Frederick Douglass

Besides being dependent upon the roughest and flintiest kind of labor, the climate of the South makes such labor uninviting and harshly repulsive to the white man.

Nature itself, in those States, comes to the rescue of the negro, fights his battles, and enables him to exact conditions from those who would unfairly treat and oppress him.

The thought of filling his place by any other variety of the human family, will be found delusive and utterly impracticable.

From this condition, shocking for a southern man to contemplate, it is now seen that nothing less powerful than the naked iron arm of the negro, can save her.

Only a few years of non-tillage would be needed to give the sunny and fruitful South to the bats and owls of a desolate wilderness.

Machinery may continue to do, as it has done, much of the work of the North, but the work of the South requires bone, sinew, and muscle of the strongest and most enduring kind for its performance.

Important as manual labor is everywhere, it is nowhere more important and absolutely indispensable to the existence of society than in the more southern of the United States.

Alexander, a Democrat, and, I believe, once a slaveholder, had not only the courage, but the magnanimity to give me fair play in this fight.

It may or may not be true that my complexion was the cause of this departure, but no man has any right to assume that position in advance of a plain declaration to that effect by President Hayes himself.

Its fall would be a blow to freedom and progress throughout the world.

Among all the great capitals of the world it is preëminently the capital of free institutions.

He is an owner of the marble grandeur which he beholds about him,--as much so as any of the forty millions of this great nation.