Frederick Douglass: “But slavery soon proved its ability to divest her of these excellent qualities, and her home of its early happiness.”

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.

Treason had shot its poisonous roots deeper, and had spread its death-dealing branches further than any northern calculation had covered.

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.

The black man (unlike the Indian) loves civilization.