Frederick Douglass: “So far as they are concerned, there is no Government or Constitution of the United States.”

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

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.

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.

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