The man, unaccustomed to slaveholding, would be astonished to observe how many foggable offenses there are in the slaveholder’s catalogue of crimes; and how easy it is to commit any one of them, even when the slave least intends it.
Douglass describes the vast and arbitrary list of offenses for which enslaved people could be punished, often without intent.
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More from Frederick Douglass
Still another ground of hope I find in the fact that colored men are strong in their gratitude to benefactors, and firm in their political convictions.
No power beneath the sky can make an ignorant, wasteful, and idle people prosperous, or a licentious people happy.
To-day the negro, starting from nothing, pays taxes upon six millions in Georgia, and forty millions in Louisiana.
The vote of the colored man, formerly beaten down and stamped out by intimidation, is now revived, sought, and defended by powerful allies, and this from no transient sentiment of the moment, but from the permanent laws controlling the…