The warm defender of the sacredness of the family relation is the same that scatters whole families,—sundering husbands and wives, parents and children, sisters and brothers,—leaving the hut vacant, and the hearth desolate.
From his autobiography, this passage critiques the hypocrisy of slaveholders who claim to uphold family values while destroying enslaved families.
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Treason had shot its poisonous roots deeper, and had spread its death-dealing branches further than any northern calculation had covered.
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.
It was perhaps better for the country and for mankind that the good man could not know the end from the beginning.