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"This Slavery question was mingled with our daily bread, it was at present the only question that could brighten up the eyes or prick up the ears of the people. [...] He thanked his good namesake, Douglas, for introducing the Nebraska Bill: [...] he recognized in him an instrument, in the hands of God, to promote Anti-Slavery. He looked upon him in the light of a God-send. [...] Slaveholders and their abettors had aimed at one thing—silence."

Douglass's first speech at a three-day convention in Greenwood Hall, Cincinnati, where a nine-by-twenty-one-foot map behind the rostrum showed slavery's "prospective extension" into Kansas and Nebraska. The papers reported him partly in his own words and partly in the third person ("He thanked his good namesake"); the card keeps his argument and does not put new words in his mouth. "Namesake" is his joke: Senator Stephen A. Douglas, who introduced the bill, shares his surname. His point: the bill breaks the silence that slaveholders, and the compromises of 1850, were meant to secure.

Read it in the original — Douglass Papers digital edition ↗

Next post: New-Haven Daily Register, May 24, 1854 →

"At sunrise this morning, one hundred guns were fired from the Public Square, by order of the Democratic Town Committee, in honor of the passage of the bill giving Territorial Governments to the people of Nebraska and Kansas, and the triumph of the principle of Constitutional freedom involved therein. [...] We are not particularly partial to demonstrations of this noisy kind, on party triumphs -- but there has been such an amount of misrepresentation, both of the bill and its friends -- such a bold-faced system of abuse, and calumny, from the press, pulpit, and stump -- that no one can question the propriety of the manifestation of gladness which is felt by the friends of the bill, on its final passage."

The same paper that welcomed Douglas's report in January is here celebrating the bill's passage with artillery — and adding, in the next breath, that it is not partial to this sort of thing, before arguing that after so much abuse of the bill no one can question the gladness. The gun count is itemized in the original: thirty-one for the States, one each for Kansas and Nebraska, thirteen for the original States.

Read it in the original — Furman Secession Era Editorials transcription ↗