Frederick Douglass: “I think no better exposure of slavery can be made than is made by the laws of the states in which slavery exists.”

Food to the indolent is poison, not sustenance.

No word of retaliation when a black man is slain by a rebel in cold blood.

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

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.