Frederick Douglass

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.

The key to the situation was the four million of slaves; yet the slave who loved us, was hated, and the slaveholder who hated us, was loved.

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

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

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

I wished it was possible I could remain small all my life, knowing that the sooner I grew large the shorter would be my time to remain with them.

Food to the indolent is poison, not sustenance.

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.

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

I am free to say, my dear sir, that the case looks as if the confiding colored soldiers had been betrayed into bloody hands by the very government in whose defence they were heroically fighting.