All the kindness I had received at Baltimore, all my former hopes and aspirations for usefulness in the world, and even the happy moments spent in the exercises of religion, contrasted with my then present lot, served but to increase my anguish.
In his autobiography, Douglass reflects on how memories of past kindness and hope only intensified his present anguish under the brutal conditions of slavery.
Share
More from Frederick Douglass
True it is that this faith was many times shaken by passing events, but never destroyed.
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.
This was a new and special revelation, dispelling a painful mystery against which my youthful understanding had struggled, and struggled in vain, to wit, the white man’s power to perpetuate the enslavement of the black man.