It may, perhaps, be fairly questioned, whether any other portion of the population of the earth could have endured the privations, sufferings and horrors of slavery, without having become more degraded in the scale of humanity than the slaves of African descent.
He reflects on the resilience of enslaved people in the face of extreme suffering and degradation.
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More from Frederick Douglass
No power beneath the sky can make an ignorant, wasteful, and idle people prosperous, or a licentious people happy.
In any fair condition of things the men who till the soil will become proprietors of the soil.
The nation or people which shall comply with them will rise, and those which violate them will fall, and perhaps will disappear altogether.
Nothing but the shot-gun or the bull-dozer’s whip can keep them from voting their convictions.