It had reached that verge of madness when it had called upon the negro for help to fight against the freedom which he so longed to find, for the bondage he would escape--against Lincoln the Emancipator for Davis the enslaver.
Douglass critiques the Confederacy's desperate and contradictory decision to consider enlisting enslaved Black men to fight for their own continued bondage.
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Knowledge unfits a child to be a slave.” I instinctively assented to the proposition, and from that moment I understood the direct pathway from slavery to freedom.
The good to be sought and the evil to be shunned were flung in the balance and weighed against each other.
My grandmother was all the world to me, and the thought of being separated from her was a most unwelcome suggestion to my affections and hopes.
We (the people of the North) are a charitable people, and in the excess of this feeling we were disposed to put the very best construction upon the strange behavior of our southern brethren.