Historical voices

Slavery had inured me to hardships that made ordinary trouble sit lightly upon me.

The test of the real civilization of the community came when I applied for work at my trade, and then my repulse was emphatic and decisive.

Notwithstanding the just and humane sentiment of New Bedford three and forty years ago, the place was not entirely free from race and color prejudice.

It was new business to me, but I never did better work, or more of it in the same space of time for Covey, the negro-breaker, than I did for myself in these earliest years of my freedom.

I was not only a freeman but a free-working man, and no Master Hugh stood ready at the end of the week to seize my hard earnings.

To understand the emotion which swelled my heart as I clasped this money, realizing that I had no master who could take it from me--that it was mine--that my hands were my own, and could earn more of the precious coin--one must have been…

There too the black man’s children attended the same public schools with the white man’s children, and apparently without objection from any quarter.

I saw in New Bedford the nearest approach to freedom and equality that I had ever seen.

He was ever more or less subject to the condition of his slave brother.

No colored man was really free while residing in a slave State.

I could have landed in no part of the United States where I should have found a more striking and gratifying contrast, not only to life generally in the South, but in the condition of the colored people there than in New Bedford.

In a word, I found everything managed with a much more scrupulous regard to economy, both of men and things, time and strength, than in the country from which I had come.

With a capital of about sixty dollars in the shape of a good-natured old ox, attached to the end of a stout rope, New Bedford did the work of ten or twelve thousand dollars, represented in the bones and muscles of slaves, and did it far…

Main strength--human muscle--unassisted by intelligent skill, was slavery’s method of labor.

In a southern port twenty or thirty hands would be employed to do what five or six men, with the help of one ox, would do at the wharf in New Bedford.

I saw there industry without bustle, labor without noise, toil--honest, earnest, and exhaustive, without the whip.

It was the superiority of educated mind over mere brute force.

I found that even the laboring classes lived in better houses, that their houses were more elegantly furnished, and were more abundantly supplied with conveniences and comforts, than the houses of many who owned slaves on the Eastern Shore…

A white man holding no slaves in the country from which I came, was usually an ignorant and poverty-stricken man.

With this foundation idea, I came naturally to the conclusion that poverty must be the general condition of the people of the free States.

I had been taught that slavery was the bottom-fact of all wealth.

I had no proper idea of the wealth, refinement, enterprise, and high civilization of this section of the country.

While wandering about the streets of New York, and lodging at least one night among the barrels on one of the wharves, I was indeed free--from slavery, but free from food and shelter as well.

I was in the midst of an ocean of my fellowmen, and yet a perfect stranger to every one.