I have sometimes thought, that the mere hearing of those songs would do more to impress truly spiritual-minded men and women with the soul-crushing and death-dealing character of slavery, than the reading of whole volumes of its mere physical cruelties.
Douglass argues that the emotional depth of slave songs reveals the spiritual devastation of slavery more effectively than descriptions of physical abuse.
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It was perhaps better for the country and for mankind that the good man could not know the end from the beginning.
The father might be a white man, glorying in the purity of his Anglo-Saxon blood, and his child ranked with the blackest slaves.
True it is that this faith was many times shaken by passing events, but never destroyed.