Frederick Douglass: “I said at the time that no better words for the colored citizen had dropped from the east portico of the Capitol since…”

It was in the air, and men breathed it and were permeated by it, often when they were quite unconscious of its presence.

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.

His iron sentences, cold and harsh, sunk like heavy weights deep into my heart, and stirred up within me a rebellion not soon to be allayed.

Treason had shot its poisonous roots deeper, and had spread its death-dealing branches further than any northern calculation had covered.