FROM THE PAGES OF MY BONDAGE AND MY FREEDOM

Genealogical trees do not flourish among slaves. (page 40)

 

My poor mother, like many other slave-women, had many children, but NO FAMILY! (pages 49-50)

 

That plantation is a little nation of its own, having its own language, its own rules, regulations and customs. The laws and institutions of the state, apparently touch it nowhere. The troubles arising here, are not settled by the civil power of the state. The overseer is generally accuser, judge, jury, advocate and executioner. The criminal is always dumb. The overseer attends to all sides of a case. (page 60)

 

Under the whole heavens there is no relation more unfavorable to the development of honorable character, than that sustained by the slaveholder to the slave. Reason is imprisoned here, and passions run wild. (page 72)

 

The slave is a subject, subjected by others; the slaveholder is a subject, but he is the author of his own subjection. There is more truth in the saying, that slavery is a greater evil to the master than to the slave, than many, who utter it, suppose. (page 89)

 

From my earliest recollections of serious matters, I date the entertainment of something like an ineffaceable conviction, that slavery would not always be able to hold me within its foul embrace; and this conviction, like a word of living faith, strengthened me through the darkest trials of my lot. (page 113)

Nature has done almost nothing to prepare men and women to be either slaves or slaveholders. (page 122)

 

How vividly, at that moment, did the brutalizing power of slavery flash before me! Personality swallowed up in the sordid idea of property! Manhood lost in chattelhood! (page 138)

 

Make a man a slave, and you rob him of moral responsibility. Freedom of choice is the essence of all accountability (page 149)

 

The over work, and the brutal chastisements of which I was the victim, combined with that ever-gnawing and soul-devouring thought—“I am a slave—aslave for life—aslave with no rational ground to hope for freedom”—rendered me a living embodiment of mental and physical wretchedness. (page 169)

 

I had reached the point, at which I was not afraid to die. This spirit made me a freeman in fact, while I remained a slave in form. (page 187)

 

I longed to have a future—a future with hope in it. To be shut up entirely to the past and present, is abhorrent to the human mind; it is to the soul—whose life and happiness is unceasing progress-what the prison is to the body; a blight and mildew, a hell of horrors. The dawning of this, another year, awakened me from my temporary slumber, and roused into life my latent, but long cherished aspirations for freedom. (page 206)

 

To make a contented slave, you must make a thoughtless one. (page 238)

 

Toward fugitives, Americans are not honest. (page 256)

 

A slave, brought up in the very depths of ignorance, assuming to instruct the highly civilized people of the north in the principles of liberty, justice, and humanity! The thing looked absurd. Nevertheless, I persevered. (page 292)