Frederick Douglass: “I am about to answer the inquiry, what is American slavery?”

Another ground of hope for our race is in the progress of education.

No power beneath the sky can make an ignorant, wasteful, and idle people prosperous, or a licentious people happy.

Still another ground of hope I find in the fact that colored men are strong in their gratitude to benefactors, and firm in their political convictions.

The vote of the colored man, formerly beaten down and stamped out by intimidation, is now revived, sought, and defended by powerful allies, and this from no transient sentiment of the moment, but from the permanent laws controlling the…