Conscious of the injustice and wrong they are every hour perpetrating, and knowing what they themselves would do if made the victims of such wrongs, they are looking out for the first signs of the dread retribution of justice.
In his autobiography, Douglass describes the inherent fear and paranoia of slaveholders, who anticipate retribution due to their own awareness of the injustices they inflict.
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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 in the air, and men breathed it and were permeated by it, often when they were quite unconscious of its presence.
Our very lack of preparation for the conflict disposed us to look for some other than the way of blood out of the difficulty.
For the moment the northern lamb was transformed into a lion, and his roar was terrible.