Frederick Douglass

My strong aversion to the great farm, was not owing to my own personal suffering, but the daily suffering of others, and to the certainty that I must, sooner or later, be placed under the barbarous rule of an overseer, such as the…

The nearer are the lines of a slave state and the borders of a free one, the greater the peril.

Every slaveholder seeks to impress his slave with a belief in the boundlessness of slave territory, and of his own almost illimitable power.

My home at my old master’s was charmless to me; it was not home, but a prison to me; on parting from it, I could not feel that I was leaving anything which I could have enjoyed by staying.

I hated the secrecy; but where slavery is powerful, and liberty is weak, the latter is driven to concealment or to destruction.

LIBERTY was our aim; and we had now come to think that we had a right to liberty, against every obstacle even against the lives of our enslavers.

Without any appeal to books, to laws, or to authorities of any kind, it was enough to accept God as a father, to regard slavery as a crime.

We did not seek to overthrow them, but to escape from them.

We were plotting against our (so called) lawful rulers; with this difference that we sought our own good, and not the harm of our enemies.

Of all consciences let me have those to deal with which have not been bewildered by the cares of life.

I claim to be the instigator of the high crime (as the slaveholders regard it) and I kept life in it, until life could be kept in it no longer.

We meant to reach the north—and the north was our Canaan.