Frederick Douglass

I hated this secresy, but where slavery was powerful, and liberty weak, the latter was driven to concealment or destruction.

Liberty was our aim, and we had now come to think that we had a right to it against every obstacle, even against the lives of our enslavers.

We meant to reach the North, and the North was our Canaan.

It will be seen that the good old rule, “A man is to be held innocent until proved to be guilty,” did not hold good on the slave plantation.

They had to deal not with earth, wood, and stone, but with men; and by every regard they had for their safety and prosperity they had need to know the material on which they were to work.

It was the interest and business of slaveholders to study human nature, and the slave nature in particular, with a view to practical results; and many of them attained astonishing proficiency in this direction.

For my part, I had become altogether too big for my chains.

I canvassed with Henry and John the subject of slavery, and dashed against it the condemning brand of God’s eternal justice.

This vow only bound me to make good my own individual escape, but my friendship for my brother-slaves was so affectionate and confiding that I felt it my duty, as well as my pleasure, to give them an opportunity to share in my…

The intensity of my desire to be free, quickened by my present favorable circumstances, brought me to the determination to act as well as to think and speak.

Freeland, I am not sure that some kind reader will not condemn me for being over-ambitious, and greatly wanting in humility, when I say the truth, that I now drove from me all thoughts of making the best of my lot, and welcomed only such…

I became not only ashamed to be contented in slavery, but ashamed to seem to be contented, and in my present favorable condition under the mild rule of Mr.