Frederick Douglass

I have found them, almost invariably, the vilest, meanest and basest of their class.

For all slaveholders with whom I have ever met, religious slaveholders are the worst.

Were I again to be reduced to the condition of a slave, next to that calamity, I should regard the fact of being the slave of a religious slaveholder, the greatest that could befall me.

It is the sober, thinking slave who is dangerous, and needs the vigilance of his master, to keep him a slave.

When a slave is drunk, the slaveholder has no fear that he will plan an insurrection; no fear that he will escape to the north.

It was about as well to be a slave to master, as to be a slave to rum and whisky.

All the license allowed, appears to have no other object than to disgust the slaves with their temporary freedom, and to make them as glad to return to their work, as they were to leave it.

It is plain, that everything like rational enjoyment among the slaves, is frowned upon; and only those wild and low sports, peculiar to semi-civilized people, are encouraged.

It is not from a generous unconcern for the slave’s labor that this cessation from labor is allowed, but from a prudent regard to the safety of the slave system.

The slave’s happiness is not the end sought, but, rather, the master’s safety.

Ostensibly, they are institutions of benevolence, designed to mitigate the rigors of slave life, but, practically, they are a fraud, instituted by human selfishness, the better to secure the ends of injustice and oppression.

Thus, the holidays, became part and parcel of the gross fraud, wrongs and inhumanity of slavery.