Under the mortgage system, no matter how industrious or economical the Negro may be, he finds himself at the end of the year in debt to the landlord, and from year to year he toils on and is tempted to try again and again, but seldom with any better result.
He describes the perpetual cycle of debt that traps Black laborers in a state of economic servitude.
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More from Frederick Douglass
For the moment the northern lamb was transformed into a lion, and his roar was terrible.
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.
A son of toil himself, he was linked in brotherly sympathy with the sons of toil in every loyal part of the republic.
This was a new and special revelation, dispelling a painful mystery against which my youthful understanding had struggled, and struggled in vain, to wit, the white man’s power to perpetuate the enslavement of the black man.