Frederick Douglass: “I was, for weeks, a poor, brokenhearted mourner, traveling through the darkness and misery of doubts and fears.”

The laws which determine the destinies of individuals and nations are impartial and eternal.

The sentiment that brings us here to-day is one of the noblest that can stir and thrill the human heart.

We (the people of the North) are a charitable people, and in the excess of this feeling we were disposed to put the very best construction upon the strange behavior of our southern brethren.

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.