The pains she took, and the toil she endured, to see me, tells me that a true mother’s heart was hers, and that slavery had difficulty in paralyzing it with unmotherly indifference.
Douglass reflects on his mother's efforts to visit him, seeing it as proof of her unwavering maternal affection despite slavery's attempts to suppress it.
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A son of toil himself, he was linked in brotherly sympathy with the sons of toil in every loyal part 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.
True it is that this faith was many times shaken by passing events, but never destroyed.
His iron sentences, cold and harsh, sunk like heavy weights deep into my heart, and stirred up within me a rebellion not soon to be allayed.