They are professedly a custom established by the benevolence of the slaveholders; but I undertake to say, it is the result of selfishness, and one of the grossest frauds committed upon the down-trodden slave.
From his autobiography, Douglass refutes the idea that slave holidays are benevolent, exposing them as a selfish fraud.
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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.
Knowledge unfits a child to be a slave.” I instinctively assented to the proposition, and from that moment I understood the direct pathway from slavery to freedom.
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.