arm offended them, would cut it off with sublime fortitude and cast it into the fire.  They wanted a free country, where the fleeing victim of slavery could find a refuge.  Douglass perceived the immense advantage these swarming millions would gain through being free in the States where they already were.  He had always been minded to do the best thing possible.  When a slave, he had postponed his escape until it seemed entirely feasible.  When denied cabin passage on steamboats, he had gone in the steerage or on deck.  When he had been refused accommodation in a hotel, he had sought it under any humble roof that offered.  It would have been a fine thing in the abstract to refuse the half-loaf, but in that event we should have had no Frederick Douglass.  It was this very vein of prudence, keeping always in view the object to be attained, and in a broad, non-Jesuitical sense subordinating the means to the end, that enabled Douglass to prolong his usefulness a generation after the abolition of slavery.  Douglass in his Life and Times states his own case as follows: 

“After a time, a careful reconsideration of the subject convinced me that there was no necessity for dissolving the union between the Northern and Southern States; that to seek this dissolution was no part of my duty as an abolitionist; that to abstain from voting was to refuse to exercise a legitimate and powerful means for abolishing slavery; and that the Constitution of the United States not only contained no guarantees in favor of slavery, but, on the contrary, was in its letter and spirit an anti-slavery instrument, demanding the abolition of slavery as a condition of its own existence, as the supreme law of the land.”

This opinion was not exactly the opinion of the majority of the Liberty party, which did not question the constitutionality of slavery in the slave States.  Neither was it the opinion of the Supreme Court, which in the Dred Scott case held that the Constitution guaranteed not only the right to hold slaves, but to hold them in free States.  Nevertheless, entertaining the views he did, Douglass was able to support the measures which sought to oppose slavery through political action.  In August, 1848, while his Garrisonian views were as yet unchanged, he had been present as a spectator at the Free Soil Convention at Buffalo.  In his Life and Times he says of this gathering:  “This Buffalo Convention of Free Soilers, however low their standard, did lay the foundation of a grand superstructure.  It was a powerful link in the chain of events by which the slave system has been abolished, the slave emancipated, and the country saved from dismemberment.”  In 1851 Douglass announced that his sympathies were with the voting abolitionists, and thenceforth he supported by voice and pen Hale, Fremont, and Lincoln, the successive candidates of the new party.