with what amounted to the applied ideas of Alexis de Tocqueville and Fancis Grund, both of which were writing at the time when Douglass realized the truth about abolition. Grund and Tocqueville celebrated the new man, the self-made men who were breaking through old restraints. These restraints included monopolized privileges, restricted franchises, and the basic refusal of the main chance of equal opportunity. The blacks were confronted by the most vicious and deadly restraints any new man had been compelled to face in the United States. This was horrendous, but it was not insurmountable. Douglass decided that the separation between whites was an advantage to his cause. He could then make allies with one of the disputants in the fight and exploit the alliance to yield guarantees of access to the devices of power and mobility the new man had historically sought. In conclusion, he and his allies would not share any common causes except that your enemy is my enemy. Influenced by Grunds and Tocquevilles beliefs, this was Douglass new political strategy and social goal. William Garrison continued to hounded Douglass. He once said, I regard him as thoroughly base and selfish....He reveals himself more and more to me as destitute of every principle of honor, ungrateful to the last degree....He is not worthy of respect, confidence, or countenance. (Garrison Papers) But in 1862, during wartime, Douglass was ready to bury their differences and implement his new political strategy.Every man who is ready to work for the overthrow of slavery, whether a voter or non-voter, a Garrisonian or a Gerrit Smith man, black or white, is both clansman and kinsman of ours. Whatever political or personal differences, which have in other days divided and distracted us, a common object and a common emergency makes us for the time at least, forget those differences. No class of men are doing more according to their numbers, to conduct this great war to the Emanci...
