Frederick Douglass: “If they could tolerate him when he was a heathen, they might bear with him now that he is a Christian.”

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.

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

It was perhaps better for the country and for mankind that the good man could not know the end from the beginning.

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.