These dear children are ours—not to work up into rice, sugar, and tobacco, but to watch over, regard, and protect, and to rear them up in the nurture and admonition of the gospel—to train them up in the paths of wisdom and virtue, and, as far as we can, to make them useful to the world and to themselves.
Douglass articulates the profound difference in raising children in freedom, emphasizing their development and well-being over their economic exploitation.
Share
More from Frederick Douglass
None now denies the ability of the colored race to acquire knowledge of anything which can be communicated to the human understanding by letters.
No power beneath the sky can make an ignorant, wasteful, and idle people prosperous, or a licentious people happy.
They cannot be coaxed or driven to vote with their enemies against their friends.