Above all, Douglass feared that the crisis would be resolved in yet further concessions to the South and slaveholders’ interests. For a former slave, and now famous orator and editor — whose political consciousness had awakened with the Mexican War and the Compromise of 1850, who had seen the fate of slaves bandied about in one political crisis after another, who had struggled to preserve hope of freedom and citizenship in the face of the Dred Scott decision’s egregious denials — a resolute stand by the North against secession and the “Slave Power” was hardly a sure thing. The best hopes for blacks, Douglass said in an editorial that winter, had always been dashed by the “old medicine of compromise.”
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