Historical voices

Slaveholders ever underrate the intelligence with which they have to grapple.

Like the fires of the prairie, once lighted, they are at the mercy of every wind, and must burn, till they have consumed all that is combustible within their remorseless grasp.

Reason is imprisoned here, and passions run wild.

Under the whole heavens there is no relation more unfavorable to the development of honorable character, than that sustained by the slaveholder to the slave.

A man’s character greatly takes its hue and shape from the form and color of things about him.

The slaveholder, as well as the slave, is the victim of the slave system.

Mas’ Daniel could not associate with ignorance without sharing its shade; and he could not give his black playmates his company, without giving them his intelligence, as well.

Are you a child with wants, tastes and pursuits common to children, not put on, but natural? then, were you black as ebony you would be welcome to the child of alabaster whiteness.

The equality of nature is strongly asserted in childhood, and childhood requires children for associates.

Nevertheless, I sometimes got full meals and kind words from sympathizing old slaves, who knew my sufferings, and received the comforting assurance that I should be a man some day.

I speak but the simple truth, when I say, I have often been so pinched with hunger, that I have fought with the dog—“Old Nep”—for the smallest crumbs that fell from the kitchen table, and have been glad when I won a single crumb in the…

Slaves, as well as slaveholders, use it with an unsparing hand.

Everybody, in the south, wants the privilege of whipping somebody else.

For diseases of the body, Epsom salts and castor oil; for those of the soul, the Lord’s Prayer, and hickory switches!

It goes against the grain to treat and address a Negro precisely as they would treat and address a white man.

There is no better material in the world for making a gentleman, than is furnished in the African.

Strange, and even ridiculous as it may seem, among a people so uncultivated, and with so many stern trials to look in the face, there is not to be found, among any people, a more rigid enforcement of the law of respect to elders, than they…

As I have said of the overseer of the home plantation, so I may say of the overseers on the smaller ones; they stand between the slave and all civil constitutions—their word is law, and is implicitly obeyed.

It was a dark, gloomy and forbidding place, and it was difficult to feel that the spirits of the sleeping dust there deposited, reigned with the blest in the realms of eternal peace.

Slaves know enough of the rudiments of theology to believe that those go to hell who die slaveholders; and they often fancy such persons wishing themselves back again, to wield the lash.

It was a treat to my young and gradually opening mind, to behold this elaborate exhibition of wealth, power, and vanity.

A man’s troubles are always half disposed of, when he finds endurance his only remedy.

Civilization is shut out, but nature cannot be.

Grim, cold, and unapproachable by all genial influences from communities without, there it stands; full three hundred years behind the age, in all that relates to humanity and morals.