Frederick Douglass: “The progress of a nation is sometimes indicated by small things.”

It had no interest in recognizing or preserving any of the ties that bind families together or to their homes.

The black man (unlike the Indian) loves civilization.

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

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.