One word of the appraisers, against all preferences and prayers, could sunder all the ties of friendship and affection, even to separating husbands and wives, parents and children.
From his autobiography, Douglass describes the absolute power of slave appraisers to arbitrarily break apart families and relationships.
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The father might be a white man, glorying in the purity of his Anglo-Saxon blood, and his child ranked with the blackest slaves.
It was perhaps better for the country and for mankind that the good man could not know the end from the beginning.
Land is not worth much where there are no people to occupy it, and a mule is not worth much where there is no one to drive him.
For the moment the northern lamb was transformed into a lion, and his roar was terrible.