I saw through the attempt to keep me in ignorance; I saw that slaveholders would have gladly made me believe that they were merely acting under the authority of God, in making a slave of me, and in making slaves of others; and I treated them as robbers and deceivers.
Douglass recounts in his autobiography how he perceived the slaveholders' attempts to justify their actions through religious authority and his subsequent defiance.
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To-day the negro, starting from nothing, pays taxes upon six millions in Georgia, and forty millions in Louisiana.
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…
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