It was the policy of the system to keep him both ignorant and degraded, the better and more safely to defraud him of his hard earnings; and this argument never staggered me.
Douglass reveals that slavery intentionally kept Black people ignorant and degraded to facilitate their exploitation, a fact he found undeniable.
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Father he might be, and not be husband, and could sell his own child without incurring reproach, if in its veins coursed one drop of African blood.
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.
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.