This device of slaveholding ingenuity, like other devices of wickedness, in some measure defeated itself-- since more than one man could be found to answer the same general description.
Douglass comments on how the detailed descriptions in "free papers," intended to control, sometimes inadvertently aided escapes due to their generality.
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My grandmother was all the world to me, and the thought of being separated from her was a most unwelcome suggestion to my affections and hopes.
True it is that this faith was many times shaken by passing events, but never destroyed.
The father might be a white man, glorying in the purity of his Anglo-Saxon blood, and his child ranked with the blackest slaves.
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.