Frederick Douglass

He was ever more or less subject to the condition of his slave brother.

No colored man was really free while residing in a slave State.

I could have landed in no part of the United States where I should have found a more striking and gratifying contrast, not only to life generally in the South, but in the condition of the colored people there than in New Bedford.

In a word, I found everything managed with a much more scrupulous regard to economy, both of men and things, time and strength, than in the country from which I had come.

With a capital of about sixty dollars in the shape of a good-natured old ox, attached to the end of a stout rope, New Bedford did the work of ten or twelve thousand dollars, represented in the bones and muscles of slaves, and did it far…

Main strength--human muscle--unassisted by intelligent skill, was slavery’s method of labor.

In a southern port twenty or thirty hands would be employed to do what five or six men, with the help of one ox, would do at the wharf in New Bedford.

I saw there industry without bustle, labor without noise, toil--honest, earnest, and exhaustive, without the whip.

It was the superiority of educated mind over mere brute force.

I found that even the laboring classes lived in better houses, that their houses were more elegantly furnished, and were more abundantly supplied with conveniences and comforts, than the houses of many who owned slaves on the Eastern Shore…

A white man holding no slaves in the country from which I came, was usually an ignorant and poverty-stricken man.

With this foundation idea, I came naturally to the conclusion that poverty must be the general condition of the people of the free States.