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Freedman   Listen
noun
Freedman  n.  (pl. freedmen)  A man who has been a slave, and has been set free.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Freedman" Quotes from Famous Books



... conjecture we have an instance in the conspiracy of Piso against Nero; for Scaevinus, one of the conspirators, the day before he was to kill Nero, made his will, liberated all his slaves and gave them money, and bade Milichus, his freedman, sharpen his old rusty dagger, and have bandages ready for binding up wounds. From all which preparations Milichus conjecturing what work was in hand, accused Scaevinus before Nero; whereupon Scaevinus was arrested, and with him Natalis, another of the conspirators, who the day before ...
— Discourses on the First Decade of Titus Livius • Niccolo Machiavelli

... recognized the value of talent in every field for his plans of reconstruction, made him independent of money-getting, and gave him currency among the foremost literary men of the city. He triumphed over the social prejudice against the son of a freedman, disarmed the jealousy of literary rivals, and was assured of ...
— Horace and His Influence • Grant Showerman

... muttered Clodius to himself, as he sauntered slowly away. 'He thinks with his feasts and his wine-cellars to make us forget that he is the son of a freedman—and so we will, when we do him the honour of winning his money; these rich plebeians are a harvest ...
— The Last Days of Pompeii • Edward George Bulwer-Lytton

... clients there were actual slaves, who were the property of their masters, and could be bought or sold at pleasure. Sometimes a slave was freed, and then he was called a LIBERTUS (freedman) and became the client of his ...
— History of Rome from the Earliest times down to 476 AD • Robert F. Pennell

... Rome during the reigns of Valerian and Gallienus were the Franks, the Alemanni, and the Goths, whose action finally decided the conquest of the Rhenish provinces of Rome. The name Frank, or Freedman, was given to a confederacy formed in A.D. 240 by the old inhabitants of the Lower Rhine and the Weser. It consisted of the Chauci, the Cherusci, and the Chatti, and of several other tribes of greater or less ...
— Hero Tales and Legends of the Rhine • Lewis Spence

... great life-work was finished, Mr. Garrison abated no activity in the various reforms in which he had enlisted. Both with voice and pen he reached a wider and more attentive public, pleading for justice to the freedman, for the legal emancipation of women, the right of the Chinese to free immigration and Christian treatment, freedom of trade (for he early eschewed his youthful belief in the protective system), ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 6 of 8 • Various

... life, was now deserted. Nero wandered through its empty chambers, and found only solitude and gloom. Conscience awoke in his seared heart, and he was filled with horror and remorse. Of all his late crowd of courtiers only three friends now remained with him,—Sporus, a servant; Phaon, a freedman; ...
— Historic Tales, Volume 11 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris

... has not yet found peace from its sins; the freedman has not yet found in freedom his promised land. Whatever of good may have come in these years of change, the shadow of a deep disappointment rests upon the Negro people,—a disappointment all the more bitter because the unattained ideal was unbounded save by the simple ...
— The Souls of Black Folk • W. E. B. Du Bois

... which is produced by fortune or by law, is always succeeded by an imaginary inequality which is implanted in the manners of the people. Nevertheless, this secondary consequence of slavery was limited to a certain term among the ancients; for the freedman bore so entire a resemblance to those born free, that it soon became impossible to ...
— American Institutions and Their Influence • Alexis de Tocqueville et al

... far exceeding any thing even in the municipal annals of New-York. The gentle freedom might need a bureau, but it certainly was not essential to his happiness to have General HOWARD enriched by managing it. Mrs. HOWARD was not a freedman. The idea was absurd. The other members of General HOWARD'S family were not freedmen. Neither were General HOWARD'S staff. Neither were any of the people who had benefited by ...
— Punchinello, Vol.1, No. 4, April 23, 1870 • Various

... of civilization, rogues though he knew them to be in his time; he mourns, albeit with an apology, over the death of a slave; his slaves evidently are attached to him, and are faithful to him at the last; he writes to his favourite freedman with all the warmth of equal friendship. In his writings—in the "De Legibus," for instance—you will find principles of humanity far more comprehensive than those by which the policy of the empire was moulded. ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith

... preference for "white government." The negroes have suffered the more because they have not resisted and defended themselves; now they have begun to convince those who have persecuted them that, if they will not strike back, they can and will run away. No one who is at all familiar with the freedman can doubt that the abridgment of his political rights has been one of the main causes of the exodus. Voting is widely regarded at the North as a disagreeable duty, but the negro looks upon it as the highest ...
— The Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, 1995, Memorial Issue • Various

... in the party spread with the rapidity of a rising thunder cloud. On February 6 Congress passed the Freedman's Bureau Bill, designed to aid helpless negroes, which the President vetoed. A month later his treatment of the Civil Rights Bill, which set in motion the necessary machinery to enforce the Thirteenth Amendment, shattered the confidence of the party. "Surely," declared Senator Trumbull ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander

... and by the woods I come upon their snares, dead-falls, and rud box-traps. The freedman is a successful trapper and hunter, and has by nature an insight into these things. I frequently see him in market or on his way thither with a tame 'possum clinging timidly to his shoulders, or a young coon or fox led by a chain. Indeed, ...
— Winter Sunshine • John Burroughs

