Frederick Douglass

It may or may not be true that my complexion was the cause of this departure, but no man has any right to assume that position in advance of a plain declaration to that effect by President Hayes himself.

Alexander, a Democrat, and, I believe, once a slaveholder, had not only the courage, but the magnanimity to give me fair play in this fight.

Only a few years of non-tillage would be needed to give the sunny and fruitful South to the bats and owls of a desolate wilderness.

Besides being dependent upon the roughest and flintiest kind of labor, the climate of the South makes such labor uninviting and harshly repulsive to the white man.

They do not emigrate from the free North, where labor is respected, to a lately enslaved South, where labor has been whipped, chained, and degraded for centuries.

Hence it is seen that the dependence of the planters, land-owners, and old master-class of the South upon the negro, however galling and humiliating to Southern pride and power, is nearly complete and perfect.

His labor made him a slave, and his labor can, if he will, make him free, comfortable, and independent.

It is more to him than fire, swords, ballot-boxes, or bayonets.

Starvation and death stared him in the face and marked him for their victim.

The policy of the old master-class dictated by passion, pride, and revenge, was then to make the freedom of the negro, a greater calamity to him, if possible, than had been his slavery.

Bad as is the condition of the negro to-day at the South, there was a time when it was flagrantly and incomparably worse.

Upon either side we saw grim death, assuming a variety of horrid shapes.