He reached the Capital as the poor, hunted fugitive slave reaches the North — in disguise, seeking concealment, evading pursuers, crawling and dodging under the sable wing of night. His Inaugural is a double-tongued document, capable of two constructions.
Original passage & context
"He reached the Capital as the poor, hunted fugitive slave reaches the North, in disguise, seeking concealment, evading pursuers, by the underground railroad, between two days, not during the sunlight, but crawling and dodging under the sable wing of night. [...] we must declare the address to be but little better than our worst fears, and vastly below what we had fondly hoped it might be. It is a double-tongued document, capable of two constructions"
Douglass reviews the same inaugural the North and South each read as their own (se-039). He grants Lincoln courage, then withholds everything else: the President who slipped into Washington by night did it the way a fugitive slave does, and the speech that followed says two things at once. Two passages joined with [...]. The scan is rough; OCR line-wraps and artifacts fixed silently in the excerpt are "evad- ing"→"evading", "ad- dress"→"address", "and- vastly"→"and vastly", "wehad"→"we had", "ca- pable"→"capable", "constructiogs"→"constructions". No words added or dropped.