Frederick Douglass

His labor made him a slave, and his labor can, if he will, make him free, comfortable, and independent.

It is more to him than fire, swords, ballot-boxes, or bayonets.

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.

His iron sentences, cold and harsh, sunk like heavy weights deep into my heart, and stirred up within me a rebellion not soon to be allayed.

We (the people of the North) are a charitable people, and in the excess of this feeling we were disposed to put the very best construction upon the strange behavior of our southern brethren.

For the moment the northern lamb was transformed into a lion, and his roar was terrible.

Treason had shot its poisonous roots deeper, and had spread its death-dealing branches further than any northern calculation had covered.

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

Now he has himself, his labor, and his right to dispose of one and the other as shall best suit his own happiness.