Frederick Douglass: “What I got from Sheridan was a bold denunciation of slavery, and a powerful vindication of human rights.”

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.

Guilty or not guilty, to be accused was to be sure of a flogging.

The good to be sought and the evil to be shunned were flung in the balance and weighed against each other.

Father he might be, and not be husband, and could sell his own child without incurring reproach, if in its veins coursed one drop of African blood.