Frederick Douglass

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

It must not depend upon mere force; the slave must know no Higher Law than his master’s will.

To make a contented slave, you must make a thoughtless one.

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…

He had the power to compel me to give him the fruits of my labor, and this power was his only right in the case.

To make this enmity deep and broad, between the slave and the poor white man, the latter is allowed to abuse and whip the former, without hinderance.

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

The impression is cunningly made, that slavery is the only power that can prevent the laboring white man from falling to the level of the slave’s poverty and degradation.

At present, the slaveholders blind them to this competition, by keeping alive their prejudice against the slaves, as men—not against them as slaves.

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.

The competition, and its injurious consequences, will, one day, array the nonslaveholding white people of the slave states, against the slave system, and make them the most effective workers against the great evil.

The slave is robbed, by his master, of all his earnings, above what is required for his bare physical necessities; and the white man is robbed by the slave system, of the just results of his labor, because he is flung into competition with…