Frederick Douglass

Slaves, as well as slaveholders, use it with an unsparing hand.

By that most foul and fiendish of all human decrees, the liberty and person of every man are put in peril.

By that act, Mason and Dixon’s line has been obliterated; New York has become as Virginia; and the power to hold, hunt, and sell men, women, and children as slaves, remains no longer a mere state institution, but is now an institution of…

By an act of the American congress, not yet two years old, slavery has been nationalized in its most horrible and revolting form.

There I see the tenderest ties ruthlessly broken, to gratify the lust, caprice, and rapacity of the buyers and sellers of men.

A man’s character greatly takes its hue and shape from the form and color of things about him.

In the solitude of my spirit, I see clouds of dust raised on the highways of the south; I see the bleeding footsteps; I hear the doleful wail of fettered humanity, on the way to the slave markets, where the victims are to be sold like…

Fellow citizens, this murderous traffic is to-day in active operation in this boasted republic.

Yet this is but a glance at the American slave trade, as it exists at this moment, in the ruling part of the United States.

Tell me, citizens, where, under the sun, can you witness a spectacle more fiendish and shocking.

The slaveholder, as well as the slave, is the victim of the slave system.

Attend the auction; see men examined like horses; see the forms of women rudely and brutally exposed to the shocking gaze of American slave-buyers.