The pains she took, and the toil she endured, to see me, tells me that a true mother’s heart was hers, and that slavery had difficulty in paralyzing it with unmotherly indifference.
Douglass reflects on his mother's efforts to visit him, seeing it as proof of her unwavering maternal affection despite slavery's attempts to suppress it.
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Father he might be, and not be husband, and could sell his own child without incurring reproach, if in its veins coursed one drop of African blood.
The laws which determine the destinies of individuals and nations are impartial and eternal.
The good to be sought and the evil to be shunned were flung in the balance and weighed against each other.