Frederick Douglass: “Your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity.”

Guilty or not guilty, to be accused was to be sure of a flogging.

The good to be sought and the evil to be shunned were flung in the balance and weighed against each other.

Human liberty excludes all idea of home and abroad.

He was called upon not merely to administer the government, but to decide, in the face of terrible odds, the fate of the Republic.