I prefer reading the laws to making any statement in confirmation of what I have said myself; for the slaveholders cannot object to this testimony, since it is the calm, the cool, the deliberate enactment of their wisest heads, of their most clear-sighted, their own constituted representatives.
He emphasizes the importance of using slaveholders' own laws as evidence of the inhumanity of slavery.
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More from Frederick Douglass
The nation or people which shall comply with them will rise, and those which violate them will fall, and perhaps will disappear altogether.
None now denies the ability of the colored race to acquire knowledge of anything which can be communicated to the human understanding by letters.
They cannot be coaxed or driven to vote with their enemies against their friends.
In any fair condition of things the men who till the soil will become proprietors of the soil.