SLAVE in Classic Quotes

1  The slave owner and his sons had mastered no special industry.

Up From Slavery: An Autobiography By Booker T. Washington
ContextHighlight   In Chapter I.

2  I was born a slave on a plantation in Franklin County, Virginia.

Up From Slavery: An Autobiography By Booker T. Washington
ContextHighlight   In Chapter I.

3  Hence labour was something that both races on the slave plantation sought to escape.

Up From Slavery: An Autobiography By Booker T. Washington
ContextHighlight   In Chapter I.

4  As the great day drew nearer, there was more singing in the slave quarters than usual.

Up From Slavery: An Autobiography By Booker T. Washington
ContextHighlight   In Chapter I.

5  Her addition to the slave family attracted about as much attention as the purchase of a new horse or cow.

Up From Slavery: An Autobiography By Booker T. Washington
ContextHighlight   In Chapter I.

6  The most trying ordeal that I was forced to endure as a slave boy, however, was the wearing of a flax shirt.

Up From Slavery: An Autobiography By Booker T. Washington
ContextHighlight   In Chapter I.

7  The slave system on our place, in a large measure, took the spirit of self-reliance and self-help out of the white people.

Up From Slavery: An Autobiography By Booker T. Washington
ContextHighlight   In Chapter I.

8  The slave who was selected to sleep in the "big house" during the absence of the males was considered to have the place of honour.

Up From Slavery: An Autobiography By Booker T. Washington
ContextHighlight   In Chapter I.

9  Any one attempting to harm "young Mistress" or "old Mistress" during the night would have had to cross the dead body of the slave to do so.

Up From Slavery: An Autobiography By Booker T. Washington
ContextHighlight   In Chapter I.

10  The night before the eventful day, word was sent to the slave quarters to the effect that something unusual was going to take place at the "big house" the next morning.

Up From Slavery: An Autobiography By Booker T. Washington
ContextHighlight   In Chapter I.

11  When war was begun between the North and the South, every slave on our plantation felt and knew that, though other issues were discussed, the primal one was that of slavery.

Up From Slavery: An Autobiography By Booker T. Washington
ContextHighlight   In Chapter I.

12  I had no schooling whatever while I was a slave, though I remember on several occasions I went as far as the schoolhouse door with one of my young mistresses to carry her books.

Up From Slavery: An Autobiography By Booker T. Washington
ContextHighlight   In Chapter I.

13  In connection with the flax shirt, my brother John, who is several years older than I am, performed one of the most generous acts that I ever heard of one slave relative doing for another.

Up From Slavery: An Autobiography By Booker T. Washington
ContextHighlight   In Chapter I.

14  In the case of the slaves on our place this was not true, and it was not true of any large portion of the slave population in the South where the Negro was treated with anything like decency.

Up From Slavery: An Autobiography By Booker T. Washington
ContextHighlight   In Chapter I.

15  Gradually, one by one, stealthily at first, the older slaves began to wander from the slave quarters back to the "big house" to have a whispered conversation with their former owners as to the future.

Up From Slavery: An Autobiography By Booker T. Washington
ContextHighlight   In Chapter I.

16  In the slave quarters, and even later, I heard whispered conversations among the coloured people of the tortures which the slaves, including, no doubt, my ancestors on my mother's side, suffered in the middle passage of the slave ship while being conveyed from Africa to America.

Up From Slavery: An Autobiography By Booker T. Washington
ContextHighlight   In Chapter I.

17  I found that this man had made a contract with his master, two or three years previous to the Emancipation Proclamation, to the effect that the slave was to be permitted to buy himself, by paying so much per year for his body; and while he was paying for himself, he was to be permitted to labour where and for whom he pleased.

Up From Slavery: An Autobiography By Booker T. Washington
ContextHighlight   In Chapter I.