Frederick Douglass

After learning to calk, I sought my own employment, made my own contracts, and collected my own earnings; giving Master Hugh no trouble in any part of the transactions to which I was a party.

The laws and the morals of the Christian city of Baltimore, afforded no protection to the sable denizens of that city.

When he whipped, he seemed to do so from a sense of duty, and feared no consequences.

Oh! sir, a slaveholder never appears to me so completely an agent of hell, as when I think of and look upon my dear children.

The slightest manifestation of sympathy or justice toward a person of color, was denounced as abolitionism; and the name of abolitionist, subjected its bearer to frightful liabilities.

He could issue no warrant on my word, against white persons; and, if I had been killed in the presence of a thousand blacks, their testimony, combined would have been insufficient to arrest a single murderer.

The very presence of this man Gore was painful, and I shunned him as I would have shunned a rattlesnake.

His indignation was really strong and healthy; but, unfortunately, it resulted from the thought that his rights of property, in my person, had not been respected, more than from any sense of the outrage committed on me as a man.

I was about as hard to please by a master, as a master is by slave.

Guilty or not guilty, it is enough to be accused, to be sure of a flogging.

I was no longer the poor scape-goat that I was when at Covey’s, where every wrong thing done was saddled upon me, and where other slaves were whipped over my shoulders.

We knew that if, by extraordinary exertion, a large quantity of work was done in one day, the fact, becoming known to the master, might lead him to require the same amount every day.