Frederick Douglass: “I felt like a besieged city at news that its defenders had fallen at its gates.”

The sentiment that brings us here to-day is one of the noblest that can stir and thrill the human heart.

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.

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

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.