It 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.
Douglass reflects on the moment he understood the deliberate mechanisms used by white slaveholders to maintain the enslavement of Black people.
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In any fair condition of things the men who till the soil will become proprietors of the soil.
They cannot be coaxed or driven to vote with their enemies against their friends.
The nation or people which shall comply with them will rise, and those which violate them will fall, and perhaps will disappear altogether.
To-day the negro, starting from nothing, pays taxes upon six millions in Georgia, and forty millions in Louisiana.