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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: and men of this class were contemptuously called "poor white trash."
Hence I supposed that, since the non-slave-holders at the South were ignorant,
poor, and degraded as a class, the non-slave-holders at the North must be
in a similar condition. I could have landed in no part of the United States
where I should have found a more striking and gratifying contrast,
not only to life generally in the South, but in the condition of the colored
people there, than in New Bedford. I was amazed when Mr. Johnson told me
that there was nothing in the laws or constitution of Massachusetts
that would prevent a colored man from being governor of the State,
if the people should see fit to elect him. There, too, the black man's
children attended the public schools with the white man's children,
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