All the license allowed, appears to have no other object than to disgust the slaves with their temporary freedom, and to make them as glad to return to their work, as they were to leave it.
In his autobiography, Douglass argues that the temporary freedoms granted during slave holidays were designed to make enslaved people despise liberty and prefer their bondage.
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More from Frederick Douglass
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.
His iron sentences, cold and harsh, sunk like heavy weights deep into my heart, and stirred up within me a rebellion not soon to be allayed.
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.