Cruelty is contagious in uncivilized communities.

The slave girl is reared in an atmosphere of licentiousness and fear.

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

I can testify, from my own experience and observation, that slavery is a curse to the whites as well as to the blacks. It makes the white fathers cruel and sensual; the sons violent and licentious; it contaminates the daughters, and makes the wives wretched. And as for the colored race, it needs an abler pen than mine to describe the extremity of their sufferings, the depth of their degradation.

I would rather drudge out my life on a cotton plantation, till the grave opened to give me rest, than to live with an unprincipled master and a jealous mistress.

When I was six years old, my mother died; and then, for the first time, I learned, by the talk around me, that I was a slave.

My master had power and law on his side; I had a determined will. There is might in each.