Frederick Douglass: “In this way I got a good many lessons in writing, which it is quite possible I should never have gotten in any other…”

It only abolished slavery where it did not exist, and left it intact where it did exist.

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.

Knowledge unfits a child to be a slave.” I instinctively assented to the proposition, and from that moment I understood the direct pathway from slavery to freedom.

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