Frederick Douglass: “Yet there was something almost providential in the resistance made by the gallant Henry.”

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.

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

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

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