![]() My thoughts would compel utterance and there, with no audience but the Almighty, I would pour out my soul’s complaint, in my rude way, with an apostrophe to the moving multitude of ships:. The sight of these always affected me powerfully. I have often, in the deep stillness of a summer’s Sabbath, stood all alone upon the lofty banks of that noble bay, and traced, with saddened heart and tearful eye, the countless number of sails moving off to the mighty ocean. Those beautiful vessels, robed in purest white, so delightful to the eye of freemen, were to me so many shrouded ghosts, to terrify and torment me with thoughts of my wretched condition. Our house stood within a few rods of the Chesapeake Bay, whose broad bosom was ever white with sails from every quarter of the habitable globe. My sufferings on this plantation seem now like a dream rather than a stern reality. I was sometimes prompted to take my life, and that of Covey, but was prevented by a combination of hope and fear. I sank down again, mourning over my wretched condition. At times I would rise up, a flash of energetic freedom would dart through my soul, accompanied with a faint beam of hope, that flickered for a moment, and then vanished. I spent this in a sort of beast-like stupor, between sleep and wake, under some large tree. My natural elasticity was crushed, my intellect languished, the disposition to read departed, the cheerful spark that lingered about my eye died the dark night of slavery closed in upon me and behold a man transformed into a brute! This brief section is from Chapter 10 and is when he was a slave under Mr. The language is beautiful in its descriptions and emotions, and as the reader you can imagine some of what he was seeing and feeling at the time. Douglass wrote this himself as a 26 year old. We must do this by labor, by suffering, by sacrifice, and, if needs be, by our lives and the lives of others.This is a beautiful quote from the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass. If we ever get free from the oppression and wrongs heaped upon us, we must pay for their removal. Men may not get all they pay for in this world, but they must certainly pay for all they get. In the light of these ideas, Negroes will be hunted in the North, and held and flogged at in the South so long as they submit to those devilish outrages, and make no resistance, either moral or physical. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress. ![]() Find out just what a people will submit to, and you have found out the exact amount of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The struggle may be a moral one or it may be a physical one, or it may both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. They want the ocean without the roar of its mighty waters. They want rain without thunder and lightning. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation are men who want crops without plowing the ground. If there is no struggle, there is no progress. The whole history of the progress of human liberty shows that all concessions yet made to her august claims have been born of earnest struggle. ![]() Let me give you a word of the philosophy of reforms. This excerpt is from an address on West India Emancipation, delivered August 4, 1857.
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