Frederick Douglass: “True it is that this faith was many times shaken by passing events, but never destroyed.”

The black man (unlike the Indian) loves civilization.

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.

Knowledge unfits a child to be a slave.” I instinctively assented to the proposition, and from that moment I understood the direct pathway from slavery to freedom.

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