Frederick Douglass: “Once master of my own time, I felt sure that I could make, over and above my obligation to him, a dollar or two every…”

No word of retaliation when a black man is slain by a rebel in cold blood.

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

Father he might be, and not be husband, and could sell his own child without incurring reproach, if in its veins coursed one drop of African blood.

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.