If he stole he but took his own; if he killed his master, he only imitated the heroes of the revolution.
Frederick Douglass: “If he stole he but took his own; if he killed his master, he only imitated the heroes of the revolution.”
Editor's note · Context
Douglass provocatively asserts that a slave's acts of stealing or killing a master could be seen as reclaiming what was rightfully theirs or emulating revolutionary heroes.
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My grandmother was all the world to me, and the thought of being separated from her was a most unwelcome suggestion to my affections and hopes.
This was a new and special revelation, dispelling a painful mystery against which my youthful understanding had struggled, and struggled in vain, to wit, the white man’s power to perpetuate the enslavement of the black man.
The good to be sought and the evil to be shunned were flung in the balance and weighed against each other.
But we are not here to applaud manly courage, save as it has been displayed in a noble cause.