Life and Times of Frederick Douglass

The events of the 1850s proved that the slaveholding interest, or “Slave Power,” would not be satisfied until it had obliterated all impediments to slavery’s expansion and silenced all critics of slavery’s morality. South Carolina Congressman Preston Brooks’s “[s]hocking and scandalous” assault on Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner, for the crime of what Brooks considered an offensive speech, won Brooks the approval of his constituents and the admiration of many southern women. As such, it showed “the thoughtful people of the North the kind of civilization to which they were linked, and how plainly it foreshadowed a conflict on a larger scale” (247).

Meanwhile, the 1854 repeal of the Missouri Compromise had opened the entire trans-Mississippi West to the prospect of slavery. Kansas Territory erupted into open warfare, drawing thousands of pro- and anti-slavery settlers, including Douglass’s old friend John Brown, whose violent exploits there on behalf of freedom Douglass deems “a terrible remedy for a terrible malady” (254). On October 16, 1859, the night Brown and his men seized the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, as part of a plan to liberate slaves (though not the same plan Brown had explained to Douglass at their first meeting 12 years earlier), Douglass was speaking in Philadelphia.