Frederick Douglass: “I told him I hired my time and while I paid him the price which he asked for it, I did not know that I was bound to ask…”

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

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.

Slavery had no recognition of fathers, as none of families.

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