The Public Record
Frederick Douglass was an American social reformer, abolitionist, orator, writer, and statesman. He was "the most important leader of the movement for African-American civil rights in the 19th century".
Edward Lloyd, himself; acting always up to the maxim, practically maintained by slaveholders, that it is better that a dozen slaves suffer under the lash, without fault, than that the master or the overseer should seem to have been wrong…
The main object to which my labors in Great Britain were directed, was the concentration of the moral and religious sentiment of its people against American slavery.
I felt that I had a duty to perform—and that was, to labor and suffer with the oppressed in my native land.
But, in this class, as in all other classes, there are characters of marked individuality, even while they bear a general resemblance to the mass.
Not until this last separation, dear reader, had I touched those profounder depths of desolation, which it is the lot of slaves often to reach.
Thirty-nine lashes on my naked and bleeding back, would have been joyfully borne, in preference to this separation from these, the friends of my youth.
The office of overseer takes this raw material of vulgarity and brutality, and stamps it as a distinct class of southern society.
Bolts, bars and grated windows are not acceptable to freedom-loving people of any color.
They are mere hucksters of the surplus slave produce of Maryland and Virginia coarse, cruel, and swaggering bullies, whose very breathing is of blasphemy and blood.
They constitute a separate fraternity at the south, not less marked than is the fraternity of Park Lane bullies in New York.
Yes; they are a legitimate fruit of slavery; and it is a puzzle to make out a case of greater villainy for them, than for the slaveholders, who make such a class possible.
They have grown intimate with vice and blood; they gloat over the wildest illustrations of their soul-damning and earth-polluting business, and are moral pests.