Sickness, adversity, and death may interfere with the plans and purposes of all, but the slave had the added danger of changing homes, in the separations unknown to other men.
Douglass contrasts the universal human experiences of hardship with the unique and profound suffering of enslaved people, who faced forced separations from family and home.
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A son of toil himself, he was linked in brotherly sympathy with the sons of toil in every loyal part of the republic.
His iron sentences, cold and harsh, sunk like heavy weights deep into my heart, and stirred up within me a rebellion not soon to be allayed.
He was called upon not merely to administer the government, but to decide, in the face of terrible odds, the fate of the Republic.