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258 LIFE AND TIMES OF FREDERICK DOUGLASS

humanity, denied citizenship, unable to call the land of my birth my country,
and adjudged by the supreme court of the United States to have no rights
which white men were bound to respect, and longing for the end of the bondage
of my people, I was ready for any political upheaval which should bring
about a change in the existing condition of things. Whether the war of words
would or would not end in blows was for a time a matter of doubt; and when
it became certain that the South was wholly in earnest, and meant at all hazards
to execute its threats of disruption, a visible change in the sentiment of
the North was apparent.

The reaction from the glorious assertion of freedom and independence
on the part of the North in the triumphant election of Abraham Lincoln, was
a painful and humiliating development of its weakness. It seemed as if all
that had been gained in the canvass was about to be surrendered to the vanquished;
that the South, though beaten at the polls, was to be victorious and
have every thing its own way in the final result. During all the intervening
months, from November to the ensuing March, the drift of northern sentiment
was towards compromise. To smooth the way for this, most of the
northern legislatures repealed their personal liberty bills, as they were supposed
to embarrass the surrender of fugitive slaves to their claimants. The
feeling everywhere seemed to be that something must be done to convince
the South that the election of Mr. Lincoln meant no harm to slavery or the
slave power, and that the North was sound on the question of the right of the
master to hold and hunt his slave as long as he pleased, and that even the
right to hold slaves in the Territories should be submitted to the supreme
court, which would probably decide in favor of the most extravagant
demands of the slave States. The northern press took on a more conservative
tone towards the slavery propagandists, and a corresponding tone of bitterness
towards anti-slavery men and measures. It came to be a no uncommon
thing to hear men denouncing South Carolina and Massachusetts in the same
breath, and in the same measure of disproval. The old pro-slavery spirit
which, in 1835, mobbed anti-slavery prayer-meetings, and dragged William
Lloyd Garrison through the streets of Boston with a halter about his neck,
was revived. From Massachusetts to Missouri, anti-slavery meetings were
ruthlessly assailed and broken up. With others, I was roughly handled by a
mob in Tremont Temple, Boston, headed by one of the wealthiest men of that
city. The talk was that the blood of some abolitionist must be shed to appease
the wrath of the offended South, and to restore peaceful relations between
the two sections of the country. A howling mob followed Wendell Phillips
for three days whenever he appeared on the pavements of his native city,

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