Frederick Douglass: “Absolute and arbitrary power can never be maintained by one man over the body and soul of another man, without brutal…”

He was called upon not merely to administer the government, but to decide, in the face of terrible odds, the fate of the Republic.

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.

My grandmother was all the world to me, and the thought of being separated from her was a most unwelcome suggestion to my affections and hopes.

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