Frederick Douglass

Heavy had been his burden, hard had been his toil, bitter had been his trials, and terrible had been his anxiety; but the future seemed now bright and full of hope.

A country, redeemed and regenerated from the foulest crime against human nature that ever saw the sun!

This was a new and special revelation, dispelling a painful mystery against which my youthful understanding had struggled, and struggled in vain, to wit, the white man’s power to perpetuate the enslavement of the black man.

But, alas! what are all good and great qualities; what are human hopes and human happiness to the revengeful hand of an assassin?

My great and exceeding joy over these stupendous achievements, especially over the abolition of slavery (which had been the deepest desire and the great labor of my life), was slightly tinged with a feeling of sadness.

I felt I had reached the end of the noblest and best part of my life; my school was broken up, my church disbanded, and the beloved congregation dispersed, never to come together again.

Knowledge unfits a child to be a slave.” I instinctively assented to the proposition, and from that moment I understood the direct pathway from slavery to freedom.

Slavery had no recognition of fathers, as none of families.

The father might be a white man, glorying in the purity of his Anglo-Saxon blood, and his child ranked with the blackest slaves.

Father he might be, and not be husband, and could sell his own child without incurring reproach, if in its veins coursed one drop of African blood.

The friendless and hungry boy, in his extremest need, found himself in the strong protecting arms of his mother.

I found that the success of a lecturer depends more upon the quality of his stock in store, than the amount.