Treason had shot its poisonous roots deeper, and had spread its death-dealing branches further than any northern calculation had covered.
Frederick Douglass: “Treason had shot its poisonous roots deeper, and had spread its death-dealing branches further than any northern…”
Editor's note · Context
Douglass describes the pervasive and underestimated nature of treason leading up to the Civil War.
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The vote of the colored man, formerly beaten down and stamped out by intimidation, is now revived, sought, and defended by powerful allies, and this from no transient sentiment of the moment, but from the permanent laws controlling the…
To-day the negro, starting from nothing, pays taxes upon six millions in Georgia, and forty millions in Louisiana.
No power beneath the sky can make an ignorant, wasteful, and idle people prosperous, or a licentious people happy.
Still another ground of hope I find in the fact that colored men are strong in their gratitude to benefactors, and firm in their political convictions.