... among the Quality. Zeokinizul stood viewing them, but his Hour was come. Love waited for him under a Mask, and she who wore it was now going to let this mischievous Deity fly into Zeokinizul's Heart. She was a young Woman, of a brown Complexion, lately married to a freedman, who having deserv'd his Master's Favour by nocturnal Services, had, together with his Liberty, obtained a Post among those who robb'd the Prince, and plunder'd the People. They are called Omeriserufs, or Rogues of the second Class. She, whom Love had already ...
— The Amours of Zeokinizul, King of the Kofirans - Translated from the Arabic of the famous Traveller Krinelbol • Claude Prosper Jolyot de Crbillon

... fought for any other cause, the task of reconstruction would, without him, have been comparatively simple. With him, however, reconstruction meant more than the restoring of shattered resources; it meant the more or less successful attempt to obtain and secure for the freedman civil and political rights, and to improve his economic and social status. In 1861, the American Negro was everywhere an inferior, and most of his race were slaves; in 1865, he was no longer a slave, but whether he was to be serf, ward, ...
— The Sequel of Appomattox - A Chronicle of the Reunion of the States, Volume 32 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Walter Lynwood Fleming

... passed on, and every night found Cleopatra with fewer friends than that which had gone before, for in evil days friends fly like swallows before the frost. Yet she would not give up Antony, whom she loved; though to my knowledge Caesar, by his freedman, Thyreus, made promise to her of her dominions for herself and for her children if she would but slay Antony, or even betray him bound. But to this her woman's heart—for still she had a heart—would not consent, and, moreover, ...
— Cleopatra • H. Rider Haggard

... courage, O my mariners! Ye shall not suffer wreck, While up to God the freedman's prayers Are rising from ...
— The Universal Reciter - 81 Choice Pieces of Rare Poetical Gems • Various

... which he had an interest, while his hope of revenge on Chunk, Scoville and Miss Lou also tended to keep him at a post which he foresaw would be one of difficulty and danger. He had no doubt that the Union officer and his freedman would return as soon as they could, and for the chance of wreaking his vengeance he was the more willing to remain in what he feared would be a spook-infested region. "Onst squar with them, en crops realized," he muttered, ...
— Miss Lou • E. P. Roe

... onward sweeps the goblin train, and again and again the same scene is enacted, the victim now a poor white, and now a freedman. ...
— Elsie's Motherhood • Martha Finley

... light? For not all know Christ. Most assuredly He illumines, so far as He is concerned.... For grace is poured out over all. It flees or despises no one, be he Jew, Greek, barbarian or Scythian, freedman or slave, man or woman, old or young. It is the same for all, easily attainable by all, it calls upon all with equal regard. As for those who neglect to make use of this gift, they should ...
— Grace, Actual and Habitual • Joseph Pohle

... the uttermost end of China-land and from among the Islands, and I will tell thee of a wonderful thing I have seen this night. If thou kind my words true, let me wend my way and write me a patent under thy hand and with thy sign manual that I am thy freedman, so none of the Jinn-hosts, whether of the upper who fly or of the lower who walk the earth or of those who dive beneath the waters, do me let or hindrance." Rejoined Maymunah, "And what is it thou hast seen this night, O liar, O accursed! Tell me ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton

... a freedman (libertus) shall have died intestate without self-successor, [his] patron (patronus) shall take the inheritance of a Roman citizen-freedman ... from ...
— The Twelve Tables • Anonymous

... they give now were given in 1870. They had what they called the Freedman's Bureau. They used to have what they called the LICK SKILLET on Spring Street from Fifth to Seventh. Leastwise, the colored people called it that. Bush and a lots of other big niggers used to go there and get free lodgings until they were able to get along alone without help. The ...
— Slave Narratives: Arkansas Narratives - Arkansas Narratives, Part 6 • Works Projects Administration

... a style so near akin to that of his master in literature. Scholars who have studied the words can probably tell us of deficiencies in language; but the easy, graphic tone is to my ear Ciceronian. Tiro, who was slave, secretary, freedman, and then literary executor, may have had the handling of these letters, and have done something toward producing their literary excellence. The subjects selected were not always good, and must occasionally have produced in Cicero's ...
— The Life of Cicero - Volume II. • Anthony Trollope

... a freedman: I should soon be off to the Lake myself! I am sick of working for the Company. I did not mind it when they set me to haul meat from the hunters, or to trap furs for them, but now they make me saw wood, or help the blacksmith at ...
— Owindia • Charlotte Selina Bompas

... that many women do not desire the suffrage and that some would not exercise it. It is probably true, as often claimed, that many slaves did not desire emancipation in 1863—and there are men in most communities who do not vote, but we hear of no freedman to-day who asks re-enslavement, and no proposition is offered to disfranchise all men because some ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various

