They had come to hate everything which had the prefix “Free”--free soil, free states, free territories, free schools, free speech, and freedom generally, and they would have no more such prefixes.
From his autobiography, Douglass describes the Southern states' growing animosity towards any concept of freedom in the years leading up to the Civil War.
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They cannot be coaxed or driven to vote with their enemies against their friends.
No power beneath the sky can make an ignorant, wasteful, and idle people prosperous, or a licentious people happy.
Still another ground of hope I find in the fact that colored men are strong in their gratitude to benefactors, and firm in their political convictions.
To-day the negro, starting from nothing, pays taxes upon six millions in Georgia, and forty millions in Louisiana.