Frederick Douglass: “The name of Abraham Lincoln was near and dear to our hearts in the darkest and most perilous hours of the Republic.”

No word of retaliation when a black man is slain by a rebel in cold blood.

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

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

Father he might be, and not be husband, and could sell his own child without incurring reproach, if in its veins coursed one drop of African blood.