... history of his life from his fortieth year. Among those addressed to his friends, some occur from Brutus, Metellus, Plancius, Caelius, and others. For the preservation of this most valuable department of Cicero's writings, we are indebted to Tyro, the author's freedman, though we possess, at the present day, but a part of those originally published. As his correspondence with his friends belongs to his character as a man and politician, rather than to his literary aspect, we have already noticed it in the first ...
— Historical Sketches, Volume I (of 3) • John Henry Newman

... people with something wholly cheerful." The entire edition was exhausted during the holiday season; 4,000 copies were sold and more called for. All her profits on the book, she devoted to the freedmen, sending $400 as a first instalment. Not only that, but she prepared a volume called "The Freedman's Book," which she printed at an expense of $600, and distributed among the freedmen 1200 copies at her own cost. She once sent Wendell Phillips a check of $100 for the freedmen, and when he protested ...
— Daughters of the Puritans - A Group of Brief Biographies • Seth Curtis Beach

... 20th, was a pleasant Sabbath. I attended a large meeting, and listened to a very interesting discourse by a freedman. At the close he earnestly exhorted his hearers to purity of life in their new freedom. He wanted to see all filthy habits left behind with bondage. "Do not let us take with us," he said, "any habit ...
— A Woman's Life-Work - Labors and Experiences • Laura S. Haviland

... said, "at first they were far worse off than befo' because the Freedman's Bureau an' the carpet-baggers made trouble right an' lef'. The No'th had a fine chance, but the carpet-baggers were jes' blind to everythin' excep' the negro, an' the po' white was jes' as shabbily treated by the No'th as he had be'n by the South. ...
— The Boy With the U.S. Census • Francis Rolt-Wheeler

... is still necessary for the freedman of the spirit. Much of the prison and the mould still remaineth in him: pure hath his ...
— Thus Spake Zarathustra - A Book for All and None • Friedrich Nietzsche

... Since another)—Ver. 5. He probably refers to Aesop: though Heinsius thinks that he refers to C. Mecaenas Melissus, mentioned by Ovid, in his Pontic Epistles, B. iv., El. xvi., l. 30, a freedman of Mecaenas, who compiled a book of jests partly from the works of Aesop. ...
— The Fables of Phdrus - Literally translated into English prose with notes • Phaedrus

... is illegal, and a slave will not step aside to let you pass him in the street. I will explain the reason of this peculiar custom. Supposing it were legal for a slave to be beaten by a free citizen, or for a resident alien or freedman to be beaten by a citizen, it would frequently happen that an Athenian might be mistaken for a slave or an alien and receive a beating; since the Athenian People is no better clothed than the slave or alien, nor in personal appearance is there any superiority. Or ...
— The Polity of the Athenians and the Lacedaemonians • Xenophon

... fulfilment of vows, had consecrated, in times of prosperity, or in seasons of dismay. Through Greece and Asia, indeed, the gifts and oblations, and even the statues of the deities were carried off; Acratus and Secundus Carinas being sent into those provinces for the purpose: the former, Nero's freedman, a prompt instrument in any iniquity; the other, acquainted with Greek learning, as far as relates to lip-knowledge, but unadorned with virtuous accomplishments. Of Seneca it was reported, "that to avert from himself the odium of this sacrilege, he prayed to retire ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to prose. Volume II (of X) - Rome • Various

... floodgates, once open, can never be shut again. A set of men once armed with the vote cannot be deprived of it: and all the efforts of Know-nothing movements will probably be vain, whether directed against the freedman, the Chinaman, or the European emigrant. The only way to meet the evils which accompany universal suffrage is by paths of education, and the creation of a pure ...
— The Nation in a Nutshell • George Makepeace Towle

... to call the attention of the Congress to a plain duty which the Government owes to the depositors in the Freedman's ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 3 (of 3) of Volume 8: Grover Cleveland, First Term. • Grover Cleveland

... setting free every slave about Teackle Hall and on the farms, with the approval of her father and husband also, and Roxy became the wife of Whatcoat, the rescued freedman, and the replacer, at her mistress's side, of poor Virgie, whose body was brought home and interred by the church where she had been her white sister's bridesmaid. The grief of Vesta for Virgie was quiet, but long, and as that of an equal, ...
— The Entailed Hat - Or, Patty Cannon's Times • George Alfred Townsend

... those who were to be done away, and he was murdered in the year 43 B.C., at 63 years of age. The correspondence of the great Roman advocate, statesman, and man of letters, preserved for us by the care of his freedman Tiro, is the richest and most interesting collection of its kind in the world's archives. The many-sided personality of their writer, his literary charm, the frankness with which he set down his opinions, hopes, and anxieties, ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IX. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton

... of Enobarbus or of Eros, the fugitive once ruined by his flight and again redeemed by the death-agony of his dark and doomed repentance, or the freedman transfigured by a death more fair than freedom through the glory of the greatness of his faith: for who can speak of all things or of half that are in Shakespeare? And who can ...
— A Study of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne

... your time of visitation! I tell you that I am about to die, and yet I mock you! You Heaven God and Apis! with death staring me in the face—I tell you, I would rather be a bondsman in hell than a freedman in your mansions! I tell you, I am filled with a blissful contempt for your divine paltriness; and I choose the abyss of destruction for a perpetual resort, where the devils Judas and Pharaoh ...
— Hunger • Knut Hamsun

