Frederick Douglass: “They not only “took me in when a stranger” and “fed me when hungry,” but taught me how to make an honest living.”

My grandmother was all the world to me, and the thought of being separated from her was a most unwelcome suggestion to my affections and hopes.

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

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