Frederick Douglass: “Meanwhile, I resolved to add to my educational attainments the art of writing.”

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.

Covey succeeded in breaking me--in body, soul, and spirit.

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.

Slavery had no recognition of fathers, as none of families.