Frederick Douglass: “Its solution is, and ought to be, the serious business of the best American wisdom and statesmanship.”

We (the people of the North) are a charitable people, and in the excess of this feeling we were disposed to put the very best construction upon the strange behavior of our southern brethren.

I wished it was possible I could remain small all my life, knowing that the sooner I grew large the shorter would be my time to remain with them.

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.

Our very lack of preparation for the conflict disposed us to look for some other than the way of blood out of the difficulty.