... of the fourth act, when the freedman Milichus discloses Piso's conspiracy, Nero's trepidation is well depicted. It is curious that among the conspirators the author should not have introduced the dauntless woman, Epicharis, who refused under the most cruel ...
— Old English Plays, Vol. I - A Collection of Old English Plays • Various

... different authors. Augustus himself, however, tells us nothing more than that he was descended of an equestrian family, both ancient and rich, of which his father was the first who obtained the rank of senator. Mark Antony upbraidingly tells him that his great-grandfather was a freedman of the territory of Thurium [107], and a rope-maker, and his grandfather a usurer. This is all the information I have any where met with, respecting the ancestors of ...
— The Lives Of The Twelve Caesars, Complete - To Which Are Added, His Lives Of The Grammarians, Rhetoricians, And Poets • C. Suetonius Tranquillus

... is obviously a gloss on this. He means Mercury.] of the gods laid a hand on him, and led him across the Campus Martius, first wrapping his head up close that no one might know him, until betwixt Tiber and the Subway he went down to the lower regions. [Footnote: By the Cloaca?] His freedman Narcissus had gone down before him by a short cut, ready to welcome his master. Out he comes to meet him, smooth and shining (he had just left the bath), and says he: "What make the gods among mortals?" "Look alive," says Mercury, "go and tell them we are coming." Away he flew, ...
— Apocolocyntosis • Lucius Seneca

... placing implicit confidence in what is stated in the Annals. He says that "the same Josephus is, nevertheless, guilty of an evident mistake when he asserts that Cumanus was convicted in Rome, and that Claudius thence sent to Judaea the brother of his freedman Pallas,—Felix; for Felix was sent along with Cumanus to that province, which was so divided between them, that Felix ruled Samaria, but Cumanus the remainder of the province":—"Sed patentis erroris nihilominus idem Josephus arguitur, ...
— Tacitus and Bracciolini - The Annals Forged in the XVth Century • John Wilson Ross

... in many other massages of his Lives, the Greek biographer has evidently aimed at creating an effect, and though he seems to have been mainly guided by the genuine narrative of Tiro, Cicero's beloved freedman, we may suspect him of having embellished it to furnish a striking termination to one of his favorite sketches. Nevertheless the narrative is mainly confirmed by a fragment of Livy's history, which ...
— The International Monthly Magazine - Volume V - No II • Various

... 'you shall not acquire the freedman's peculium; you shall remain a slave, dragging your chain behind you; your peal of bells ...
— The Life of the Fly - With Which are Interspersed Some Chapters of Autobiography • J. Henri Fabre

... related of Al Amin, the Khalif of Bagdad, that he was engaged at chess with his freedman Kuthar, at the time when Al Manim's forces were carrying on the siege of that city, with so much vigour, that it was on the point of being carried by assault. The Khalif, when warned of his danger, cried out, "Let me alone, for I see Checkmate ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 17, No. 471, Saturday, January 15, 1831 • Various

... remembered the grand line of the African freedman, that makes all human interests everybody's business, and had a sudden sense of dilatation and evolution, as it were, in all his dimensions, as if he were a head taller, and a foot bigger round the chest, ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)

... this point, probably, where the first idea of a "Freedman's Bureau" took its origin. Orders of the government prohibited the expulsion of the negroes from the protection of the army, when they came in voluntarily. Humanity forbade allowing them to starve. With such an army of them, of all ages and both sexes, as had congregated about Grand ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan

... earnest, good man seeking to do right. Henry takes the ground that it is unwise and impolitic to endeavor to force negro suffrage on the South at the point of the bayonet. His policy would be, to hold over the negro the protection of our Freedman's Bureau until the great laws of free labor shall begin to draw the master and servant together; to endeavor to soothe and conciliate, and win to act with us, a party composed of the really good men ...
— The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe • Charles Edward Stowe

... public legal act—such as in the making of a testament, in an action at law, or in the census—expressly or tacitly surrendered his -dominium-, neither he himself nor his lawful successors should ever have power arbitrarily to recall that resignation or reassert a claim to the person of the freedman himself or of his descendants. The clients and their posterity did not by virtue of their position possess either the rights of burgesses or those of guests: for to constitute a burgess a formal bestowal of the privilege was requisite on the part of the community, while the relation of guest ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen

... which we have any knowledge are those which were promulgated about 1016 by Canute, the Dane, and probably much the same as had existed for a long period previously. The principal points of their tyrannical laws were, that if a freedman offered violence to a keeper of the King's deer, he was liable to lose his freedom and property; if a serf did the same, he lost his right hand; if the offence was repeated, he paid the penalty with his life. For killing a deer, either ...
— Bygone Punishments • William Andrews

