They were not before the war, they were not during the war, and have not been since the war, in their spirit or in their civilization, a people in common with the people of the North, or the civilized world.
Douglass argues that the South has never shared the same values or civilization as the North or the broader civilized world.
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More from Frederick Douglass
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.
But we are not here to applaud manly courage, save as it has been displayed in a noble cause.
The father might be a white man, glorying in the purity of his Anglo-Saxon blood, and his child ranked with the blackest slaves.
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.