Frederick Douglass: “Such is the constitution of the human mind, that, when pressed to extremes, it often avails itself of the most opposite…”

Father he might be, and not be husband, and could sell his own child without incurring reproach, if in its veins coursed one drop of African blood.

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.

For the moment the northern lamb was transformed into a lion, and his roar was terrible.

The anti-slavery platform had performed its work, and my voice was no longer needed.