Frederick Douglass: “I deny that nature has made the negro a thief or a burglar.”

It only abolished slavery where it did not exist, and left it intact where it did exist.

It was perhaps better for the country and for mankind that the good man could not know the end from the beginning.

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.

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