We were waiting and listening as for a bolt from the sky, which should rend the fetters of four million of slaves; we were watching, as it were, by the dim light of the stars, for the dawn of a new day; we were longing for the answer to the agonizing prayers of centuries.
Douglass vividly describes the intense public anticipation for the Emancipation Proclamation, portraying it as a moment of divine intervention and the dawn of a new era.
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A son of toil himself, he was linked in brotherly sympathy with the sons of toil in every loyal part of the republic.
It was perhaps better for the country and for mankind that the good man could not know the end from the beginning.
The father might be a white man, glorying in the purity of his Anglo-Saxon blood, and his child ranked with the blackest slaves.