Frederick Douglass: “Our relation to the American people makes us in some sense a peculiar class, and unless we speak separately, our voice…”

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.

I looked into this kitchen with peculiar interest, and remembered that it was there I last saw my mother.

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.

Slavery had no recognition of fathers, as none of families.