Frederick Douglass

Such tenderness--such pathos-- such world-embracing love! and, on the other hand, such indignation-- such fiery and thunderous denunciation, and such wit and humor, I never heard surpassed, if equaled, at home or abroad.

He could stir the multitude at will, to a tempest of wrath, or reduce it to the silence with which a mother leaves the cradle-side of her sleeping babe.

One spoke to the cold, calculating side of the British nation, which asks “if the new idea will pay?” The other spoke to the infinite side of human nature--the side which asks, first of all, “is it right? is it just? is it humane?”…

It was interest against interest, but something more and deeper: for, while there was aggrandizement of the landed aristocracy on the one side, there was famine and pestilence on the other.

It was thus I was led to seek a refuge in monarchial England, from the dangers of republican slavery.

I became myself painfully alive to the liability which surrounded me, and which might at any moment scatter all my proud hopes, and return me to a doom worse than death.

It would be a grateful duty to speak of the noble young men, who forsook ease and pleasure, as did White, Gay, and Monroe, and endured all manner of privations in the cause of the enslaved and down-trodden of my race.

They were not more amiable than brave, for they never seemed to ask, What will the world say? but walked straight forward in what seemed to them the line of duty, please or offend whomsoever it might.

They looked at slavery as a creature of law; we regarded it as a creature of public opinion.

I never go there without endeavoring to see that tree, which, like the cause it sheltered, has grown large and strong and imposing.

It would be easy to silence anti-slavery agitation if refusing its agents the use of halls and churches could effect that result.

Her proud boast that no slave had ever been delivered up to his master within her borders did not hinder her hatred to anti-slavery.