Frederick Douglass: “In old times when it was asked, “How can we abolish slavery?” the answer was “Quit stealing.”

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.

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

True it is that this faith was many times shaken by passing events, but never destroyed.

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