... to the feudal superior, the obligation to assist in endowing his daughter and equipping his son, the liability to his guardianship in minority, and many other similar incidents of tenure, must have been literally borrowed from the relations of Patron and Freedman under Roman law, that is, of quondam-master and quondam-slave. But then it is known that the earliest beneficiaries were the personal companions of the sovereign, and it is indisputable that this position, brilliant as it seems, was at first attended by some ...
— Ancient Law - Its Connection to the History of Early Society • Sir Henry James Sumner Maine

... subsequently the body-servant of Lerma, he had been created by that minister secretary of the privy council. He possessed some of the virtues of the slave, such as docility and attachment to the hand that had fed and scourged him, and many vices of both slave and freedman. He did much of the work which it would have been difficult for the duke to accomplish in person, received his fees, sold and dispensed his interviews, distributed his bribes. In so doing, as might be supposed, he did not neglect his own interest. ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley

... the basest disowning of flattery is to be disagreeable without any purpose in view, and it shows an altogether inelegant and clumsy unfitness for social intercourse to shun by unpleasing moroseness the suspicion of being mean and servile in friendship; like the freedman in the comedy who thought railing only enjoying freedom of speech. Seeing then, that it is equally disgraceful to become a flatterer through trying only to please, as in avoiding flattery to destroy all friendship and intimacy by excessive freedom of speech, we must avoid ...
— Plutarch's Morals • Plutarch

... sung by a thousand voices nor by the voices of educated Negroes. I had associated them with the Negro of the past, not with the Negro who was struggling upward. They brought to my mind the plantation, the cabin, the slave, not the freedman in quest of education. But on the plantation and in the cabin they had never been sung as these thousand students sang them. I saw again all the old plantations that I had ever seen; the whole history of the Negro ran through my mind; and the inexpressible pathos ...
— Up From Slavery: An Autobiography • Booker T. Washington

... whom Lucan calls infaustus Magni comes (or according to Plutarch Philippus the faithful freedman of Pompeius), finds the cast-up body of Pompeius and gives ...
— Helps to Latin Translation at Sight • Edmund Luce

... freedom, and with it a certain amount of money, and a dwelling-place where his land joined with Hoskuld's. [Sidenote: Hrut's quarrel with Thorliek] And it lay so near the landmark that Hrut's people had made a mistake in the matter, and settled the freedman down on the land belonging to Hoskuld. He soon gained there much wealth. Hoskuld took it very much to heart that Hrut should have placed his freedman right up against his ear, and bade the freedman pay him money for the lands he lived on "for it is mine own." The freedman went to Hrut and told ...
— Laxdaela Saga - Translated from the Icelandic • Anonymous

... hard-faced statesmen or lawyers; war-worn, cruel-looking captains; dissolute youths with foppish dress and perfumed hair, and shuddering, wondered whether she was appointed to any one of these. Or was it, perhaps, to that rich and greasy tradesman, or to yon low-born freedman with a cunning leer? She knew not, God alone knew, and in Him must be ...
— Pearl-Maiden • H. Rider Haggard

... 1863, the Port Royal Relief Committee was enlarged into the Pennsylvania Freedman's Relief Association, Mr. McKim was made its corresponding secretary. He had previously resigned his place in the Anti-slavery Society, believing that that organization was near the end ...
— The Underground Railroad • William Still

... another or intermarry. Napoleon constructing a galaxy of generals and courtiers, and even of monarchs, out of his collection of social nobodies; Julius Caesar appointing as governor of Egypt the son of a freedman—one who but a short time before would have been legally disqualified for the post even of a private soldier in the Roman army; Louis XI making his barber his privy councillor: all these had in their different ways a firm hold of the scientific fact of human equality, expressed by Barbara ...
— Bernard Shaw's Preface to Major Barbara • George Bernard Shaw

... me what I know already," said Einar, who was rather red, and showed a frown. "My own birth is no such thing. My father was a freedman. ...
— Gudrid the Fair - A Tale of the Discovery of America • Maurice Hewlett

... the young man with a smile—"a sorry soldier wouldst thou make of me, who am within so short a space to meet the savages of Pontus, under our mighty Pompey! There is no danger, Julia, here in the heart of Rome; and my stout freedman Thrasea awaits me with his torch. Nor is it so far either to my house, for those who cross, as I shall do, the cemetery on the Esquiline. 'Tis but a step across the ...
— The Roman Traitor (Vol. 1 of 2) • Henry William Herbert

... as fixed as the laws of the Medes and Persians, and believed so heartily in the right of all sexes, colours, creeds, and ranks to education, that there was room for everyone who knocked, and a welcome to the shabby youths from up country, the eager girls from the West, the awkward freedman or woman from the South, or the well-born student whose poverty made this college a possibility when other doors were barred. There still was prejudice, ridicule, neglect in high places, and prophecies of failure to contend against; but the Faculty was composed of cheerful, hopeful ...
— Jo's Boys • Louisa May Alcott

... Nicodemus, the freedman, one-eyed, short, immensely broad, beetle-browed, and grizzled, stood in the door of his wine-shop and watched the crowding press of travellers at the marsh-ford, fore-runners of the throng which nightly descended upon Thorney. Behind him, in the dim recesses of the smoky shop, his ...
— Nicanor - Teller of Tales - A Story of Roman Britain • C. Bryson Taylor

