Frederick Douglass: “It did not entirely satisfy me to narrate wrongs; I felt like denouncing them.”

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

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.

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