Frederick Douglass: “So that he has grown up unequal, unsymmetrical, and is no longer a vertical, well-rounded man, in body or in mind.”

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.

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.