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 anguish.
In his autobiography, Douglass reflects on how memories of past kindness and hope only intensified his present anguish under the brutal conditions of slavery.
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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 in the air, and men breathed it and were permeated by it, often when they were quite unconscious of its presence.
We (the people of the North) are a charitable people, and in the excess of this feeling we were disposed to put the very best construction upon the strange behavior of our southern brethren.