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".
Besides, the worst enemy of the nation could not cast upon its fair name a greater infamy than to admit that negroes could be tolerated among them in a state of the most degrading slavery and oppression, and must be cast away, driven into…
Peace between races is not to be secured by degrading one race and exalting another, by giving power to one race and withholding it from another, but by maintaining a state of equal justice between all classes.
Experience proves that those are most abused who can be abused with the greatest impunity.
There was no earthly reason why the blacks should not hate and dread the poor whites when in a state of slavery, for it was from this class that their masters received their slave catchers, slave drivers, and overseers.
Those masters secured their ascendency over both the poor whites and blacks by putting enmity between them.
It has its root and sap in the relation of slavery, and was incited on both sides by the cunning of the slave master.
So long as they could keep him beyond the circle of human brotherhood, they could scourge him to toil, as a beast of burden, with a good Christian conscience, and without reproach.
The way of transgression is a bottomless pit, one step in that direction invites the next, and the end is never reached; and it is the same with the path of righteous obedience.
It is another illustration of how any advance in pursuance of a right principle, prepares and makes easy the way to another.
I am less amazed at these evils, than by the rapidity with which they are subsiding and not more astonished at the facility with which the former slave has become a free man, than at the rapid adjustment of the master-class to the new…
Great changes in the relations of mankind can never come, without evils analogous to those which have attended the emancipation and enfranchisement of the colored people of the United States.