Oration, Delivered in Corinthian Hall, Rochester · 1852 pamphlet, p. 22

Behold the practical operation of this internal slave-trade, the American slave-trade, sustained by American politics and American religion. Here you will see men and women, reared like swine, for the market. You know what is a swine-drover? I will show you a man-drover. They inhabit all our Southern States. They perambulate the country, and crowd the highways of the nation, with droves of human stock. You will see one of these human flesh jobbers, armed with pistol, whip and bowie-knife, driving a company of a hundred men, women, and children, from the Potomac to the slave market at New Orleans. These wretched people are to be sold singly, or in lots, to suit purchasers. They are food for the ​cotton-field, and the deadly sugar-mill. Mark the sad procession, as it moves wearily along, and the inhuman wretch who drives them. Hear his savage yells and his blood-chilling oaths, as he…

Frederick Douglass · 5 July 1852
Lee, Mann & Co., Rochester, 1852. Reading text from Literature in Context (University of Virginia), checked against the Rochester pamphlet where corrections are recorded; verse and source pagination retained.
Literature in Context TEI: CC BY-SA 4.0
Literature in Context; Students and Staff of the University of Virginia; Humzah Syed (transcription, correction, editorial commentary, markup); John O’Brien (editor). Funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities. Based on the HathiTrust/Google digitization of an Indiana University Library copy.
The TEI file expressly identifies this license. Original 1852 words are public domain; modern editorial commentary is excluded. Gloss distributes this adapted transcription under CC BY-SA 4.0.
Gloss paragraph segmentation, whitespace and line-end hyphen normalization, source page addresses, and separately listed scan-verified corrections.
Passage preview. Read in context for the complete text, notes and references.