution to coerce a State, are all matters of history,
and need only the briefest mention here.

To arrest this tide of secession and revolution, which was sweeping over
the South, the southern papers, which still had some dread of the consequences
likely to ensue from the course marked out before the election,
proposed as a means fix promoting conciliation and satisfaction, that "each
northern State, through her legislature, or in convention assembled, should
repeal all laws passed for the injury of the constitutional rights of the South
(meaning thereby all laws passed for the protection of personal liberty); that
they should pass laws for the easy and prompt execution of the fugitive slave
law; that they should pass other laws imposing penalties on all malefactors
who should hereafter assist or encourage the escape of fugitive slaves; also,
laws declaring and protecting the right of slaveholders to travel and sojourn
in Northern States, accompanied by their slaves; also, that they should
instruct their representatives and senators in Congress to repeal the law prohihiting
the sale of slaves in the District of Columbia, and pass laws sufficient for the full
protection of slave property in the Territories of the
Union."

It may indeed be well regretted that there was a class of men in the North
willing to patch up a peace with this rampant spirit of disunion by compliance with
these offensive, scandalous, and humiliating terms, and to do so
without any guarantee that the South would then be pacified; rather with the
certainty, learned by past experience, that it would by no means promote this
end. I confess to a feeling allied to satisfaction at the prospect of a conflict
between the North and the South. Standing outside the pale of American