Frederick Douglass: “I might become a husband, a father, an aged man, but through all, from birth to death, from the cradle to the grave, I…”

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.

His iron sentences, cold and harsh, sunk like heavy weights deep into my heart, and stirred up within me a rebellion not soon to be allayed.

We could not but believe that there existed at the South a latent and powerful Union sentiment which would assert itself at last.

But we are not here to applaud manly courage, save as it has been displayed in a noble cause.