Frederick Douglass

His defeat was already assuming the form and pressure of victory, and his death was giving new life and power to the principles of justice and liberty.

The old hero, in the trial hour, had behaved so grandly that men regarded him not as a murderer, but as a martyr.

No one who has not himself been compelled to leave his home and country and go into permanent banishment, can well imagine the state of mind and heart which such a condition brings.

Nobody could then see that in the short space of four years this power would be broken and the slave system destroyed.

Slavery seemed to be at the very top of its power; the national government with all its powers and appliances were in its hands, and it bade fair to wield them for many years to come.

England had given me shelter and protection when the slavehounds were on my track fourteen years before, and her gates were still open to me now that I was pursued in the name of Virginia justice.

Captain Brown urged us both to go with him, but I could not do so, and could but feel that he was about to rivet the fetters more firmly than ever on the limbs of the enslaved.

I looked at him with some astonishment, that he could rest upon a reed so weak and broken, and told him that Virginia would blow him and his hostages sky-high, rather than that he should hold Harper’s Ferry an hour.

It would be an attack upon the federal government, and would array the whole country against us.

To me, such a measure would be fatal to running off slaves (as was the original plan), and fatal to all engaged in doing so.

In the worse case, too, if the plan should fail, and John Brown should be driven from the mountains, a new fact would be developed by which the nation would be kept awake to the existence of slavery.

Men do not like to buy runaway horses, nor to invest their money in a species of property likely to take legs and walk off with itself.