He can be father without being a husband, and may sell his child without incurring reproach, if the child be by a woman in whose veins courses one thirty-second part of African blood.
Douglass describes the legal and social perversions of slavery, where a man could father and sell his own child, born to an enslaved woman, without facing societal condemnation.
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More from Frederick Douglass
It only abolished slavery where it did not exist, and left it intact where it did exist.
It had no interest in recognizing or preserving any of the ties that bind families together or to their homes.
But we are not here to applaud manly courage, save as it has been displayed in a noble cause.
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.