Frederick Douglass: “The white people of this country are asleep, but not dead.”

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

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.

The sentiment that brings us here to-day is one of the noblest that can stir and thrill the human heart.