Frederick Douglass: “You are freedom’s swift-winged angels, that fly round the world; I am confined in bands of iron!”

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.

It had no interest in recognizing or preserving any of the ties that bind families together or to their homes.

It was perhaps better for the country and for mankind that the good man could not know the end from the beginning.

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