"I would unite with anybody to do right, and with nobody to do wrong"

Frederick Douglass refutes Garrison's "no union" slogan

On William Lloyd Garrison’s Anti-Slavery Society slogan, “No union with slave-holders”:

“As a mere expression of abhorrence of slavery, the sentiment is a good one; but it expresses no intelligible principle of action, and throws no light on the pathway of duty. . . . It condemns Gerrit Smith for sitting in Congress, and our Savior for eating with publicans and sinners. . . . But this is not the worst fault of this Society. Its chief energies are expended in confirming the opinion, that the United States Constitution is, and was, intended to be a slave-holding instrument—thus piling up, between the slave and his freedom, the huge work of the abolition of Government, as an indispensable condition to emancipation. My point here is, first, the Constitution is, according to its reading, an anti-slavery document; and, secondly, to dissolve the Union, as a means to abolish slavery, is about as wise as it would be to burn up this city, in order to get the thieves out of it. But again, we hear the motto, ‘no union with slave-holders’; and I answer it, as that noble champion of liberty, N. P. Rogers, answered it with a more sensible motto, namely—‘No union with slave-holding.’ I would unite with anybody to do right; and with nobody to do wrong. And as the Union, under the Constitution, requires me to do nothing which is wrong, and gives me many facilities for doing good, I cannot go with the American Anti-Slavery Society in its doctrine of disunion.”

—Frederick Douglass, “The Anti-slavery Movement: A Lecture Before the Rochester Ladies' Anti-slavery Society,” 1855