Frederick Douglass: “The cause was good, the men engaged in it were good, the means to attain its triumph, good.”

True it is that this faith was many times shaken by passing events, but never destroyed.

For the moment the northern lamb was transformed into a lion, and his roar was terrible.

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.

The friendless and hungry boy, in his extremest need, found himself in the strong protecting arms of his mother.