Frederick Douglass: “It was born in the tempest and whirlwind of war, and has lived in a storm of violence and blood.”

We (the people of the North) are a charitable people, and in the excess of this feeling we were disposed to put the very best construction upon the strange behavior of our southern brethren.

Knowledge unfits a child to be a slave.” I instinctively assented to the proposition, and from that moment I understood the direct pathway from slavery to freedom.

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

To make a man a slave was to rob him of moral responsibility.