The gratification afforded by the triumph was a full compensation for whatever else might follow, even death itself.
Frederick Douglass: “The gratification afforded by the triumph was a full compensation for whatever else might follow, even death itself.”
Editor's note · Context
From his autobiography, this reflects on the deep satisfaction and sense of triumph he felt after successfully resisting his enslaver, regardless of potential consequences.
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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.
But we are not here to applaud manly courage, save as it has been displayed in a noble cause.
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.