Those dear souls who came to my Sabbath-school came not because it was popular or reputable to do so, for they came with a liability of having forty stripes laid on their naked backs.
Douglass describes the immense courage of enslaved people who risked severe punishment to attend his secret Sabbath-school.
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The father might be a white man, glorying in the purity of his Anglo-Saxon blood, and his child ranked with the blackest slaves.
It was perhaps better for the country and for mankind that the good man could not know the end from the beginning.