Frederick Douglass: “The fact is, and all investigation shows it, that I was married to a corpse.”

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.

For the moment the northern lamb was transformed into a lion, and his roar was terrible.

To make a man a slave was to rob him of moral responsibility.

He was called upon not merely to administer the government, but to decide, in the face of terrible odds, the fate of the Republic.