The Public Record
Frederick Douglass was an American social reformer, abolitionist, orator, writer, and statesman. He was "the most important leader of the movement for African-American civil rights in the 19th century".
You have, dear reader, seen me humbled, degraded, broken down, enslaved, and brutalized; and you understand how it was done; now let us see the converse of all this, and how it was brought about; and this will take us through the year 1834.
The over-work, and the brutal chastisements of which I was the victim, combined with that ever-gnawing and soul-devouring thought--“I am a slave--a slave for life--a slave with no rational ground to hope for freedom”--rendered me a living…
All the kindness I had received at Baltimore, all my former hopes and aspirations for usefulness in the world, and even the happy moments spent in the exercises of religion, contrasted with my then present lot, served but to increase my…
My thoughts would compel utterance; and there, with no audience but the Almighty, I would pour out my soul’s complaint in my rude way with an apostrophe to the moving multitude of ships.
My sufferings, as I remember them now, seem like a dream rather than a stern reality.
I was sometimes tempted to take my life and that of Covey, but was prevented by a combination of hope and fear.
It was never too hot, or too cold; it could never rain, blow, snow, or hail too hard for us to work in the field.
It was the system of slavery which made this allowable, and which condemned the slaveholder for buying a slave woman and devoting her to this life, no more than for buying a cow and raising stock from her, and the same rules were observed…
Knowing this fact as the slaveholder did, and judging the slave by himself, he naturally concluded that the slave would be idle whenever the cause for this fear was absent.
The fear of punishment was the sole motive of any sort of industry with him.