Frederick Douglass

The people were more enlightened and had made more progress than their leaders had supposed.

Whatever of good or ill the future may have in store for me, the past at least is secure.

I believed I should get enough to eat at Covey’s, even if I suffered in other respects, and this to a hungry man is not a prospect to be regarded with indifference.

I replied that there must be two sides to the relation of master and slave, and what was deemed kind and just to the one was the opposite to the other.

I was called forward, and responded with all the energy of my soul, for I looked upon suffrage to the negro as the only measure which could prevent him from being thrust back into slavery.

In addition to the justice of the measure, it was soon commended by events as a political necessity.

The adoption of the fourteenth and fifteenth amendments and their incorporation into the Constitution of the United States opened a very tempting field to my ambition, and one to which I should probably have yielded, had I been a younger…

That I did not yield to this temptation was not entirely due to my age; for the idea did not square well with my better judgment and sense of propriety.

Upon the whole, I have never regretted that I did not enter the arena of Congressional honors to which I was invited.

I had an audience ready made in the free States; one which the labors of thirty years had prepared for me, and before this audience the freedmen of the South needed an advocate as much as they needed a member of Congress.

The fact is, and all investigation shows it, that I was married to a corpse.

Freeland, irreligious though he was, it must be stated that he was the best master I ever had until I became my own master and assumed for myself, as I had a right to do, the responsibility of my own existence and the exercise of my own…