"Douglass' quest to create the hated enemy of the Union cause reflects a long-standing psychological need of his own. We must remember that he spent twenty-seven years of his life either as a slave or a fugitive slave; his sense of self-determination took its departure from his slave origins as the child of a black mother and her white master. He was both a reflection of the system into which he was born and its greatest contradiction. Slavery never received a more eloquent indictment than in Douglass' autobiographies, editorials, and speeches. He knew slavery as a system rooted in dehumanization and violence, and he knew from experience that slaves were both desired and despised. Slavery, in his view, required hatred and force in order to survive. It had taught him a great deal about the uses of violence, and it had taught him how to hate. (p. 88)"