Frederick Douglass: “I used to contrast my condition with that of the black-birds, in whose wild and sweet songs I fancied them so happy.”

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

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

Guilty or not guilty, to be accused was to be sure of a flogging.

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