Frederick Douglass: “A house was hardly necessary in the summer time; I could hold my school under the shade of an old oak tree, as well as…”

Land is not worth much where there are no people to occupy it, and a mule is not worth much where there is no one to drive him.

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.

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

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