To allow a slave to escape punishment, who has impudently attempted to exculpate himself from unjust charges, preferred against him by some white person, is to be guilty of great dereliction of duty.
Douglass describes the perverse logic of slaveholders who believed it was a dereliction of duty to let a slave escape punishment for perceived impudence.
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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…
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.
They cannot be coaxed or driven to vote with their enemies against their friends.