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.

The degradation, the wrongs, the vices, that grow out of slavery, are more than I can describe. They are greater than you would willingly believe.

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.

The beautiful spring came; and when Nature resumes her loveliness, the human soul is apt to revive also.

Death is better than slavery.

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.

Always it gave me a pang that my children had no lawful claim to a name.