It had made my brothers and sisters strangers to me; it converted the mother that bore me, into a myth; it shrouded my father in mystery, and left me without an intelligible beginning in the world.
Douglass describes how slavery fractured his family, turning his relatives into strangers and obscuring his origins, leaving him without a clear sense of identity.
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For the moment the northern lamb was transformed into a lion, and his roar was terrible.
We could not but believe that there existed at the South a latent and powerful Union sentiment which would assert itself at last.
It was perhaps better for the country and for mankind that the good man could not know the end from the beginning.