Scenes of sacred tenderness, around the death-bed, never forgotten, and which often arrest the vicious and confirm the virtuous during life, must be looked for among the free, though they sometimes occur among the slaves.
Douglass reflects on the moral and emotional significance of deathbed rituals, noting how slavery often deprives enslaved people of these formative experiences.
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Some will be more successful than others, and poverty, in many cases, is the result of misfortune rather than of crime; but no race can afford to have all its members the victims of this misfortune, without being considered a worthless…
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They were sent away empty-handed, without money, without friends, and without a foot of land to stand upon.
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