Frederick Douglass: “Such a set of debased and villainous creatures, I never saw before, and hope never to see again.”

Knowledge unfits a child to be a slave.” I instinctively assented to the proposition, and from that moment I understood the direct pathway from slavery to freedom.

The father might be a white man, glorying in the purity of his Anglo-Saxon blood, and his child ranked with the blackest slaves.

We could not but believe that there existed at the South a latent and powerful Union sentiment which would assert itself at last.

The black man (unlike the Indian) loves civilization.