That slave who had the courage to stand up for himself against the overseer, although he might have many hard stripes at first, became while legally a slave virtually a freeman.
From his autobiography, Douglass reflects on how a slave's courage to resist an overseer could lead to a form of virtual freedom.
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Nothing but the shot-gun or the bull-dozer’s whip can keep them from voting their convictions.
To-day the negro, starting from nothing, pays taxes upon six millions in Georgia, and forty millions in Louisiana.
In any fair condition of things the men who till the soil will become proprietors of the soil.
No power beneath the sky can make an ignorant, wasteful, and idle people prosperous, or a licentious people happy.