By some means I learned from these inquiries that “God, up in the sky,” made every body; and that he made white people to be masters and mistresses, and black people to be slaves.
Douglass recounts the common, religiously-based justification for slavery he encountered as a child, which claimed divine ordination for racial hierarchy.
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His iron sentences, cold and harsh, sunk like heavy weights deep into my heart, and stirred up within me a rebellion not soon to be allayed.
It had no interest in recognizing or preserving any of the ties that bind families together or to their homes.
True it is that this faith was many times shaken by passing events, but never destroyed.
The father might be a white man, glorying in the purity of his Anglo-Saxon blood, and his child ranked with the blackest slaves.