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.
In his autobiography, Douglass recounts the moment he understood the deliberate mechanisms used by white men to maintain the institution of slavery.
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Treason had shot its poisonous roots deeper, and had spread its death-dealing branches further than any northern calculation had covered.
We could not but believe that there existed at the South a latent and powerful Union sentiment which would assert itself at last.