Frederick Douglass: “The reading of these documents enabled me to utter my thoughts, and to meet the arguments brought forward to sustain…”

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.

Treason had shot its poisonous roots deeper, and had spread its death-dealing branches further than any northern calculation had covered.

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

It was in the air, and men breathed it and were permeated by it, often when they were quite unconscious of its presence.