Frederick Douglass: “I saw in New Bedford the nearest approach to freedom and equality that I had ever seen.”

It had no interest in recognizing or preserving any of the ties that bind families together or to their homes.

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

Treason had shot its poisonous roots deeper, and had spread its death-dealing branches further than any northern calculation had covered.

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.