Frederick Douglass

I had been taught that slavery was the bottom-fact of all wealth.

I had no proper idea of the wealth, refinement, enterprise, and high civilization of this section of the country.

While wandering about the streets of New York, and lodging at least one night among the barrels on one of the wharves, I was indeed free--from slavery, but free from food and shelter as well.

I was in the midst of an ocean of my fellowmen, and yet a perfect stranger to every one.

Baffled, entangled, and discouraged, I had at times asked myself the question, May not my condition after all be God’s work, and ordered for a wise purpose, and if so, was not submission my duty?

I might become a husband, a father, an aged man, but through all, from birth to death, from the cradle to the grave, I had felt myself doomed.

During ten or fifteen years I had, as it were, been dragging a heavy chain, which no strength of mine could break; I was not only a slave, but a slave for life.

If life is more than breath, and the “quick round of blood,” I lived more in one day than in a year of my slave life.

No man now had a right to call me his slave or assert mastery over me.

For the moment the dreams of my youth, and the hopes of my manhood, were completely fulfilled.

The heart of no fox or deer, with hungry hounds on his trail, in full chase, could have beaten more anxiously or noisily than did mine, from the time I left Baltimore till I reached Philadelphia.

The border lines between slavery and freedom were the dangerous ones, for the fugitives.