Frederick Douglass: “Are the pearly gates of happiness and sweet content flung open to such suitors? far from it!”

A son of toil himself, he was linked in brotherly sympathy with the sons of toil in every loyal part of the republic.

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.

Slavery had no recognition of fathers, as none of families.

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.