The license allowed appeared to have no other object than to disgust the slaves with their temporary freedom, and to make them as glad to return to their work as they were to leave it.
From his autobiography, Douglass analyzes the cynical purpose behind the limited freedoms granted to enslaved people during holidays.
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The good to be sought and the evil to be shunned were flung in the balance and weighed against each other.
Knowledge unfits a child to be a slave.” I instinctively assented to the proposition, and from that moment I understood the direct pathway from slavery to freedom.
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.