Ostensibly they were institutions of benevolence designed to mitigate the rigors of slave life, but practically they were a fraud instituted by human selfishness, the better to secure the ends of injustice and oppression.
Douglass exposes the deceptive nature of slave holidays, revealing them as tools of oppression rather than acts of kindness.
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In any fair condition of things the men who till the soil will become proprietors of the soil.
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.
Nothing but the shot-gun or the bull-dozer’s whip can keep them from voting their convictions.
They cannot be coaxed or driven to vote with their enemies against their friends.