Frederick Douglass: “If religion had any effect at all on him, it made him more cruel and hateful in all his ways.”

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

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.

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.

It only abolished slavery where it did not exist, and left it intact where it did exist.