Frederick Douglass: “For them the contest was easy; their tremendous power and our weakness easily gave them the victory.”

He was called upon not merely to administer the government, but to decide, in the face of terrible odds, the fate of the Republic.

The day we celebrate is preëminently the colored man’s day.

The sentiment that brings us here to-day is one of the noblest that can stir and thrill the human heart.

His iron sentences, cold and harsh, sunk like heavy weights deep into my heart, and stirred up within me a rebellion not soon to be allayed.