Frederick Douglass: “Reader! are you with the man-stealers in sympathy and purpose, or on the side of their down-trodden victims?”

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.

No word of retaliation when a black man is slain by a rebel in cold blood.

He was called upon not merely to administer the government, but to decide, in the face of terrible odds, the fate of the Republic.

It was in the air, and men breathed it and were permeated by it, often when they were quite unconscious of its presence.