Very well,” thought I; “knowledge unfits a child to be a slave.” I instinctively assented to the proposition; and from that moment I understood the direct pathway from slavery to freedom.
Douglass recounts his epiphany upon realizing that slaveholders deliberately kept enslaved people ignorant to maintain their bondage, thus revealing the path to freedom.
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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.
But we are not here to applaud manly courage, save as it has been displayed in a noble cause.