Frederick Douglass: “Ministers of religion come forward and torture the hallowed pages of inspired wisdom to sanction the bloody deed.”

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.

The father might be a white man, glorying in the purity of his Anglo-Saxon blood, and his child ranked with the blackest slaves.

It had no interest in recognizing or preserving any of the ties that bind families together or to their homes.

That the mother was a slave was enough for its deadly purpose.