Frederick Douglass: “Slavery soon proved its ability to divest her of these heavenly qualities.”

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

Lincoln was not only a great President, but a GREAT MAN--too great to be small in anything.

We (the people of the North) are a charitable people, and in the excess of this feeling we were disposed to put the very best construction upon the strange behavior of our southern brethren.

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.