The colored people can rent land, it is true, and many of them do rent many acres, and find themselves poorer at the end of the year than at the beginning, because they are charged more a year for rent per acre than the land would bring at auction sale.
Douglass discusses the economic struggles of African American tenants who find themselves in a cycle of poverty despite renting land.
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He was called upon not merely to administer the government, but to decide, in the face of terrible odds, the fate of the Republic.
The father might be a white man, glorying in the purity of his Anglo-Saxon blood, and his child ranked with the blackest slaves.
We (the people of the North) are a charitable people, and in the excess of this feeling we were disposed to put the very best construction upon the strange behavior of our southern brethren.