Frederick Douglass

But the slave must be brutalized to keep him as a slave.

If a slave has a bad master, his ambition is to get a better; when he gets a better, he aspires to have the best; and when he gets the best, he aspires to be his own master.

But, as soon as the blow was not to be feared, then came the longing for liberty.

When I was looking for the blow about to be inflicted upon my head, I was not thinking of my liberty; it was my life.

When I was treated exceedingly ill; when my back was being scourged daily; when I was whipped within an inch of my life—life was all I cared for.

And all this is necessary; it is necessary to resort to these cruelties, in order to make the slave a slave, and to keep him a slave.

Of all things that have been said of slavery to which exception has been taken by slaveholders, this, the charge of cruelty, stands foremost, and yet there is no charge capable of clearer demonstration, than that of the most barbarous…

The slave-dealer boldly publishes his infamous acts to the world.

Yet in the United States, human beings are thus branded.

Starvation, the bloody whip, the chain, the gag, the thumb-screw, cat-hauling, the cat-o’-nine-tails, the dungeon, the blood-hound, are all in requisition to keep the slave in his condition as a slave in the United States.

Suffice it to say, that all of the peculiar modes of torture that were resorted to in the West India islands, are resorted to, I believe, even more frequently, in the United States of America.

Three millions of people shut out from the light of knowledge!