The Enduring Struggle
▻https://www.thenation.com/article/the-enduring-struggle
Douglass had no patience for those in the antislavery camp who argued for withdrawal from a hopelessly tainted Union, or for the abandonment of a hopelessly degraded democratic politics. “If I were on board of a pirate ship,” he declared, “I would not clear my soul…by jumping in the long boat, and singing out no union with pirates.” Instead, abolitionists must dig in and fight, trusting in their ability to build a democratic alliance against slavery across the free states. “[T]he slaveholders are but four hundred thousand in number,” he noted, “and we are fourteen millions…we are really the strong and they are the weak.”