Frederick Douglass

Have I not as good a right to be free as you have?” Words like these, I observed, always troubled them; and I had no small satisfaction in wringing from the boys, occasionally, that fresh and bitter condemnation of slavery, that springs…

Suspicion and torture are the approved methods of getting at the truth, here.

The reader will see that the good old rule—“a man is to be held innocent until proved to be guilty”—does not hold good on the slave plantation.

For a single biscuit, any of my hungry little comrades would give me a lesson more valuable to me than bread.

The slave is sometimes whipped into the confession of offenses which he never committed.

You have got the devil in you,” say they, “and we will whip him out of you.” I have often been put thus to the torture, on bare suspicion.

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.

Conscious of the injustice and wrong they are every hour perpetrating, and knowing what they themselves would do if made the victims of such wrongs, they are looking out for the first signs of the dread retribution of justice.

They have to deal not with earth, wood, or stone, but with men; and, by every regard they have for their safety and prosperity, they must study to know the material on which they are at work.

I was just as well aware of the unjust, unnatural and murderous character of slavery, when nine years old, as I am now.

It is the interest and business of slaveholders to study human nature, with a view to practical results, and many of them attain astonishing proficiency in discerning the thoughts and emotions of slaves.

Thoughts and purposes so incendiary as those I now cherished, could not agitate the mind long, without danger of making themselves manifest to scrutinizing and unfriendly beholders.