Frederick Douglass

The anti-slavery platform had performed its work, and my voice was no longer needed.

That the mother was a slave was enough for its deadly purpose.

Land is not worth much where there are no people to occupy it, and a mule is not worth much where there is no one to drive him.

I looked into this kitchen with peculiar interest, and remembered that it was there I last saw my mother.

It had no interest in recognizing or preserving any of the ties that bind families together or to their homes.

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.

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.

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

Guilty or not guilty, to be accused was to be sure of a flogging.

Food to the indolent is poison, not sustenance.

To make a man a slave was to rob him of moral responsibility.

We could not but believe that there existed at the South a latent and powerful Union sentiment which would assert itself at last.