... same persons, but with this difference in the idea: libertusthe freedman of some particular master, libertinusone in the condition of a freedman without reference to any master. At the time of the Decemvirate, and for some time after, libertiemancipated slaves, libertinithe descendants of ...
— Germania and Agricola • Caius Cornelius Tacitus

... Government, such compensation as may seem fair to both parties; that the money necessary to pay the amounts awarded shall be advanced by the Government; that the sum adjudged to be paid for manumission shall remain in whole or in part, as may be determined in Council, a debt from the freedman to the State, which he shall be bound to repay by a deduction of a portion of his wages for labor on the public works of the country, which he must continue until his debt is cleared off, should he be ...
— The Golden Chersonese and the Way Thither • Isabella L. Bird (Mrs. Bishop)

... on the throne; but hardly had they done this, when lo and behold! there arose a dust-cloud terrifying and some huge thing came flying and crying, "Spare me, O King's son, and slay me not; but make me thy freedman, and I will bring thee to thy desire!" Quoth Daulat Khatun, "The Jinni cometh; slay the sparrow, lest this accursed enter the palace and take it from thee and slaughter me and slaughter thee after me." So the Prince wrung the sparrow's ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 7 • Richard F. Burton

... as a pleader in the courts, the one philosophic orator of Rome, as he not unjustly boasts[12]. For two years he was busily engaged, and then suddenly left Rome for a tour in Eastern Hellas. It is usually supposed that he came into collision with Sulla through the freedman Chrysogonus, who was implicated in the case of Roscius. The silence of Cicero is enough to condemn this theory, which rests on no better evidence than that of Plutarch. Cicero himself, even when mentioning his speech in defence of Roscius, never assigns any other ...
— Academica • Marcus Tullius Cicero

... Maecenas, none, though ne'er so blue His Tusco-Lydian blood, surpasses you? What if your grandfathers, on either hand, Father's and mother's, were in high command? Not therefore do you curl the lip of scorn At nobodies, like me, of freedman born: Far other rule is yours, of rank or birth To raise no question, so there be but worth, Convinced, and truly too, that wights unknown, Ere Servius' rise set freedmen on the throne, Despite their ancestors, not seldom came To high employment, honours, ...
— The Satires, Epistles, and Art of Poetry • Horace

... emperor removed all restrictions between freedmen and citizens. Previously, after the emancipation of a slave, he was bound to render certain services to his former master as patron, and if the freedman died intestate his property reverted ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord

... Sen. My freedman, coming home at grey of dawn, Saw a strange ship unload her merchandise, And one bale chanced to fall, and from it came Groanings and drops ...
— Gycia - A Tragedy in Five Acts • Lewis Morris

... strange combination, yet one which may be seen every day, and which when made free and permitted to exert its unrestrained power, will be of unmeasured value. The mulatto makes a very bad slave, Anglo-Saxon blood being never intended to run in the veins of a voluntary bondman, but will be a noble freedman. ...
— The Future of the Colored Race in America • William Aikman

... Cephas, an old freedman of Edwards, drove the chaise up to the side door, and a few bundles having been put into the vehicle, Desire herself entered, and was ...
— The Duke of Stockbridge • Edward Bellamy

... do not desire to sell myself. Diomed's daughter is handsome, I grant; and at one time, had she not been the grandchild of a freedman, I might have—yet, no—she carries all her beauty in her face; her manners are not maiden-like, and her mind knows no culture save ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol VI. • Various

... Claudius was adding new letters to the alphabet, Messalina was parading with utter shamelessness her last and fatal passion for Silius, and went so far as publicly to marry her paramour. It was the freedman Narcissus who made the outrageous truth known to Claudius, and practically terrorised him into striking. Half measures were impossible; a swarm of Messalina's accomplices in vice were put to death. To ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XI. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton

... to be sold for the crime of being out of work. Their old masters were to have the preference in the purchase. So the whole Republican Party of the North came to be united in the belief that there could be no security for the liberty of the freedman ...
— Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2 • George Hoar

... majority of the agents of the Bureau, advised the freedmen that by their industry they must expect to live. To this end they endeavor to secure employment for them: to see that both contracting parties comply with their agreements. In some instances; I am sorry to say, the freedman's mind does not seem to be disabused of the idea that a freedman has a right to live without care or provision for the future. The effect of the belief in the division of lands is idleness and accumulation in camps, towns, and cities. In ...
— History of the Impeachment of Andrew Johnson, • Edumud G. Ross

... long period of involuntary servitude, deserving of recompense of every kind that the nation could bestow. As to his mental capacity, the North believed that in order to rise from his degraded state and to take his place among the races of civilized men the freedman awaited only the same means of education that the Anglo-Saxon for centuries had enjoyed. Whatever may be the judgment of history concerning these two conflicting views, it is clear that the South had neither the inclination nor the means ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 3, 1918 • Various

