The white man’s happiness cannot be purchased by the black man’s misery.

Douglass’s line crystallizes a core moral and political claim of abolitionism: a society cannot build legitimate prosperity or “happiness” for one group on the coerced suffering of another. The phrasing exposes slavery (and, by extension, racial exploitation) as not merely a harm to Black people but a corruption of the nation’s ethical foundations—turning comfort into complicity. It also rejects paternalistic arguments that white security, economic gain, or social order require Black subordination. The sentence functions as an indictment and a warning: any peace purchased through injustice is unstable, because it depends on ongoing violence and denial of shared human rights.