Frederick Douglass: “The very accompaniments of the slave system stamp it as the offspring of hell itself.”

That the mother was a slave was enough for its deadly purpose.

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

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.

It was perhaps better for the country and for mankind that the good man could not know the end from the beginning.