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LIFE AND TIMES OF FREDERICK DOUGLASS 335

eminent Chief Justice of the District of Columbia and some of his associates
were not well pleased with my appointment, I was always treated by them,
as well as by the chief clerk of the courts, Hon. J. R. Meigs, and the subordinates
of the latter (with a single exception), with the respect and consideration
due to my office. Among the eminent lawyers of the District I believe
I had many friends, and there were those of them to whom I could always go
with confidence in an emergency for sound advice and direction, and this
fact, after all the hostility felt in consequence of my appointment, and
revived by my speech at Baltimore, is another proof of the vincibility of all
feelings arising out of popular prejudices.

In all my forty years of thought and labor to promote the freedom and
welfare of my race. I never found myself more widely and painfully at variance
with leading colored men of the country, than when I opposed the effort
to set in motion a wholesale exodus of colored people of the South to the
Northern States; and yet I never took a position in which I felt myself better
fortified by reason and necessity. It was said of me, that I had deserted to the
old master class, and that I was a traitor to my race; that I had run away from
slavery myself, and yet I was opposing others in doing the same. When my
opponents condescended to argue, they took the ground that the colored
people of the South needed to be brought into contact with the freedom and
civilization of the North; that no emancipated and persecuted people ever
had or ever could rise in the presence of the people by whom they had been
enslaved, and that the true remedy for the ills which the freedmen were suffering,
was to initiate the lsraelitish departure from our modern Egypt to a
land abounding, if not in "milk and honey," certainly in pork and hominy.

Influenced, no doubt, by the dazzling prospects held out to them by the
advocates of the exodus movement, thousands of poor, hungry, naked, and
destitute colored people were induced to quit the South amid the frosts and
snows of a dreadful winter in search of a better country. I regret to say there
was something sinister in this so-called exodus, for it transpired that some of
the agents most active in promoting it had an understanding with certain
railroad companies, by which they were to receive one dollar per head upon
all such passengers. Thousands of these poor people, traveling only so far as
they had money to bear their expenses, were dropped on the levees of St.
Louis, in the extremest destitution; and their tales of woe were such as to
move a heart much less sensitive to human suffering than mine. But while I
felt for these poor deluded people, and did what I could to put a stop to their
ill-advised and ill-arranged stampede. I also did what I could to assist such
of them as were within my reach, who were on their way to this land of