The slaveholders, with a craftiness peculiar to themselves, by encouraging the enmity of the poor, laboring white man against the blacks, succeeds in making the said white man almost as much a slave as the black slave himself.
In his autobiography, Douglass explains how slaveholders manipulate poor white laborers to maintain the system.
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More from Frederick Douglass
But we are not here to applaud manly courage, save as it has been displayed in a noble cause.
Treason had shot its poisonous roots deeper, and had spread its death-dealing branches further than any northern calculation had covered.
Land is not worth much where there are no people to occupy it, and a mule is not worth much where there is no one to drive him.
The father might be a white man, glorying in the purity of his Anglo-Saxon blood, and his child ranked with the blackest slaves.