Frederick Douglass

I was solitary in the world, and alone within the walls of a stone prison, left to a fate of life-long misery.

Not until this last separation, dear reader, had I touched those profounder depths of desolation, which it is the lot of slaves often to reach.

Thirty-nine lashes on my naked and bleeding back, would have been joyfully borne, in preference to this separation from these, the friends of my youth.

Bolts, bars and grated windows are not acceptable to freedom-loving people of any color.

They are mere hucksters of the surplus slave produce of Maryland and Virginia coarse, cruel, and swaggering bullies, whose very breathing is of blasphemy and blood.

Yes; they are a legitimate fruit of slavery; and it is a puzzle to make out a case of greater villainy for them, than for the slaveholders, who make such a class possible.

They have grown intimate with vice and blood; they gloat over the wildest illustrations of their soul-damning and earth-polluting business, and are moral pests.

They walk amid desecrated affections, insulted virtue, and blasted hopes.

Their ears are made quite familiar with the agonizing cry of outraged and woe-smitted humanity.

For one, I detested the whisky-bloated gamblers in human flesh; and I believe I was as much detested by them in turn.

I felt myself surrounded as by a pack of fiends, fresh from perdition.

Such a set of debased and villainous creatures, I never saw before, and hope never to see again.