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LIFE AND TIMES OF FREDERICK DOUGLASS 297

to join this advanced movement. In this respect he was in the rear of Mr.
Phillips; who saw not only the justice, but the wisdom and necessity of the
measure. To his credit it may be said, that he gave the full strength of his
character and eloquence to its adoption. While Mr. Garrison thought it too
much to ask. Mr. Phillips thought it too little. While the one thought it might
be postponed to the future, the other thought it ought to be done at once. But
Mr. Garrison was not a man to lag far in the rear of truth and right, and he
soon came to see with the rest of us that the ballot was essential to the freedom
of the freedman. A man's head will not long remain wrong, when his
heart is right. The applause awarded to Mr. Garrison by the conservatives,
for his moderation both in respect of his views on this question, and the
disbandment of the American Anti-Slavery Society must have disturbed him.
He was at any rate soon found on the right side of the suffrage question.

The enfranchisement of the freedmen was resisted on many grounds, but
mainly these two: first, the tendency of the measure to bring the freedmen
into conflict with the old master-class, and the white people of the South
generally. Secondly, their unfitness, by reason of their ignorance, servility,
and degradation, to exercise so great a power as the ballot, over the destinies
or this great nation.

These reasons against the measure which were supposed to be unanswerable,
were in some sense the most powerful arguments in its favor. The
argument that the possession of suffrage would be likely to bring the negro
into conflict with the old master-class at the South, had its main force in the
admission that the interests of the two classes antagonized each other and
that the maintenance of the one would prove inimical to the other. It resolved
ltself into this, if the negro had the means of protecting his civil rights, those
who had formerly denied him these rights would be offended and make war
upon him. Experience has shown in a measure the correctness of this position.
The old master was offended to find the negro whom he lately possessed
the right to enslave and flog to toil, casting a ballot equal to his own,
and resorted to all sorts of meanness. Violence, and crime, to dispossess him
of the enjoyment of this point of equality. In this respect the exercise of the
right of suffrage by the negro has been attended with the evil which the
opponents of the measure predicted, and they could say "I've told you so,"
but immeasurably and intolerably greater would have been the evil consequences
resulting from the denial to one class of this natural means of protection,
and granting it to the other, and hostile class. It would have been, to
have committed the lamb to the care of the wolf — the arming of one class
and disarming the other — protecting one interest, and destroying the other —