Frederick Douglass: “I hated slavery, always, and the desire for freedom only needed a favorable breeze, to fan it into a blaze, at any…”

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

Land is not worth much where there are no people to occupy it, and a mule is not worth much where there is no one to drive him.

Treason had shot its poisonous roots deeper, and had spread its death-dealing branches further than any northern calculation had covered.

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