Douglass’s political defection very much intensified the feeling against him among his former coadjutors.  The Garrisonians, with their usual plain speaking, did not hesitate to say what they thought of Douglass.  Their three papers, the Liberator, the Standard, and the Freeman, assailed Douglass fiercely, and charged him with treachery, inconsistency, ingratitude, and all the other crimes so easily imputed to one who changes his opinions.  Garrison and Phillips and others of his former associates denounced him as a deserter, and attributed his change of heart to mercenary motives.  Douglass seems to have borne himself with rare dignity and moderation in this trying period.  He realized perfectly well that he was on the defensive, and that the burden devolved upon him to justify his change of front.  This he seems to have attempted vigorously, but by argument rather than invective.  Even during the height of the indignation against him Douglass disclaimed any desire to antagonize his former associates.  He simply realized that there was more than one way to fight slavery,—­which knew a dozen ways to maintain itself,—­and had concluded to select the one that seemed most practical.  He was quite willing that his former friends should go their own way.  “No personal assaults,” he wrote to George Thompson, the English abolitionist, who wrote to him for an explanation of the charges made against him, “shall ever lead me to forget that some, who in America have often made me the subject of personal abuse, are in their own way earnestly working for the abolition of slavery.”

In later years, when political action had resulted in abolition, some of these harsh judgments were modified, and Douglass and his earlier friends met in peace and harmony.  The debt he owed to William Lloyd Garrison he ever delighted to acknowledge.  His speech on the death of Garrison breathes in every word the love and honor in which he held him.  In one of the last chapters of his Life and Times he makes a sweeping acknowledgment of his obligations to the men and women who rendered his career possible.

“It 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.