It was the system of slavery which made this allowable, and which condemned the slaveholder for buying a slave woman and devoting her to this life, no more than for buying a cow and raising stock from her, and the same rules were observed, with a view to increasing the number and quality of the one, as of the other.
From his autobiography, Douglass describes how the system of slavery reduced enslaved women to mere breeders, akin to livestock.
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But we are not here to applaud manly courage, save as it has been displayed in a noble cause.
It was in the air, and men breathed it and were permeated by it, often when they were quite unconscious of its presence.
The good to be sought and the evil to be shunned were flung in the balance and weighed against each other.