Frederick Douglass: “Nothing is more evident, than that such disclosures are a positive evil to the slaves remaining, and seeking to escape.”

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.

It was perhaps better for the country and for mankind that the good man could not know the end from the beginning.

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

It only abolished slavery where it did not exist, and left it intact where it did exist.