In later years Douglass speaks of this newspaper enterprise as one of the wisest things he ever undertook.  To paraphrase Lord Bacon’s famous maxim, much reading of life and of books had made him a full man, and much speaking had made him a ready man.  The attempt to put facts and arguments into literary form tended to make him more logical in reasoning and more exact in statement.  One of the effects of Douglass’s editorial responsibility and the influences brought to bear upon him by reason of it, was a change in his political views.  Until he began the publication of the North Star 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