Frederick Douglass

I was insulted, but helpless; keenly alive to the demands of justice and liberty, but with no means of asserting them.

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.

A life of living death, beset with the innumerable horrors of the cotton field, and the sugar plantation, seemed to be my doom.

The possibility of ever becoming anything but an abject slave, a mere machine in the hands of an owner, had now fled, and it seemed to me it had fled forever.

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.

I was solitary in the world, and alone within the walls of a stone prison, left to a fate of life-long misery.

Their ears are made quite familiar with the agonizing cry of outraged and woe-smitted humanity.

A noble nature, like hers, could not, instantly, be wholly perverted; and it took several years to change the natural sweetness of her temper into fretful bitterness.

For one, I detested the whisky-bloated gamblers in human flesh; and I believe I was as much detested by them in turn.

I felt myself surrounded as by a pack of fiends, fresh from perdition.

I say for a time, because the fatal poison of irresponsible power, and the natural influence of slavery customs, were not long in making a suitable impression on the gentle and loving disposition of my excellent mistress.

Such a set of debased and villainous creatures, I never saw before, and hope never to see again.