Frederick Douglass

Besides, I could not tell how anybody could know that God made black people to be slaves.

Then I found, too, that there were puzzling exceptions to this theory of slavery, in the fact that all black people were not slaves, and all white people were not masters.

The doctrine that submission to violence is the best cure for violence did not hold good as between slaves and overseers.

That slave who had the courage to stand up for himself against the overseer, although he might have many hard stripes at first, became while legally a slave virtually a freeman.

They breathed the prayer and complaint of souls overflowing with the bitterest anguish.

The remark in the olden time was not unfrequently made, that slaves were the most contented and happy laborers in the world, and their dancing and singing were referred to in proof of this alleged fact; but it was a great mistake to…

The contrast between the condition of the slaves and that of their masters was marvelously sharp and striking.

There were pride, pomp, and luxury on the one hand, servility, dejection, and misery on the other.

They were as distinct from the slaveholding gentry of the south as are the fish-women of Paris, and the coal-heavers of London, distinct from other grades of society.

The office of overseer took this raw material of vulgarity and brutality, and stamped it as a distinct class in southern life.

It was something to me that I could share these odors with the winds, even if the meats themselves were under a more stringent monopoly.

They received me as a man and a brother, when I was new from the house of bondage, and had few of the graces derived from free and refined society.