Frederick Douglass: “The expense and hardships, to say nothing of the cruelty attending such a measure, would make success impossible.”

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

True it is that this faith was many times shaken by passing events, but never destroyed.

It had no interest in recognizing or preserving any of the ties that bind families together or to their homes.

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.