They had come to hate everything which had the prefix “Free”--free soil, free states, free territories, free schools, free speech, and freedom generally, and they would have no more such prefixes.
From his autobiography, Douglass describes the Southern states' growing animosity towards any concept of freedom in the years leading up to the Civil War.
Share
More from Frederick Douglass
Nothing but the shot-gun or the bull-dozer’s whip can keep them from voting their convictions.
It is this, neither we, nor any other people, will ever be respected till we respect ourselves, and we will never respect ourselves till we have the means to live respectably.
To-day the negro, starting from nothing, pays taxes upon six millions in Georgia, and forty millions in Louisiana.