The woman was placed on the auctioneer’s block; her limbs, as is customary, were brutally exposed to the purchasers, who examined her with all the freedom with which they would examine a horse.
Douglass recounts the brutal and dehumanizing process of a slave auction, where a woman's body was inspected like an animal.
Share
More from Frederick Douglass
It was perhaps better for the country and for mankind that the good man could not know the end from the beginning.
He was called upon not merely to administer the government, but to decide, in the face of terrible odds, the fate of the Republic.