I felt somewhat surprised that I could be so much at ease in such company, but I found it then, as I have since, that the higher the gradation in intelligence and refinement, the farther removed are all artificial distinctions, and restraints of mere caste or color.
From his autobiography, Douglass observes that genuine intelligence and refinement tend to transcend artificial distinctions of race or caste.
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More from Frederick Douglass
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.
Treason had shot its poisonous roots deeper, and had spread its death-dealing branches further than any northern calculation had covered.
He was called upon not merely to administer the government, but to decide, in the face of terrible odds, the fate of the Republic.