Frederick Douglass: “Her personal appearance and bearing are ineffaceably stamped upon my memory.”

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

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.

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

Land is not worth much where there are no people to occupy it, and a mule is not worth much where there is no one to drive him.