Historical voices

In teaching me the alphabet, in the days of her simplicity and kindness, my mistress had given me the “inch,” and now, no ordinary precaution could prevent me from taking the “ell.

In ceasing to instruct me, she must begin to justify herself to herself; and, once consenting to take sides in such a debate, she was riveted to her position.

The first step, in the wrong direction, was the violence done to nature and to conscience, in arresting the benevolence that would have enlightened my young mind.

It must stand entire, or it does not stand at all.

Once thoroughly broken down, who is he that can repair the damage?

Her noble soul was overthrown; but, he that overthrew it did not, himself, escape the consequences.

I was human, and she, dear lady, knew and felt me to be so.

I could talk and sing; I could laugh and weep; I could reason and remember; I could love and hate.

One cannot easily forget to love freedom; and it is as hard to cease to respect that natural love in our fellow creatures.

Nothing but rigid training, long persisted in, can perfect the character of the one or the other.

Nature has done almost nothing to prepare men and women to be either slaves or slaveholders.

It was, at least, necessary for her to have some training, and some hardening, in the exercise of the slaveholder’s prerogative, to make her equal to forgetting my human nature and character, and to treating me as a thing destitute of a…

She either thought it unnecessary, or she lacked the depravity indispensable to shutting me up in mental darkness.

Hamilton is as justly chargeable to the upholders of the slave system, as drunkenness is chargeable on those who, by precept and example, or by indifference, uphold the drinking system.

Of stone must that heart be made, that could look upon Henrietta and Mary, without being sickened to the core with sadness.

Of all the dejected, emaciated, mangled and excoriated creatures I ever saw, those two girls—in the refined, church going and Christian city of Baltimore were the most deplorable.

I found, in Baltimore, that no man was more odious to the white, as well as to the colored people, than he, who had the reputation of starving his slaves.

He is a desperate slaveholder who will shock the humanity of his non-slaveholding neighbors, by the cries of the lacerated slaves; and very few in the city are willing to incur the odium of being cruel masters.

The general sense of decency that must pervade such a population, does much to check and prevent those outbreaks of atrocious cruelty, and those dark crimes without a name, almost openly perpetrated on the plantation.

In learning to read, therefore, I am not sure that I do not owe quite as much to the opposition of my master, as to the kindly assistance of my amiable mistress.

That which he most loved I most hated; and the very determination which he expressed to keep me in ignorance, only rendered me the more resolute in seeking intelligence.

Very well,” thought I; “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.

It 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 deep into my heart, and stirred up not only my feelings into a sort of rebellion, but awakened within me a slumbering train of vital thought.