Frederick Douglass

Every slaveholder seeks to impress his slave with a belief in the boundlessness of slave territory, and of his own almost illimitable power.

I hated the secrecy; but where slavery is powerful, and liberty is weak, the latter is driven to concealment or to destruction.

LIBERTY was our aim; and we had now come to think that we had a right to liberty, against every obstacle even against the lives of our enslavers.

We did not seek to overthrow them, but to escape from them.

We were plotting against our (so called) lawful rulers; with this difference that we sought our own good, and not the harm of our enemies.

I claim to be the instigator of the high crime (as the slaveholders regard it) and I kept life in it, until life could be kept in it no longer.

We meant to reach the north—and the north was our Canaan.

Suspicion and torture are the approved methods of getting at the truth, here.

The reader will see that the good old rule—“a man is to be held innocent until proved to be guilty”—does not hold good on the slave plantation.

The slave is sometimes whipped into the confession of offenses which he never committed.

You have got the devil in you,” say they, “and we will whip him out of you.” I have often been put thus to the torture, on bare suspicion.

Conscious of the injustice and wrong they are every hour perpetrating, and knowing what they themselves would do if made the victims of such wrongs, they are looking out for the first signs of the dread retribution of justice.