Frederick Douglass: “Though the colored man is no longer subject to be bought and sold, he is still surrounded by an adverse sentiment which…”

It had no interest in recognizing or preserving any of the ties that bind families together or to their homes.

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

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