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296 LIFE AND TIMES OF FREDERICK DOUGLASS

or improve his own condition. Now, since poverty has, and can have no
chance against wealth, the landless against the land owner, the ignorant
against the intelligent, the freedman was powerless. He had nothing left him
but a slavery-distorted and diseased body, and lame and twisted limbs with
which to fight the battle of life. I therefore, soon found that the negro had still
a cause, and that he needed my voice and pen with others to plead for it. The
American Anti-Slavery Society, under the lead of Mr. Garrison, had disbanded,
its newspapers were discontinued, its agents were withdrawn from
the field, and all systematic efforts by abolitionists were abandoned. Many of
the Society, Mr. Phillips and myself amongst the number, differed from Mr.
Garrison as to the wisdom of this course. I felt that the work of the Society
was not done, that it had not fulfilled its mission, which was not merely to
emancipate, but to elevate the enslaved class; but against Mr. Garrison's leadership
and the surprise and joy occasioned by the emancipation, it was impossible
to keep the association alive, and the cause of the freedmen was left
mainly to individual effort and to hastily extemporized societies of an ephemeral
character, brought together under benevolent impulse, but having no history
behind them, and being new to the work, they were not as effective for
good as the old society would have been had it followed up its work and kept
its old instrumentalities in operation.

From the first I saw no chance of bettering the condition of the freedman,
until he should cease to be merely a freedman, and should become a
citizen. I insisted that there was no safety for him, or for anybody else in
America, outside the American Government: that to guard, protect, and
maintain his liberty, the freedman should have the ballot: that the liberties of
the American people were dependent upon the Ballot-box, the Jury-box, and
the Cartridge-box, that without these no class of people could live and flourish
in this country, and this was now the word for the hour with me, and the
word to which the people of the north willingly listened when I spoke. Hence
regarding as I did, the elective franchise as the one great power by which all
civil rights are obtained, enjoyed, and maintained under our form of government,
and the one without which freedom to any class is delusive if not
impossible, I set myself to work with whatever force and energy I possessed
to secure this power for the recently emancipated millions.

The demand for the ballot was such a vast advance upon the former
objects proclaimed by the friends of the colored race, that it startled and
struck men as preposterous and wholly inadmissible. Anti-slavery men
themselves were not united as to the wisdom of such a demand. Mr. Garrison
himself, though foremost for the abolition of slavery, was not yet quite ready