Frederick Douglass

For, of all the places in the world where an anti-slavery man needs the confidence and encouragement of friends, I take Washington to be that place.

It coolly proposes to sell the bodies and souls of the blacks to increase the intelligence and refinement of the whites; to rob every black stranger who ventures among them, to increase their literary fund.

It would seem that the men who enacted that law, had not only banished from their minds all sense of justice, but all sense of shame.

It was intended to put thorns under feet already bleeding; to crush a people already bowed down; to enslave a people already but half free; in a word, it was intended to discourage, dishearten, and drive the free colored people out of the…

The history of that election reveals, with great clearness, the extent to which slavery has shot its leprous distillment through the life-blood of the nation.

Resting their platforms upon the fugitive slave bill, they boldly asked the people for political power to execute the horrible and hell-black provisions of that bill.

They virtually asked them to unite in a war upon free speech, and upon conscience, and to drive the Almighty presence from the councils of the nation.

Never did parties come before the northern people with propositions of such undisguised contempt for the moral sentiment and the religious ideas of that people.

They are, therefore, rapidly sinking all other questions to nothing, compared with the increasing demands of slavery.

Its great head for the present is President Pierce, whose boast it was, before his election, that his whole life had been consistent with the interests of slavery, that he is above reproach on that score.

For the present, the best representative of the slavery party in politics is the democratic party.

Like is finding its like on either side of these great issues, and the great battle is at hand.