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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Collected Articles by Frederick Douglass: to protect the rights of individuals in the interior of distant States.
They must have the power to protect themselves, or they will go unprotected,
spite of all the laws the Federal government can put upon the national
statute-book.
Slavery, like all other great systems of wrong, founded in the depths
of human selfishness, and existing for ages, has not neglected its own
conservation. It has steadily exerted an influence upon all around
it favorable to its own continuance. And to-day it is so strong
that it could exist, not only without law, but even against law.
Custom, manners, morals, religion, are all on its side everywhere
in the South; and when you add the ignorance and servility
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