What did Frederick Douglass say about slavery?

What did I say about slavery? Let me give you my own words rather than a summary of them. At Finsbury Chapel in London, in May of 1846, I took care to define slavery precisely, because I had seen the word stretched until it lost its horror. As I said that evening, “Slavery in the United States is the granting of that power by which one man exercises and enforces a right of property in the body and soul of another” The slave is not a person in the eyes of the law — he is a commodity, bought and sold at a master's whim. I also insisted that slavery could not survive honest examination. Speaking to a British audience, I argued that “Slavery is one of those monsters of darkness to whom the light of truth is death” That is why slaveholders demanded silence above all else — not defense of the institution, simply silence. My weapon against them was exposure. And I never forgot what slavery does to the human spirit. I wrote in My Bondage and My Freedom that I felt bound by “the prayers, and tears, and entreaties of three millions of kneeling bondsmen, to have no compromise with men who are in any shape or form connected with the slaveholders of America” Every word I ever spoke or wrote was aimed at one end: the total, unconditional destruction of that system.