Frederick Douglass: “I could entertain no such nonsense as this; and I almost lost my patience when I found any colored man weak enough to…”

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.

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

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.

The laws which determine the destinies of individuals and nations are impartial and eternal.