Frederick Douglass: “We are no longer four millions of slaves, but six millions of freemen.”

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

The day we celebrate is preëminently the colored man’s day.

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

To make a man a slave was to rob him of moral responsibility.