Frederick Douglass: “I felt that I had a duty to perform—and that was, to labor and suffer with the oppressed in my native land.”

The friendless and hungry boy, in his extremest need, found himself in the strong protecting arms of his mother.

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

This was a new and special revelation, dispelling a painful mystery against which my youthful understanding had struggled, and struggled in vain, to wit, the white man’s power to perpetuate the enslavement of the black man.

Human liberty excludes all idea of home and abroad.