Frederick Douglass

Why should I hang down my head, and speak with bated breath, when there was no pride to scorn me, no coldness to repel me, and no hatred to inspire me with fear?

To this fact the dear lady no doubt owed the excellent preservation of her natural goodness of heart, for slavery could change a saint into a sinner, and an angel into a demon.

Established in my new home in Baltimore, I was not very long in perceiving that in picturing to myself what was to be my life there, my imagination had painted only the bright side; and that the reality had its dark shades as well as its…

So the great world was opening upon me, and I was eagerly acquainting myself with its multifarious lessons.

I used to contrast my condition with that of the black-birds, in whose wild and sweet songs I fancied them so happy.

The unkindness of Aunt Katy, the hunger and cold I suffered, and the terrible reports of wrongs and outrages which came to my ear, together with what I almost daily witnessed, led me to wish I had never been born.

He who could eat fastest got most, and he that was strongest got the best place, but few left the trough really satisfied.

For such friendship I was deeply grateful, and bitter as are my recollections of slavery, it is a true pleasure to recall any instances of kindness, any sunbeams of humane treatment, which found way to my soul, through the iron grating of…

The usual pretext for such crimes was that the slave had offered resistance.

His very presence was fearful, and I shunned him as I would have shunned a rattlesnake.

Guilty or not guilty, to be accused was to be sure of a flogging.

With the malign and tyrannical qualities of an overseer he combined something of the lawful master.