For what this separation is done, I do not know, unless it be to hinder the development of the child’s affection toward its mother, and to blunt and destroy the natural affection of the mother for the child.
In his autobiography, Douglass speculates on the cruel purpose behind the separation of enslaved children from their mothers, suggesting it was to destroy natural familial bonds.
Share
More from Frederick Douglass
To-day the negro, starting from nothing, pays taxes upon six millions in Georgia, and forty millions in Louisiana.
It was born in the tempest and whirlwind of war, and has lived in a storm of violence and blood.
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…
A poverty-stricken class will be an ignorant and despised class, and no amount of sentiment can make it otherwise.