Frederick Douglass: “I worked that day with a pleasure I had never before experienced.”

The sentiment that brings us here to-day is one of the noblest that can stir and thrill the human heart.

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

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.

The friendless and hungry boy, in his extremest need, found himself in the strong protecting arms of his mother.