He reached the Capital as the poor, hunted fugitive slave reaches the North — in disguise, crawling and dodging under the sable wing of night. We have no censure for the President at this point. He only did what braver men have done. His Inaugural is a double-tongued document.
Next post: Indianapolis Daily State Sentinel, Apr 9, 1861 →
The post above is condensed. From the original, word for word
"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 have no censure for the President at this point. He only did what braver men have done. [...] 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 likens the President's night arrival in Washington to a fugitive slave's, then declines to censure it ("He only did what braver men have done"); his censure is for the speech that followed, which says two things at once. Three 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.