Frederick Douglass: “Full well our enemies have known where to strike and how to stab us most fatally.”

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.

To make a man a slave was to rob him of moral responsibility.

It only abolished slavery where it did not exist, and left it intact where it did exist.

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