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384 LIFE AND TIMES OF FREDERICK DOUGLASS

honor in a white nation was a bold one. While there was much in the history
and generous nature of Mr. Garfield to justify hope, I must say, that there
was also something in his temperament and character to cause doubt and
fear that his resolution in the end might be sicklied over with the pale cast
of thought. Mr. Garfield, though a good man, was not my man for the
Presidency. For that place I wanted a man of sterner stuff. I was for General
Grant and for him with all the embarrassment and burden of a ''Third term"
attaching to his candidacy. I held that even defeat with Grant was better than
success with a temporizer. I knew both men personally and valued the qualities
of both. In the Senate Mr. Garfield was in his place. He was able in
debate, amiable in disposition and loveable in character, and when surrounded
by the right influences would be sure to go right, but he did not to
my mind, have in his moral make up, sufficient "backbone" to fit him for
the chief magistracy of the nation at such a time as was then upon the country.
In this place, a clear head, quick decision and firm purpose are required.
The conditions demanded stalwart qualities and he was not a stalwart. The
country had not quite survived the effects and influence of its great war for
existence. The serpent had been wounded but not killed. Under the disguise
of meekly accepting the results and decisions of the war, the rebels had
come back to Congress more with the pride of conquerors than with the
repentant humility of defeated traitors. Their heads were high in the air. It
was not they but the loyal men who were at fault. Under the fair-seeming
name of local self-government, they were shooting to death just as many of
the newly made citizens of the South as was necessary to put the individual
states of the Union entirely into their power. The object, which, through
violence and bloodshed, they had accomplished in the several states, they
were already aiming to accomplish in the United States, by address and
political strategy. They had captured the individual states and meant now to
capture the United States. The moral difference between those who fought
for the Union and liberty, and those who fought for slavery and the dismemberment
of the Union, was fast fading away. The language of a sickly conciliation,
inherited from the administration of President Hayes, was abroad.
lnsolency born of slave mastery had begun to exhibit itself in the House and
Senate of the Nation. The recent amendments of the Constitution, adopted
to secure the results of the war for the Union, were beginning to be despised
and scouted, and the Ship of State seemed fast returning to her ancient
moorings. It was therefore no blind partiality that led me to prefer General
Grant to General Garfield. The one might arrest the reaction and stay the
hand of violence and bloodshed at the South; the other held out little promise