Frederick Douglass: “I hated the secrecy; but where slavery is powerful, and liberty is weak, the latter is driven to concealment or to…”

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.

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

I believed I should get enough to eat at Covey’s, even if I suffered in other respects, and this to a hungry man is not a prospect to be regarded with indifference.

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.