Frederick Douglass

His indignation was really strong and healthy; but, unfortunately, it resulted from the thought that his rights of property, in my person, had not been respected, more than from any sense of the outrage committed on me as a man.

To make this enmity deep and broad, between the slave and the poor white man, the latter is allowed to abuse and whip the former, without hinderance.

The impression is cunningly made, that slavery is the only power that can prevent the laboring white man from falling to the level of the slave’s poverty and degradation.

At present, the slaveholders blind them to this competition, by keeping alive their prejudice against the slaves, as men—not against them as slaves.

The competition, and its injurious consequences, will, one day, array the nonslaveholding white people of the slave states, against the slave system, and make them the most effective workers against the great evil.

The slave is robbed, by his master, of all his earnings, above what is required for his bare physical necessities; and the white man is robbed by the slave system, of the just results of his labor, because he is flung into competition with…

Both are plundered, and by the same plunderers.

The white slave has taken from him, by indirection, what the black slave has taken from him, directly, and without ceremony.

The difference between the white slave, and the black slave, is this: the latter belongs to one slaveholder, and the former belongs to all the slaveholders, collectively.

The slaveholders, with a craftiness peculiar to themselves, by encouraging the enmity of the poor, laboring white man against the blacks, succeeds in making the said white man almost as much a slave as the black slave himself.

That phase is this: the conflict of slavery with the interests of the white mechanics and laborers of the south.

He could grow, and become a MAN; I could grow, though I could not become a man, but must remain, all my life, a minor—a mere boy.