There is nothing more evil
in this world than slavery,
and I will not rest until this
evil is brought to an end.
Frederick Douglass
to pick the seeds out of just one
piece of cotton. Not very many
people grew cotton, because it took
too long to pick out the seeds. But
the cotton gin could clean all the
seeds out of a piece of cotton in
seconds. People could clean the
seeds out of cotton hundreds of
times faster than before. After the
cotton gin was invented, almost
everybody in the South started
growing cotton. People in other
This evil all started with
the cotton gin. Without
the cotton gin, slavery
wouldn’t have been
profitable, and it would
have just died out. But
thanks to Eli Whitney, the
inventor of the cotton gin,
slavery lives on. You see,
before the cotton gin was
invented, a person had to
spend about half an hour
cotton gin
countries like England and France bought a lot of the cotton, and now
that it was easy to clean the seeds, farmers could make a lot of money
growing cotton. Unfortunately, it takes a lot of work to plant and pick
cotton, and who did many farmers in the South use to plant and pick
their cotton? That’s right: slaves. And so because of the cotton gin,
slavery became a lot more popular in the South.
I was one of those slaves. I’ve worked in the city and I’ve worked on
those terrible cotton plantations. I’ve been beaten, whipped, and
tortured. When I was a young man, I decided that it was wrong of me
to accept life as a slave. I knew I had to do something to show people
that slavery was evil, so I escaped from the plantation, and ran to the
North.
I now dedicate my live to speaking out against
slavery. I have traveled all over the North, and
have even spoken in England.
Sojourner Truth
But I’m not the only one who is working to end
slavery. Sojourner Truth, like me, travels the
country speaking out against slavery. She is such
a powerful speaker that people say that if you
hear her there is no way you can ever support
slavery again.
My friend, William Lloyd
Garrison, has a newspaper, called The Liberator,
that writes only antislavery articles. Everything
article in The Liberator informs people about how
William Lloyd Garrison
terrible slavery is, and what we can do to bring it to an end.
Then there are the hundreds of people in the South who help slaves
escape on the Underground Railroad, but I’ll let my friend Harriet
Tubman tell you about that.