Frederick Douglass: “They have never been mistaken as to the historical difference between the party which gave them liberty and the party…”

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

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 friendless and hungry boy, in his extremest need, found himself in the strong protecting arms of his mother.

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