Frederick Douglass: “How happens it that the land-owner is becoming richer and the laborer poorer?”

He was called upon not merely to administer the government, but to decide, in the face of terrible odds, the fate of the Republic.

It was in the air, and men breathed it and were permeated by it, often when they were quite unconscious of its presence.

But we are not here to applaud manly courage, save as it has been displayed in a noble cause.

We (the people of the North) are a charitable people, and in the excess of this feeling we were disposed to put the very best construction upon the strange behavior of our southern brethren.