Frederick Douglass

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

Both are plundered, and by the same plunderers.

The white slave has taken from him, by indirection, what the black slave has taken from him, directly, and without ceremony.

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.

The difference between the white slave, and the black slave, is this: the latter belongs to one slaveholder, and the former belongs to all the slaveholders, collectively.

The slaveholders, with a craftiness peculiar to themselves, by encouraging the enmity of the poor, laboring white man against the blacks, succeeds in making the said white man almost as much a slave as the black slave himself.

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.

That phase is this: the conflict of slavery with the interests of the white mechanics and laborers of the south.

He could grow, and become a MAN; I could grow, though I could not become a man, but must remain, all my life, a minor—a mere boy.

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.

It was a sad thing to me, that, loving each other as we had done, we must now take different roads.

In childhood, he scarcely considered me inferior to himself certainly, as good as any other boy with whom he played; but the time had come when his friend must become his slave.