Frederick Douglass: “The rich planter can afford to learn politics in the parlor, and to dispense with religion altogether.”

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

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.

No word of retaliation when a black man is slain by a rebel in cold blood.

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