and for several years
thereafter, he was, with the rest of the Garrisonians, a pronounced
disunionist. He held to the Garrisonian doctrine that the pro-slavery
Constitution of the United States was a "league with death and a
covenant with hell," maintained that anti-slavery men should not vote
under it, and advocated the separation of the free States as the
only means of preventing the utter extinction of freedom by the
ever-advancing encroachments of the slave power. In Rochester he found
himself in the region where the Liberty party, under the leadership of
James G. Birney, Salmon P. Chase, Gerrit Smith, and others, had its
largest support. The Liberty party maintained that slavery could be
fought best with political weapons, that by the power of the ballot
slavery could be confined strictly within its constitutional limits
and prevented from invading new territory, and that it could be
extinguished by the respective States whenever the growth of public
opinion demanded it. One wing of the party took the more extreme
ground that slavery was contrary to the true intent and meaning of
the Constitution, and demanded that the country should return to the
principles of liberty upon which it was founded. Though the more
radical abolitionists were for a time bitterly opposed to these views,
yet the Liberty party was the natural outgrowth of the abolition
agitation. Garrison and Phillips and Douglass and the rest had
planted, Birney and Gerrit Smith and Chase and the rest watered, and
the Union party, led by the great emancipator, garnered the grain
after a bloody harvest.

Several influences must have co-operated to modify Douglass's
political views. The moral support and occasional financial aid given
his paper by members of the Liberty party undoubtedly predisposed
him favorably to their opinions. His retirement as agent of the
Anti-slavery Society and the coolness resulting therefrom had taken
him out of the close personal contact with those fervent spirits who
had led the van in the struggle for liberty. Their zeal had been more
disinterested, perhaps, than Douglass's own; for, after all, they had
no personal stake in the outcome, while to Douglass and his people the
abolition of slavery was a matter of life and death. Serene in the
high altitude of their convictions, the Garrisonians would accept no
halfway measures, would compromise no principles, and, if their right
arm offended them, would cut it off with sublime fo