Jan 1, 1855
Here, thought I, is something worth living for; here is an excellent chance for usefulness; and I shall soon have a company of young friends, lovers of knowledge, like some of my Baltimore friends, from whom I now felt parted forever.
Frederick Douglass
The Public Record
Frederick Douglass was an American social reformer, abolitionist, orator, writer, and statesman. He was "the most important leader of the movement for African-American civil rights in the 19th century".
gutenberg.org
Jan 1, 1855
The whole community—with but a single exception, among the whites—frowned upon everything like imparting instruction either to slaves or to free colored persons.
Jan 1, 1855
They seemed almost as unconcerned about our getting to heaven, as they were about our getting out of slavery.
Jan 1, 1855
The natural wickedness of his heart had not been removed, but only reinforced, by the profession of religion.
Jan 1, 1855
If religion had any effect on his character at all, it made him more cruel and hateful in all his ways.
Jan 1, 1855
His religion, therefore, neither made him emancipate his slaves, nor caused him to treat them with greater humanity.
Jan 1, 1855
The highest evidence the slaveholder can give the slave of his acceptance with God, is the emancipation of his slaves.
Jan 1, 1855
Slaveholders may, sometimes, have confidence in the piety of some of their slaves; but the slaves seldom have confidence in the piety of their masters.
Jan 1, 1855
His conversion was not to change his relation toward men—at any rate not toward BLACK men—but toward God.
Jan 1, 1855
Slaves, too, readily distinguish between the birthright bearing of the original slaveholder and the assumed attitudes of the accidental slaveholder; and while they cannot respect either, they certainly despise the latter more than the…