Frederick Douglass: “The very manner of their emancipation invited to the heads of the freedmen the bitterest hostility of race and class.”

Covey succeeded in breaking me--in body, soul, and spirit.

Guilty or not guilty, to be accused was to be sure of a flogging.

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.

To make a man a slave was to rob him of moral responsibility.