It was not color, but crime, not God, but man, that afforded the true explanation of the existence of slavery; nor was I long in finding out another important truth, viz: what man can make, man can unmake.
In his autobiography, Douglass explains his realization that slavery is a human construct, not a divine or natural one, and thus can be abolished.
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Father he might be, and not be husband, and could sell his own child without incurring reproach, if in its veins coursed one drop of African blood.
The father might be a white man, glorying in the purity of his Anglo-Saxon blood, and his child ranked with the blackest slaves.
We could not but believe that there existed at the South a latent and powerful Union sentiment which would assert itself at last.