... freedman knew exactly how to begin anew and it was some time before affairs emerged from the chaotic state into which the war had plunged them. The average planter had little or no faith in free negro labor, yet all who were now able were willing to give it a trial. ...
— History and Comprehensive Description of Loudoun County, Virginia • James W. Head

... years past, there lived a worthy couple, freedman and freedwoman of Vedius Vindex. The husband died more than a year ago, leaving a young and childless widow, named Greia Posis, possessed of a good town-house and of three small farms not far out in the country. Naturally as she was comely and well-off, Greia ...
— Andivius Hedulio • Edward Lucas White

... civil law is extended and sustained. Perplexing questions were naturally to be expected from the great and sudden change in the relations between the two races, but systems are gradually developing themselves under which the freedman will receive the protection to which he is justly entitled, and, by means of his labor, make himself a useful and independent member of the community in which he has his home. From all the information in my possession, and from that which I have recently derived from the most reliable authority, ...
— Report on the Condition of the South • Carl Schurz

... in the handsome house formerly occupied when her husband was living on the same street where Aurelius Lucanus dwelt, preferring to leave it in charge of her freedman and his wife, who had served her family for many years. She occupied a villa about two miles from the city gates, where there were immense vineyards, festooned between mulberry trees. The vines were now hung with great purple clusters of grapes, promises of luscious fruits a little later, when ...
— Virgilia - or, Out of the Lion's Mouth • Felicia Buttz Clark

... possible in literature, history, rhetoric, dialectic, and court procedure, and to attract public notice for election purposes by taking a few cases. It was not every citizen who dared enter such a career. This was the one occupation that the nobility guarded most jealously. While any foreigner or freedman might become a doctor, banker, architect or merchant prince, he could not presume to stand up before a praetor to discuss the rights and wrongs of Roman citizens; and since the advocate's work was furthermore considered the ...
— Vergil - A Biography • Tenney Frank

... indeed if recent events in New York have not taught it to doubt whether the tender mercies of the Abolitionists are so gentle, after all. While things are so (and there is scant hope of their changing within many generations) the position of the black freedman in the North will never be much higher than that of the Chinese in California, where a scintilla of civil rights is the utmost that the unhappy aliens can claim. In the South, I do greatly fear, there is no alternative between suppression ...
— Border and Bastille • George A. Lawrence

... never to be lost sight of in a contest for liberty: and, with white officers and a majority of white soldiers, no imaginable danger could be feared from themselves, as there certainly could be none from the effect of the example on those who should remain in bondage; experience having shown that a freedman immediately loses all attachment and sympathy ...
— History of the Negro Race in America From 1619 to 1880. Vol 1 - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George W. Williams

... bright and chill, First freedman from the summer sun! Spice high the bowl, and drink your fill! Thank heaven, ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 3 (of 4) • Various

... sank: he even felt a sort of dread. Tchertop-hanov put the horse in its old place, gave him a light pat on the back, and said, 'There! now you're at home again; and mind what you're about.' The same day he hired a freedman out of work as watchman, established himself again in his rooms, and began living ...
— A Sportsman's Sketches - Volume II • Ivan Turgenev

... the South; the Ku Klux Klan.%—Grant and Colfax began their term of office on March 4, 1869, and soon found that the reconstruction policy of Congress had not been so successful as they could wish, and that the work of protecting the freedman in the exercise of his new rights was not yet completed. Three states (Virginia, Mississippi, and Texas) had not yet complied with the conditions imposed by Congress, and were still refused seats ...
— A School History of the United States • John Bach McMaster

... the Freedman's Commission, was most enthusiastic in the work of the Loyal League, and came to our rooms frequently to suggest new modes of agitation and to give us an inkling of what was going on behind the scenes in Washington. ...
— Eighty Years And More; Reminiscences 1815-1897 • Elizabeth Cady Stanton

... liberated,—a Gaul or German whom Caesar had captured as a child in one of his expeditions and later freed, because of his consummate administrative ability. It appears, however, that, for the Gauls at least, this ability was even too great. In a curious chapter Dion tells us that Licinius, this freedman, uniting the avarice of a barbarian to the pretences of a Roman, beat down everyone that seemed greater than he; oppressed all those who seemed to have more power; extorted enormous sums from all, were they to fill out the dues of his office, or to enrich himself ...
— Characters and events of Roman History • Guglielmo Ferrero

... a poor fellow who had been five years in chains. The travellers took compassion on him, and released him from bondage. His chains were struck off with a hammer, and, once on his feet, a freedman, he seemed scarcely to believe the fact; when, however, attired in a clean calico shirt, he strutted about and soon came to make his new master his best bow. On his body were numerous spear-wounds. He had been captured by the Watuta, who had cut off several of his ...
— Great African Travellers - From Mungo Park to Livingstone and Stanley • W.H.G. Kingston

... would have proved an obstacle in the way of a good speech really helped me during my address. As for the Emperor, he showed me such kind attention and consideration— for it would be too much to call it anxiety on my behalf—that he frequently nodded to my freedman, who was standing just behind me, to give me a hint not to overtax my voice and lungs, when he thought that I was throwing myself too ardently into my pleading and imposing too great a burden on my slender frame. Claudius Marcellinus ...
— The Letters of the Younger Pliny - Title: The Letters of Pliny the Younger - - Series 1, Volume 1 • Pliny the Younger

