W.E.B. Du Bois: “The question of punishment indicated the slowly changing moral attitude of the South toward the slave system.”

Whatever of good may have come in these years of change, the shadow of a deep disappointment rests upon the Negro people,—a disappointment all the more bitter because the unattained ideal was unbounded save by the simple ignorance of a…

The ballot, which before he had looked upon as a visible sign of freedom, he now regarded as the chief means of gaining and perfecting the liberty with which war had partially endowed him.

The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife,—this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self.

By 1830 slavery seemed hopelessly fastened on the South, and the slaves thoroughly cowed into submission.