“I assert most unhesitatingly, that the religion of the south is a mere covering for the most horrid crimes,—a justifier of the most appalling barbarity,—a sanctifier of the most horrid frauds,—and a dark shelter under which the darkest, foulest, grossest, and most infernal deeds of slaveholders, find the strongest protection. Were I to be again reduced to the chains of slavery, next to that enslavement, I should regard being the slave of a religious master the greatest calamity that could befall me. For of all the slaveholders with whom I have ever met, religious slaveholders are the worst. I have found them to be the meanest and basest, the most cruel and cowardly, of all others.” – Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself