Frederick Douglass: “I only wish that something like the same justice and the same charity shall be shown to the Negro.”

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.

The good to be sought and the evil to be shunned were flung in the balance and weighed against each other.

It only abolished slavery where it did not exist, and left it intact where it did exist.

To make a man a slave was to rob him of moral responsibility.