On the record
The whites, north and south, played a game, and made the black people their stakes.
Source
gutenberg.orgHorace Mann: “The whites, north and south, played a game, and made the black people their stakes.”
Editor's note · Context
This metaphor illustrates the exploitation of Black people by both northern and southern whites during the slavery era.
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More from Horace Mann
I answer, that this difference which they so be-little and disparage will often be all the difference between freedom and bondage, between life and death, between honor and infamy, between happiness and perdition.
A southern slave stands higher, politically, than a northern laborer, if the latter must vote as his employer dictates.
The man of independent circumstances has this liberty; and no man’s circumstances, not even the poorest and the humblest, should be so dependent as to take it away.
Why, fellow-citizens, the ballot is worse than useless, if it be not FREE!
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