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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More from Frederick Douglass
In any fair condition of things the men who till the soil will become proprietors of the soil.
To-day the negro, starting from nothing, pays taxes upon six millions in Georgia, and forty millions in Louisiana.
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.