The overseer had written his character on the living parchment of most of their backs, and left them callous; my back (thanks to my early removal from the plantation to Baltimore) was yet tender.
From his autobiography, Douglass reflects on the physical scars of slavery and his relative fortune in avoiding them early on.
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No power beneath the sky can make an ignorant, wasteful, and idle people prosperous, or a licentious people happy.
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