Frederick Douglass: “No vindication could be more complete, no condemnation could be more absolute and humiliating.”

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.

The father might be a white man, glorying in the purity of his Anglo-Saxon blood, and his child ranked with the blackest slaves.

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

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