Frederick Douglass: “I will continue to pray, labor, and wait, believing that she cannot always be insensible to the dictates of justice, or…”

Slavery had no recognition of fathers, as none of families.

It had no interest in recognizing or preserving any of the ties that bind families together or to their homes.

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

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.