Thus, when the slave asked for hours of “virtuous liberty,” his cunning master took advantage of his ignorance and cheered him with a dose of vicious and revolting dissipation artfully labeled with the name of “liberty.
From his autobiography, Douglass critiques how slaveholders manipulated the concept of liberty to further control enslaved people.
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They cannot be coaxed or driven to vote with their enemies against their friends.
To-day the negro, starting from nothing, pays taxes upon six millions in Georgia, and forty millions in Louisiana.
No power beneath the sky can make an ignorant, wasteful, and idle people prosperous, or a licentious people happy.