The thought of paying cash for labor that they could formerly extort by the lash did not in anywise improve their disposition to the emancipated slave, or improve his own condition.
Reflecting on the immediate aftermath of emancipation, Douglass describes the continued animosity of former slaveholders towards freedmen.
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The nation or people which shall comply with them will rise, and those which violate them will fall, and perhaps will disappear altogether.
In any fair condition of things the men who till the soil will become proprietors of the soil.
To-day the negro, starting from nothing, pays taxes upon six millions in Georgia, and forty millions in Louisiana.