Historical voices

If it be broken toward the slave on Sunday, it will be toward the master on Monday.

Once thoroughly injured, who is he who can repair the damage?

But slavery soon proved its ability to divest her of these excellent qualities, and her home of its early happiness.

Her fervent piety and watchful uprightness made it impossible to see her without thinking and feeling “that woman is a Christian.” There was no sorrow nor suffering for which she had not a tear, and there was no innocent joy for which she…

Nature never intended that men and women should be either slaves or slaveholders, and nothing but rigid training long persisted in, can perfect the character of the one or the other.

Knowledge unfits a child to be a slave.” I instinctively assented to the proposition, and from that moment I understood the direct pathway from slavery to freedom.

This was a new and special revelation, dispelling a painful mystery against which my youthful understanding had struggled, and struggled in vain, to wit, the white man’s power to perpetuate the enslavement of the black man.

His iron sentences, cold and harsh, sunk like heavy weights deep into my heart, and stirred up within me a rebellion not soon to be allayed.

Why should I hang down my head, and speak with bated breath, when there was no pride to scorn me, no coldness to repel me, and no hatred to inspire me with fear?

To this fact the dear lady no doubt owed the excellent preservation of her natural goodness of heart, for slavery could change a saint into a sinner, and an angel into a demon.

Established in my new home in Baltimore, I was not very long in perceiving that in picturing to myself what was to be my life there, my imagination had painted only the bright side; and that the reality had its dark shades as well as its…

So the great world was opening upon me, and I was eagerly acquainting myself with its multifarious lessons.

I used to contrast my condition with that of the black-birds, in whose wild and sweet songs I fancied them so happy.

The unkindness of Aunt Katy, the hunger and cold I suffered, and the terrible reports of wrongs and outrages which came to my ear, together with what I almost daily witnessed, led me to wish I had never been born.

He who could eat fastest got most, and he that was strongest got the best place, but few left the trough really satisfied.

For such friendship I was deeply grateful, and bitter as are my recollections of slavery, it is a true pleasure to recall any instances of kindness, any sunbeams of humane treatment, which found way to my soul, through the iron grating of…

The usual pretext for such crimes was that the slave had offered resistance.

His very presence was fearful, and I shunned him as I would have shunned a rattlesnake.

Guilty or not guilty, to be accused was to be sure of a flogging.

With the malign and tyrannical qualities of an overseer he combined something of the lawful master.

The office of overseer took this raw material of vulgarity and brutality, and stamped it as a distinct class in southern life.

They were as distinct from the slaveholding gentry of the south as are the fish-women of Paris, and the coal-heavers of London, distinct from other grades of society.

I did not consider myself as uttering that which was strictly untrue, for I always measured the kindness of my master by the standard of kindness set up by the slaveholders around us.

The real feelings and opinions of the slaves were not much known or respected by their masters.