This arrangement admits of the greatest license to brutal slaveholders, and their profligate sons, brothers, relations and friends, and gives to the pleasure of sin, the additional attraction of profit.
Douglass describes how the legal system of slavery encouraged sexual exploitation by slaveholders, turning illicit pleasure into a source of profit.
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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.
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…