Frederick Douglass: “Only think of it; one hundred miles straight north, and I am free!”

Guilty or not guilty, to be accused was to be sure of a flogging.

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.

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

But we are not here to applaud manly courage, save as it has been displayed in a noble cause.