Oration, Delivered in Corinthian Hall, Rochester · 1852 pamphlet, p. 24

In the deep still darkness of midnight, I have been often aroused by the dead heavy footsteps, and the pitious cries of the chained gangs that passed our door. The anguish of my boyish heart was intense; and I was often consoled, when speaking to my mistress in the morning, to hear her say that the custom was very wicked; that she hated to hear the rattle of the chains, and the heart-rending cries. I was glad to find one who sympathised with me in my horror.

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.