Frederick Douglass

There was no earthly inducement in the slave’s condition to incite him to labor faithfully.

No thief was ever more artful in his devices than this man Covey.

I believed I should get enough to eat at Covey’s, even if I suffered in other respects, and this to a hungry man is not a prospect to be regarded with indifference.

The whole community, with but one single exception, among the whites, frowned upon everything like imparting instruction, either to slaves or to free colored persons.

Cookman was, that whenever he met slaveholders he labored faithfully with them, as a religious duty, to induce them to liberate their bondmen.

They seemed about as unconcerned about our getting to heaven, as about our getting out of slavery.

If religion had any effect at all on him, it made him more cruel and hateful in all his ways.

This was proof to us that he was willing to give up all to God, and for the sake of God, and not to do this was, in our estimation, an evidence of hard-heartedness, and was wholly inconsistent with the idea of genuine conversion.

Slaveholders might sometimes have confidence in the piety of some of their slaves, but the slaves seldom had confidence in the piety of their masters.

Failing to command their respect, both himself and wife were ever on the alert lest some indignity should be offered him by the slaves.

To make a man a slave was to rob him of moral responsibility.

Slaveholders I held to be individually and collectively responsible for all the evils which grew out of the horrid relation, and I believed they would be so held in the sight of God.