Frederick Douglass: “It is national territory, and the one place where no American is an intruder or a carpet-bagger.”

Food to the indolent is poison, not sustenance.

Knowledge unfits a child to be a slave.” I instinctively assented to the proposition, and from that moment I understood the direct pathway from slavery to freedom.

Slavery had no recognition of fathers, as none of families.

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