Frederick Douglass: “A band of pirates never looked more like their father, the devil.”

The good to be sought and the evil to be shunned were flung in the balance and weighed against each other.

That the mother was a slave was enough for its deadly purpose.

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

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