Captain Brown urged us both to go with him, but I could not do so, and could but feel that he was about to rivet the fetters more firmly than ever on the limbs of the enslaved.
Douglass recounts his decision not to join John Brown's raid, expressing his fear that it would worsen the condition of enslaved people.
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His iron sentences, cold and harsh, sunk like heavy weights deep into my heart, and stirred up within me a rebellion not soon to be allayed.
The good to be sought and the evil to be shunned were flung in the balance and weighed against each other.