I will not censure her harshly; she cannot censure me, for she knows I speak but the truth, and have acted in my opposition to slavery, just as she herself would have acted, in a reverse of circumstances.
Douglass expresses a nuanced view of his former mistress, acknowledging her complicity in slavery while also suggesting a shared human response to oppression.
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His iron sentences, cold and harsh, sunk like heavy weights deep into my heart, and stirred up within me a rebellion not soon to be allayed.
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.
Our very lack of preparation for the conflict disposed us to look for some other than the way of blood out of the difficulty.