For such friendship I felt deeply grateful, and bitter as are my recollections of slavery, I love to recall any instances of kindness, any sunbeams of humane treatment, which found way to my soul through the iron grating of my house of bondage.
Reflecting on his early life in slavery, Douglass expresses gratitude for small acts of kindness that illuminated the harsh reality of his bondage.
Share
More from Frederick Douglass
The sentiment that brings us here to-day is one of the noblest that can stir and thrill the human heart.
It was in the air, and men breathed it and were permeated by it, often when they were quite unconscious of its presence.
We could not but believe that there existed at the South a latent and powerful Union sentiment which would assert itself at last.