Frederick Douglass: “Without appealing to any higher feeling, I would warn the American people, and the American government, to be wise in…”

I believed I should get enough to eat at Covey’s, even if I suffered in other respects, and this to a hungry man is not a prospect to be regarded with indifference.

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.

It was in the air, and men breathed it and were permeated by it, often when they were quite unconscious of its presence.

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.