The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass

My 13 highlights

• I was told by some one very early that “God up in the sky” had made all things, and had made black people to be slaves and white people to be masters. I was told too, that God was good and that He knew what was best for everybody. This was, however, less satisfactory than the first statement.

• She pointed out to me my brother Perry, my sisters, Sarah and Eliza. I had never seen them before, and though I had sometimes heard of them and felt a curious interest in them, I really did not understand what they were to me or I to them. Brothers and sisters we were by blood, but slavery had made us strangers.

• While I heard of numerous murders committed by slaveholders on the eastern shore of Maryland, I never knew a solitary instance where a slaveholder was either hung or imprisoned for having murdered a slave. The usual pretext for such crimes was that the slave had offered resistance. Should a slave, when assaulted, but raise his hand in self-defence, the white assaulting party was fully justified by Southern law, and Southern public opinion, in shooting the slave down, and for this there was no redress.

• Everybody in the South seemed to want the privilege of whipping somebody else.

• A man’s troubles are always half disposed of when he finds endurance the only alternative. I found myself there; there was no getting away; and naught remained for me but to make the best of it.

• Nature never intended that men and women should be either slaves or slaveholders, and nothing but rigid training, long persisted in, can perfect the character of the one or the other.

• the kindness of the slave-master only gilded the chain, it detracted nothing from its weight or strength.

• The freedom from bodily torture and unceasing labour had given my mind an increased sensibility, and imparted to it greater activity.

• The table of the house groaned under the blood-bought luxuries gathered with pains-taking care at home and abroad.

• The songs of the slaves represented their sorrows, rather than their joys. Like tears, they were a relief to their aching hearts.

• Nature made us friends, but slavery had made us enemies.

• in the morning I started off, obedient to the order of Master Thomas, feeling that I had no friend on earth, and doubting if I had one in heaven.

• His horses and dogs fared better than his men. Their beds were far softer and cleaner than those of his human cattle. No