Judging from my own observation and experience, I believe these holidays to be among the most effective means, in the hands of slaveholders, of keeping down the spirit of insurrection among the slaves.
From his autobiography, Douglass explains how slave holidays were used by masters to suppress rebellion.
Share
More from Frederick Douglass
No power beneath the sky can make an ignorant, wasteful, and idle people prosperous, or a licentious people happy.
The nation or people which shall comply with them will rise, and those which violate them will fall, and perhaps will disappear altogether.
None now denies the ability of the colored race to acquire knowledge of anything which can be communicated to the human understanding by letters.