Frederick Douglass: “As it stands, it implies that the Negro is the cause of whatever trouble there is in the South.”

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

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.

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.

I wished it was possible I could remain small all my life, knowing that the sooner I grew large the shorter would be my time to remain with them.