To strike a white man was death by lynch law, in Gardiner’s ship-yard; nor was there much of any other law toward the colored people at that time in any other part of Maryland.
Douglass describes the brutal reality of racial injustice and the absence of legal protection for Black individuals in Maryland during his time as an enslaved person.
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Nothing but the shot-gun or the bull-dozer’s whip can keep them from voting their convictions.
In any fair condition of things the men who till the soil will become proprietors of the soil.
They cannot be coaxed or driven to vote with their enemies against their friends.