It has revealed the arrogant and overbearing spirit of the slave states toward the free states; despising their principles—shocking their feelings of humanity, not only by bringing before them the abominations of slavery, but by attempting to make them parties to the crime.
Douglass describes how the Fugitive Slave Act revealed the slave states' contempt for free state principles and attempted to implicate them in the institution of slavery.
Share
More from Frederick Douglass
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.
It was in the air, and men breathed it and were permeated by it, often when they were quite unconscious of its presence.