Frederick Douglass: “I had become quite useful to several young colored men, who had made me their teacher.”

He was called upon not merely to administer the government, but to decide, in the face of terrible odds, the fate of the Republic.

True it is that this faith was many times shaken by passing events, but never destroyed.

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.