There are, after all, between seventy-five thousand and a hundred thousand descendants of the Ball-family slaves. If I were to begin apologizing to every one of these families, it would quickly become a meaningless act.

Before the American Revolution there were frequent slave uprisings, and a lot of people would run away.

I freed a thousand slaves I could have freed a thousand more if only they knew they were slaves.

Give me a thousand kisses, then a hundred, then a thousand more.

If you read the memoirs of slave-owning families, you'd be hard pressed to find evidence of black people in the lives of the whites, even though for most of the time on the plantations black people outnumbered whites by a ratio of seven to one.

I freed a thousand slaves I could have freed a thousand more if only they knew they were slaves.