Frederick Douglass: “That day, in the woods, I would have exchanged my manhood for the brutehood of an ox.”

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

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

The friendless and hungry boy, in his extremest need, found himself in the strong protecting arms of his 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.