Page:Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1892).djvu/640

632 hereafter to take no step backward. Cherishing, as I did, this view of what was promised and should be expected from the continued life of Mr. Garfield, his death appeared to me as among the gloomiest calamities that could have come to my people. The hopes awakened by the kind-hearted President had no support in my knowledge of the character of the self-indulgent man who was elected, in the contingency of death, to succeed him. The announcement, at the Chicago Convention, of this man's name as that of the candidate for the Vice-Presidency, strangely enough brought over me a shudder such as one might feel in coming upon an armed murderer or a poisonous reptile. For some occult and mysterious cause, I know not what, I felt the hand of death upon me. I do not say or intimate that Mr. Arthur had anything to do with the taking off of the President. I might have had the same shudder had any other man been named, but I state the simple fact precisely as it was.