Frederick Douglass: “Its mission was the redemption of the world from the bondage of ages.”

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

The father might be a white man, glorying in the purity of his Anglo-Saxon blood, and his child ranked with the blackest slaves.

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.

But we are not here to applaud manly courage, save as it has been displayed in a noble cause.