Frederick Douglass: “No man can tell the intense agony which is felt by the slave, when wavering on the point of making his escape.”

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

That the mother was a slave was enough for its deadly purpose.

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.

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.