Frederick Douglass: “More than to reason or religion are we indebted to the influence which this wonderful delineation of American chattel…”

The sentiment that brings us here to-day is one of the noblest that can stir and thrill the human heart.

The father might be a white man, glorying in the purity of his Anglo-Saxon blood, and his child ranked with the blackest slaves.

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.

We could not but believe that there existed at the South a latent and powerful Union sentiment which would assert itself at last.