Frederick Douglass

I readily saw that this plan could be made very effective in rendering slave property in Maryland and Virginia valueless by rendering it insecure.

Hating slavery as I did, and making its abolition the object of my life, I was ready to welcome any new mode of attack upon the slave system which gave any promise of success.

A government recognizing the validity of the Dred Scott decision at such a time as this, is not likely to have any very charitable feelings towards me, and if I am to meet its representatives I prefer to do so at least upon equal terms.

They have by the single act of slaveholding, voluntarily placed themselves beyond the laws of justice and honor, and have become only fitted for companionship with thieves and pirates--the common enemies of God and of all mankind.

Men who live by robbing their fellowmen of their labor and liberty have forfeited their right to know anything of the thoughts, feelings, or purposes of those whom they rob and plunder.

The time for a full statement of what I know and of ALL I know of this desperate but sublimely disinterested effort to emancipate the slaves of Maryland and Virginia from their cruel taskmasters, has not yet come, and may never come.

I desire to be quite emphatic here, for of all guilty men, he is the guiltiest who lures his fellowmen to an undertaking of this sort, under promise of assistance which he afterwards fails to render.

The lightning when speaking for itself, is among the most direct, reliable, and truthful of things; but when speaking of the terror-stricken slaveholders at Harper’s Ferry, it has been made the swiftest of liars.

All who were supposed to have been any way connected with John Brown were to be hunted down and surrendered to the tender mercies of slaveholding and panic-stricken Virginia, and there to be tried after the fashion of John Brown’s trial…

A scream for vengeance came up from all sections of the slave States and from great multitudes in the North.

What in the tone of southern sentiment had been fierce before became furious and uncontrollable now.

Now, while this war of words--this conflict of doctrines-- was in progress, the portentous shadow of a stupendous civil war became more and more visible.