Frederick Douglass: Letter “To My Old Master”

Glossary

• brute animal
• chattel slave
• helpmeet partner, in all senses; typically used to describe a spouse
• live at service work as a maid or other domestic servant
• took the morning tide at the flood took a particularly convenient opportunity when it arose
• the vocabulary of the damned would not afford a word sufficiently infernal even people in hell could not imagine a word so horrible
• with a view to filling your own ever-hungry purse with the idea of satisfying your bottomless greed
• Wm. Lloyd Garrison American social reformer William Lloyd Garrison (1805–1879), who was publisher of the Liberator, a leading abolitionist periodical