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Appendix
Inhumanity of Slavery
Extract from a Lecture on Slavery, at Rochester, December 8, 1850
Douglass rebuts the idea of slavery as a benign ‘patriarchal’ relation, argues that cruelty is structurally necessary to the system rather than incidental to bad masters, and warns that slavery's corrupting reach extends into northern politics and mob violence.
Rebuttal of the ‘kind master’ defense of slaveryWhy cruelty is structurally necessary to slaveholdingNorthern complicity and anti-abolitionist mob violenceThomas Jefferson's warning quoted in closing