It coolly proposes to sell the bodies and souls of the blacks to increase the intelligence and refinement of the whites; to rob every black stranger who ventures among them, to increase their literary fund.
Douglass critiques the Illinois law, exposing its cruel and hypocritical intent to exploit Black people for the benefit of whites.
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More from Frederick Douglass
We (the people of the North) are a charitable people, and in the excess of this feeling we were disposed to put the very best construction upon the strange behavior of our southern brethren.
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.
He was called upon not merely to administer the government, but to decide, in the face of terrible odds, the fate of the Republic.