Frederick Douglass: “Slavery was a state of war, and the slave had a right to anything necessary to his freedom.”

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

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

Food to the indolent is poison, not sustenance.

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