Frederick Douglass

Our very lack of preparation for the conflict disposed us to look for some other than the way of blood out of the difficulty.

Treason had shot its poisonous roots deeper, and had spread its death-dealing branches further than any northern calculation had covered.

For the moment the northern lamb was transformed into a lion, and his roar was terrible.

We could not but believe that there existed at the South a latent and powerful Union sentiment which would assert itself at last.

We (the people of the North) are a charitable people, and in the excess of this feeling we were disposed to put the very best construction upon the strange behavior of our southern brethren.

This haughty and unreasonable and unreasoning attitude of the imperious South saved the slave and saved the nation.

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 have no more such prefixes.

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.

Some of 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 overwhelmed all moral conviction.

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.

I confess to a feeling allied to satisfaction at the prospect of a conflict between the North and the South.

Had Southern men puzzled their brains to find the most effective means to array against slavery and slaveholding manners the solid opposition of the North, they could not have hit upon any expedient better suited to that end, than was this…