Frederick Douglass: “Men were better than their theology, and truer to humanity, than to their politics, or their offices.”

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.

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.

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

I looked into this kitchen with peculiar interest, and remembered that it was there I last saw my mother.