Frederick Douglass: “It was not my enslavement at the then present time which most affected me; the being a slave for life was the saddest…”

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

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.

Our very lack of preparation for the conflict disposed us to look for some other than the way of blood out of the difficulty.

He was called upon not merely to administer the government, but to decide, in the face of terrible odds, the fate of the Republic.