... Latin writer was a Greek, Livius Andronicus, a freedman, a schoolmaster, and later an actor. The first works in Latin were translations from the Greek. Livius Andronicus had translated the Odyssey and several tragedies. The Roman people took pleasure in Greek pieces and would have no others. Even the Roman authors who wrote for the ...
— History Of Ancient Civilization • Charles Seignobos

... which he might specially excel were closed against him lest he should compete with white men. In short his liberty in all directions was so curtailed that it was a bitter mockery to refer to him in the statutes as a "freedman." The truth was, that his liberty was merely of form and not of fact, and the slavery which was abolished by the organic law of a Nation was now to be revived by the enactments ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Volume 2 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine

... Husband or wife there was not one in four millions. Not a child might call upon a father for aid, and no man of them all might lift his hand in a daughter's defence. Uncle and aunt and cousin, home, family—none of these words had any place in the freedman's vocabulary. Right he had, in the abstract; in the concrete, none. Justice would not hear his voice. The law was still color-blinded by ...
— Bricks Without Straw • Albion W. Tourgee

... a citizen of Boston, presented to the city a duplicate of the Freedman's Memorial Statue erected in Lincoln Park, Washington, D. C., after a design by Thomas Ball. The group, which stands in Park Square, represents the figure of a slave from whose limbs the broken fetters have fallen, kneeling in gratitude at the feet of Lincoln. The verses which ...
— The Poets' Lincoln - Tributes in Verse to the Martyred President • Various

... come to Columbia in 1866, I find work on houses, and building was plentiful then. I git 'long pretty well, then, 'cause if I did not land a job, I could go to de Freedman's Aid Office at Assembly and Gervais streets and git rations and a little cash for my family. After de Freedman's Aid left town I had no trouble findin' work. And soon I was pretty prosperous. I kept that way, so long as I was able to do my share ...
— Slave Narratives: a Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves • Works Projects Administration

... as preserved for us by his freedman Tiro, does not open till the thirty-ninth year of the orator's life, and is so strictly contemporary, dealing so exclusively with the affairs of the moment, that little light is thrown by it on his previous life. It does not become continuous till the year after his consulship (B.C. 62). ...
— The Letters of Cicero, Volume 1 - The Whole Extant Correspodence in Chronological Order • Marcus Tullius Cicero

... Natural liberty. The slave dealers developed tricks far surpassing those of horse dealers in modern times.[770] By enfranchisement the owner got rid of the worst worry of slavery, and tied the freedman to himself by a contract which it was for the interest of the freedman to fulfill. The owner made a crafty gain.[771] Tacitus[772] says that, in his time, the Roman people was almost entirely freedmen. If that is so, we must notice that the "people," ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner

... and that his body was consumed by the flames. Eponina herself was deceived, says Plutarch, whose story I follow, with the additions made thereto by the Comte de Champagny, the historian of Antoninus; and when Martialis the freedman told her of her husband's self-slaughter, she lay for three days and three nights on the ground, refusing all nourishment. When Sabinus heard of her grief, he took pity and caused her to know that he lived. She none the less mourned and shed floods of tears, in the daytime, when people ...
— Wisdom and Destiny • Maurice Maeterlinck

... A freedman of Caesar's, Phaon by name, ran panting into Nero's presence, shrieking: "Rome is in flames! the conflagration ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 03 • Various

... carrying the bed-covers, and the phial of poison. Then he seemed determined to put an end to his life by throwing himself from one of the bridges; but again his courage failed, and he begged to be shown a hiding-place. It was at this supreme moment that Phaon the freedman offered him his suburban villa, situated between the Via Salaria and the Via Nomentana, four miles outside the Porta Collina. The proposal was accepted at once; and barefooted, and dressed in a tunic, with a mantle of the commonest material about his shoulders, he jumped on a horse and ...
— Pagan and Christian Rome • Rodolfo Lanciani

... soon surpassed her in commercial tonnage. Every interest prospered with the prosperity of the planter of the Southern States. His class has passed away; the weeds blacken where the chaste, white cotton beautified his fields; his slave is a freedman—a constitution-maker—a ruler set up by a beastly fanaticism to control his master, and to ...
— The Memories of Fifty Years • William H. Sparks

... are behind Europeans and Americans, while the native African, converted and trained in his own land, has behind him only the few years of his own life separating him from the densest degradation of heathenism; the African born and converted in the West Indies has been a freedman only since 1840; and the American Negro was perhaps himself a slave, and his race had the shackles struck from their bodies only in 1863, while the fetters of ignorance and vice still manacle the minds and hearts of the mass. We ought not, therefore, so much to wonder at the failure of the many, ...
— The American Missionary, Volume 42, No. 12, December, 1888 • Various

... Zibeline, "you are there, General, to remind me that I am only a mortal, as Philippe's freedman reminded ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet



Words linked to "Freedman" :   freeman, freewoman



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