was my good fortune," he writes, "to get out of slavery at the
right time, to be speedily brought in contact with that circle of
highly cultivated men and women, banded together for the overthrow of
slavery, of which William Lloyd Garrison was the acknowledged leader.
To these friends, earnest, courageous, inflexible, ready to own me as
a man and a brother, against all the scorn, contempt, and derision of
a slavery-polluted atmosphere, I owe my success in life."

VIII.

Events moved rapidly in the decade preceding the war. In 1850 the new
Fugitive Slave Law brought discouragement to the hearts of the friends
of liberty. Douglass's utterances during this period breathed the
fiery indignation which he felt when the slave-driver's whip was heard
cracking over the free States, and all citizens were ordered to aid
in the enforcement of this inhuman statute when called upon. This law
really defeated its own purpose. There were thousands of conservative
Northern men, who, recognizing the constitutional guarantees of
slavery and the difficulty of abolishing it unless the South should
take the initiative, were content that it should be preserved intact
so long as it remained a local institution. But when the attempt was
made to make the North wash the South's dirty linen, and transform
every man in the Northern States into a slave-catcher, it wrought a
revulsion of feeling that aroused widespread sympathy for the slave
and strengthened the cause of freedom amazingly. Thousands of escaped
slaves were living in Northern communities. Some of them had acquired
homes, had educated their children, and in some States had become
citizens and voters. Already social pariahs, restricted generally to
menial labor, bearing the burdens of poverty and prejudice, they now
had thrust before them the spectre of the kidnapper, the slave-catcher
with his affidavit, and the United States [Supreme] Court, which
was made by this law the subservient tool of tyranny. This law gave
Douglass and the other abolitionists a new text. It was a set-back to
their cause; but they were not entirely disheartened, for they saw in
it the desperate expedients by which it was sought to bolster up an
institution already doomed by the advancing tide of civilization.

The loss of slaves had become a serious drain upon the border States.
The number of refugees settled in the North was, of course, largely
a matter of estimate. Runaway slaves were not apt to adve