The white slave had taken from him by indirection what the black slave had taken from him directly and without ceremony.
Frederick Douglass: “The white slave had taken from him by indirection what the black slave had taken from him directly and without ceremony.”
Editor's note · Context
Douglass explains the differing methods of exploitation faced by poor white laborers and enslaved black people under the slave system.
Share
More from Frederick Douglass
The vote of the colored man, formerly beaten down and stamped out by intimidation, is now revived, sought, and defended by powerful allies, and this from no transient sentiment of the moment, but from the permanent laws controlling the…
The nation or people which shall comply with them will rise, and those which violate them will fall, and perhaps will disappear altogether.
To-day the negro, starting from nothing, pays taxes upon six millions in Georgia, and forty millions in Louisiana.
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.