Frederick Douglass: “Our countrymen in chains, The whip on woman’s shrinking flesh, Our soil yet reddening with the stains Caught from her…”

For the moment the northern lamb was transformed into a lion, and his roar was terrible.

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.

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.

Treason had shot its poisonous roots deeper, and had spread its death-dealing branches further than any northern calculation had covered.