Much of my early dislike of white persons was removed, and their manners, habits, and customs, so entirely unlike what I had been used to in the kitchen-quarters on the plantations of the south, fairly charmed me, and gave me a strong disrelish for the coarse and degrading customs of my former condition.
Douglass describes how exposure to refined society in the North helped him shed his prejudice against white people and appreciate new customs.
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Treason had shot its poisonous roots deeper, and had spread its death-dealing branches further than any northern calculation had covered.
Knowledge unfits a child to be a slave.” I instinctively assented to the proposition, and from that moment I understood the direct pathway from slavery to freedom.
It was perhaps better for the country and for mankind that the good man could not know the end from the beginning.
Father he might be, and not be husband, and could sell his own child without incurring reproach, if in its veins coursed one drop of African blood.