A rude, uncultivated fugitive slave was driven, by stern necessity, to that country to which young American gentlemen go to increase their stock of knowledge, to seek pleasure, to have their rough, democratic manners softened by contact with English aristocratic refinement.
Douglass contrasts his desperate flight to England as an escaped slave with the privileged reasons young American gentlemen typically traveled there.
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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.
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.