The secrets of slavery are concealed like those of the Inquisition.

The slave child had no thought for the morrow; but there came that blight, which too surely waits on every human being born to be a chattel.

The secrets of slavery are concealed like those of the Inquisition.

I was ordered to go for flowers, that my mistress's house might be decorated for an evening party. I spent the day gathering flowers and weaving them into festoons, while the dead body of my father was lying within a mile of me. What cared my owners for that? he was merely a piece of property. Moreover, they thought he had spoiled his children, by teaching them to feel that they were human beings. This was blasphemous doctrine for a slave to teach; presumptuous in him, and dangerous to the masters.

But to the slave mother New Year's day comes laden with peculiar sorrows. She sits on her cold cabin floor, watching the children who may all be torn from her the next morning and often does she wish that she and they might die before the day dawns.

Hot weather brings out snakes and slaveholders, and I like one class of the venomous creatures as little as I do the other.

Death is better than slavery.