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LIFE AND TIMES OF FREDERICK DOUGLASS 259

because of his ability and prominence in the propagation of anti-slavery
opinions.

While this humiliating reaction was going on at the North, various
devices were suggested and pressed at Washington, to bring about peace and
reconciliation. Committees were appointed to listen to southern grievances,
and, if possible, devise means of redress for such as might be alleged. Some
or these peace propositions would have been shocking to the last degree to
the moral sense of the North, had not fear for the safety of the Union over-
whelmed all moral conviction. Such men as William H. Seward, Charles
Francis Adams, Henry B. Anthony, Joshua R. Giddings, and others — men
whose courage had been equal to all other emergencies — bent before this
southem storm, and were ready to purchase peace at any price. Those who
had stimulated the courage of the North before the election, and had shouted
"Who's afraid?" were now shaking in their shoes with apprehension and
dread. One was for passing laws in the northern States for the better protection
of slavehunters, and for the greater efficiency of the fugitive slave bill.
Another was for enacting laws to punish the invasion of the slave States, and
others were for so altering the constitution of the United States that the federal
goverment should never abolish slavery while any one State should
object to such a measure.• Everything that could be demanded by insatiable
pride and scittishness on the part of the slaveholding South, or could be surrendered
by abject fear and senility on the part of the North, had able and
eloquent advocates.

Happily for the cause of human freedom, and for the final unity of the
American nation, the South was mad, and would listen to no concessions.
They would neither accept the terms offered, nor offer others to be accepted.
They had made up their minds that under a given contingency they would
secede from the Union and thus dismember the Republic. That contingency
had happened, and they should execute their threat. Mr. Iverson of Georgia,
expressed the ruling sentiment of his section when he told the northern
peacemakers that if the people of the South were given a blank sheet of paper
upon which to write their own terms on which they would remain in the
Union, they would not stay. They had come to hate everything which had the
prefix "Free" — free soil, free states, free territories, free schools, free speech,
and freedom generally, and they would haw no more such prefixes. This
haughty and unreasonable and unreasoning attitude of the imperious South
saved the slave and saved the nation. Had the South accepted our conces-

• See "History of American Conflict," Vol. II, by Horace Greeley.