Thus, when the slave asked for hours of “virtuous liberty,” his cunning master took advantage of his ignorance and cheered him with a dose of vicious and revolting dissipation artfully labeled with the name of “liberty.
From his autobiography, Douglass critiques how slaveholders manipulated the concept of liberty to further control enslaved people.
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Our very lack of preparation for the conflict disposed us to look for some other than the way of blood out of the difficulty.
The laws which determine the destinies of individuals and nations are impartial and eternal.
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.
Father he might be, and not be husband, and could sell his own child without incurring reproach, if in its veins coursed one drop of African blood.