Frederick Douglass

They took me with earnest hand to their homes and hearths, and made me feel that though I wore the burnished livery of the sun I was still a countryman and kinsman of whom they were never ashamed.

They received me as a man and a brother, when I was new from the house of bondage, and had few of the graces derived from free and refined society.

They had their own opinions, were independent, and called no man master.

I think that our labors in Rhode Island during this Dorr excitement did more to abolitionize the State, than any previous, or subsequent work.

No white man ever made the black man’s cause more completely his own.

What we wanted, and what we labored to obtain, was a constitution free from the narrow, selfish, and senseless limitation of the word white.

Anti-slavery men wanted a new constitution, but they did not want a defective instrument which required reform at the start.

In this he consulted policy rather than right, and at last shared the fate of all compromisers and trimmers, for he was disastrously defeated.

There was a double motive for seeking my re-enslavement--avarice and vengeance; and while, as I have said, there was little probability of successful recapture, if attempted openly, I was constantly in danger of being spirited away at a…

It was felt that I had committed the double offense of running away and exposing the secrets and crimes of slavery and slaveholders.

Fugitive slaves were rare then, and as a fugitive slave lecturer, I had the advantage of being a “bran new fact”--the first one out.

I found, however, full soon that my enthusiasm had been extravagant, that hardships and dangers were not all over, and that the life now before me had its shadows also, as well as its sunbeams.